Learning
Module 4: Activity One – History 103/online
Civil
Rights v. Black Power
General Information: This
activity provides two points of view about the Black Freedom Movement of the 1960s:
The Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power, Black Nationalism movement. The
objective of those associated with the Civil Rights Movement was to end
segregation and discrimination of blacks and to gain full equality. To achieve
this objective, the participants applied a strategy of non-violent direct
action. The objective of those associated with Black Power/Black Nationalism
was to empower the black community so that blacks would unite and take control
of their communities and gain self-reliance, race pride and political and
economic empowerment. To achieve this objective, the participants stated that
they would take control by “any means necessary” and liberate themselves from
white domination. In this activity, we will evaluate and compare the effectiveness
of (1) non-violent direct action and (2) empowerment of the black community.
Process:
General Information
Learning Objectives:
Step
One: Introduction to Visual Sources: Select
“High Speed Access”
1. Watch “Emmett Till” and the Civil Rights
Movement” --- located in Talon
Net. The “Table of Contents” for
these videos includes “high definition” for the video which provides a better
resolution of the video itself. Page through the table of contents for this
option. You are not required to use this
option.
2. As you watch, consider why these images
(photographs and media) lead to broad-based support outside the South for the Civil
Rights Movement.
3. Be prepared to share your observations in
the discussion.
Access to Video Excerpts:
·
Go to
Lessons
·
The
Civil Rights Movement is the first on the list.
Access this location and watch Emmitt Till and The Civil Rights
Movement.
Step Two: You are required to read the introduction and select ONE of
the two documents in each category
·
The Civil Rights Movement: Introduction and
Martin Luther King OR Fannie Lou Hamer.
·
Black Power Movement: Introduction and Malcolm X
or Stokely Carmichael
Black Power, Black Nationalism
The Civil Rights Movement:
Introduction: The Civil Rights
Movement[1]
In1955 a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, initiated a new phase in
the African American struggle for racial justice. Civil rights activists now
employed a .new strategy—“nonviolent direct action"— which used marches,
boycotts, and similar mass actions to create crises intended to force
segregated southern communities to abandon their Jim Crow laws and practices.
It called for nonviolence on the part of participants, in spite of racial
taunts, arrest, or physical attack. The most visible and eloquent spokesman
for· this approach was a black Baptist preacher named Martin Luther King Jr.
(1929-1968), who had studied the ideas and technique of India's Mohandas Gandhi
and sought to apply a similar method in the struggle for black equality. As the
leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), he set out to
employ his nonviolent strategy in community after community throughout the
South. King became an internationally known figure and in 1964 won the Nobel
Peace Prize for his civil rights activities. Although assassinated in 1968, he
remains the most potent symbol of the Civil Rights movement.
As King and SCLC brought their strategy to
communities throughout the South, new groups adopted the technique. In February
1960 four black college students sat down· at a "whites only" lunch
counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave unless they were
served. Within weeks, the sit-in movement had spread to seventy southern cities
and attracted thousands of black college students. Many of them came together
in April to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Their
tactics were soon expanded to include kneel· ins at segregated churches and
wade·ins at segregated public pools. In 1961 the Congress of Racial Equality
(CORE) sent an interracial group of “freedom riders" across the South on
buses to force compliance with a Federal ban on segregation in interstate
travel. After repeated physical assaults in Alabama forced them to go home,
SNCC volunteers carried on these so-called Freedom Rides. In 1962 SNCC turned
its attention to a voter registration campaign with the assistance of SCLC,
CORE, and the NAACP.
Before 1963 the Civil Rights movement achieved
many local successes. In that year, it started to pressure the federal
government for sweeping change. This resulted in several landmark pieces of
civil rights legislation. In August the March On Washington for Jobs and
Freedom brought nearly 250,000 Americans to the nation’s capital to demonstrate
on behalf of a pending civil rights bill. It was capped by King's stirring
"I Have a Dream” speech envisioning an integrated America. Congress
responded by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the most comprehensive civil
rights law it had ever enacted. This act prohibited discrimination or
segregation in employment and public facilities, outlawed bias in federally
assisted programs, and authorized the attorney general to institute lawsuits
challenging discrimination in public schools and other facilities operated by
state and local governments.
The movement then stepped up its campaign for
voting rights. In 1964 the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the Constitution was
ratified, ending use of the poll tax. After a Selma-to-Montgomery march in
Alabama publicized continuing disfranchisement, Congress passed the Voting
Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed literacy tests and similar devices and sent
federal examiners to register voters in areas that had historically excluded
blacks from the ballot. A century after emancipation, African Americans had
finally gained legal equality.
Documents: Select King or Hamer. Answers to the questions for each document
will provide you the information needed for the online discussion and the exam
essay.
Questions:
1. How
does Martin Luther King define and promote nonviolent direct action? Explain
the concept behind the strategy.
2.
What are the four things that need to occur to
achieve the goal on non-violent direct action?
Martin Luther King, Jr., The Strategy
of Nonviolent Direct Action
The lessons of Montgomery convinced King and other
civil rights activists to employ the strategy of nonviolent direct action
against Jim Crow throughout the South. In 1957 they gathered in Atlanta and
formed SCLC for that purpose. Under King's leadership, SCLC organized
nonviolent direct action campaigns in dozens of cities over the next decade,
most notably Albany (1961), Birmingham (1963), S10 Augustine (1964), and Selma
(1965). But the strategy was not without its critics. Many whites, especially
in the South, condemned the tactics and timing of the campaigns and accused
King and other SCLC officials of being "outside agitators." Some
blacks criticized the strategy of nonviolent direct action as too passive and
called for a more forceful approach. On the heels of the Selma campaign, which
used a controversial march to the Alabama state capitol in Montgomery to
publicize African American demands for equal access to the ballot in Alabama
and the South, King penned the following piece for the Saturday Review. He noted the strategy's forceful nature-how it
worked to provoke crises in segregated southern communities in order to prompt
federal action in behalf of civil rights. In response to the Selma campaign,
President Lyndon B. Johnson called on Congress to pass voting rights
legislation to address the historic disfranchisement of blacks in the South[2]
The
goal of the demonstrations in Selma, as elsewhere, is to dramatize the
existence of injustice and to bring about the presence of justice by methods of
nonviolence. Long years of experience indicate to us that Negroes can achieve
this goal when four things occur:
1. Nonviolent demonstrators go
into the streets to exercise their constitutional rights.
2. Racists resist by unleashing
violence against them.
3. Americans of conscience in the
name of decency demand federal intervention and legislation.
4. The administration, under mass
pressure, initiates measures of immediate intervention and remedial
legislation.
The
working out of this process has never been simple or tranquil. When nonviolent
protests were countered by local authorities with harassment, intimidation, and
brutality, the federal government has always first asked the Negro to desist
and leave the streets, rather than bring pressure to bear on those who commit
the criminal acts. We have always been compelled to reject vigorously such
federal requests and have rather relied on our allies, the millions of
Americans across the nation, to bring pressure on the federal government for
protective action in our behalf. Our position has always been that there is a
wrong and right side to the question of full freedom and equality for millions
of Negro Americans and that the federal government does not belong in the
middle on this issue.
During
our nonviolent direct-action campaigns we have always been advised, and again
were so advised in Selma, that violence may ensue. Herein lies a dilemma: Of
course there always exists the likelihood that because of the hostility to our
demonstrations, acts of lawlessness may be precipitated. We realize that we
must exercise extreme caution so that our direct-action program is not
conducted in a manner that might be considered provocative or an invitation to
violence. Accordingly, each situation must be studied in detail; the strength
and temper of our adversaries must be estimated and any change in any of these
factors will affect the details of our strategy. Nevertheless, we often must
begin a march without knowing when or where it will actually terminate.
Questions
Fannie Lou Hamer, Fighting for the
Vote in Mississippi
While national attention focused on King and
other prominent figures in the Civil Rights movement, the success of the
struggle often depended upon mobilizing the African American masses. Even
though SCLC, SNCC, and other civil rights organizations sent trained workers
into southern communities to coordinate campaigns against Jim Crow laws and
disfranchisement, those campaigns required the courage and determination of
local people. In 1962 SNCC initiated a voter registration drive in Mississippi,
where only five percent of the black residents were registered to vote. One of
the first local blacks to respond was a sharecropper named Fannie Lou Hamer
(1917-1977). But after attempting to register to vote, she was subjected to
unceasing economic intimidation, arrest, and physical violence. In 1964 she
joined the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which organized mock
elections among blacks in the state and sought representation in that year's
Democratic National Convention. The following testimony by Hamer before the
convention's Credentials Committee exposed the hazards of trying to vote in
Mississippi and called for the nation to live up to its democratic ideals.[3]
Mr.
Chairman and the Credentials Committee, my name is Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, and I
live at 626 East Lafayette Street, Ruleville, Mississippi, Sunflower County,
the home of Senator James O. Eastland, and Senator [John] Stennis.
It
was the 31st of August in 1962 that eighteen of us traveled twenty -six miles
to the county courthouse in Indianola to try to register to try to become
first-class citizens. We was met in Indianola by Mississippi men, highway
patrolmen, and they only allowed two of us in to take the literacy test at the
time. After we had taken this test and started back to Ruleville, we was held
up by the City Police and the State Highway Patrolmen and carried back to
Indianola, where the bus driver was charged that day with driving a bus the
wrong color.
After
we paid the fine among us, we continued on to Ruleville, and Reverend Jeff
Sunny carried me four miles in the rural area where I had worked as a
timekeeper and sharecropper for eighteen years. I was met there by my children,
who told me the plantation owner was angry because I had gone down to try to
register. After they told me, my husband came, and said the plantation owner
was raising cain because I had tried to register, and before he quit talking
the plantation owner came, and said, "Fannie Lou, do you know-did Pap tell
you what I said?"
I
said, "Yes, sir."
He
said, "I mean that," he said. "If you don't go down and withdraw
your registration, you will have to leave," he said, "Then if you go
down and withdraw," he said. "You will-you might have to go because
we are not ready for that in Mississippi."
And
I addressed him and told him and said, "I didn't try to register for you.
I tried to register for myself." I had to leave that same night.
On
the 10th of September 1962, sixteen bullets were fired into the home of Mr. and
Mrs. Robert Tucker for me. That same night two girls were shot in Ruleville,
Mississippi. Also Mr. Joe McDonald's house was shot in.
And
in June, the 9th, 1963, I had attended a voter registration workshop, was
returning back to Mississippi. Ten of us was traveling by the Continental
Trailway bus. When we got to Winona, Mississippi, which is Montgomery County,
four of the people got off to use the washroom, and two of the people-to use
the restaurant-two of the people wanted to use the washroom. The four people
that had gone in to use the rest room was ordered out. During this time I was
on the bus. But when I looked through the window and saw they had rushed out, I
got off the bus to see what had happened, and one of the ladies said, "It
was a State Highway Patrolman and a chief of police ordered us out."
I
got back on the bus and one of the persons had used the washroom got back on
the bus, too. As soon as I was seated on the bus, I saw when they began to get
the four people in a highway patrolman's car. I stepped off the bus to see
what was happening and somebody screamed from the car that the four workers was
in and said, "Get that one there," and when I went to get in the car,
when the man told me I was under arrest, he kicked me.
I
was carried to the county jail, and put in the booking room. They left some of
the people in the booking room and began to place us in cells. I was placed in
a cell with a young woman.... After I was placed in the cell I began to hear
sounds of licks and screams. I could hear the sounds of licks and horrible
screams, and I could hear somebody say, "Can you say, yes sir, nigger?
Can you say yes, sir?"
And
they would say other horrible names. She would say, "Yes, I can say yes,
sir." "So say it."
She
says, "I don't know you well enough."
They
beat her, I don't know how long, and after a while she began to pray, and asked
God to have mercy on those people.
And
it wasn't too long before three white men came to my cell. One of these men was
a State Highway Patrolman and he asked me where I was from, and I told him
Ruleville. He said, "We are going to check this." And they left my
cell and it wasn't too long before they came back. He said, "You are from
Ruleville all right," and he used a curse word, and he said, "We are
going to make you wish you was dead."
I
was carried out of that cell into another cell where they had two Negro prisoners.
The
State Highway Patrolman ordered the first Negro to take the blackjack. The
first Negro prisoner ordered me, by orders from the State Highway Patrolman for
me, to lay down on a bunk bed on my face, and I laid on my face. The first
Negro began to beat, and I was beat by the first Negro until he was exhausted,
and I was holding my hands behind me at that time on my left side because I
suffered from polio when I was six years old. After the first Negro had beat
until he was exhausted, the State Highway Patrolman ordered the second Negro to
take the blackjack.
The
second Negro began to beat and I began to work my feet, and the State Highway
Patrolman ordered the first Negro who had beat to set on my feet to keep me
from working my feet. I began to scream and one white man got up and began to
beat me in my head and tell me to hush. One white man-my dress had worked up
high, he walked over and pulled my dress down-and he pulled my dress back, back
up....
All
of this on account we want to register, to become first-class citizens, and if
the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this
America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep
with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because
we want to live as decent human beings, in America?
Documents: Select Malcolm X or Stokely Carmichael. Answers to the questions for each document
will provide you the information needed for the online discussion and the exam
essay.
Questions
Black
Power, Black Nationalism – Introduction
In the wake of its greatest
legislative triumph, the Civil Rights movement began to fragment. On 11 August
1965, less than a week after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the black
Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts exploded into a firestorm of looting and violence.
When the riot ended, 34 people lay dead and property damage exceeded 35 million
dollars. But Watts was only one incident in a half decade of rage. From 1964
through 1968, the ghettoes of the North and West combusted in some three
hundred riots involving at least a half million African Americans.
The riots illustrated the limits of the Civil Rights movement. By the 1960s, a
majority of African Americans lived in inner-city neighborhoods, most of them
outside the South. They faced no Jim Crow laws or disfranchisement devices,
only the economic ills and social alienation of places like Watts-widespread
poverty, massive unemployment, welfare, inadequate housing and schools, and
racist police. The boycotts, marches, sit-ins, and freedom rides had raised
black awareness and expectations but could do little to ameliorate the
conditions of ghetto life. Now many black activists, especially younger ones,
searched for a different strategy.
"Black Power" became the
new watchword. The term, coined by Stokely Carmichael in 1966, became a
rallying cry for urban blacks increasingly alienated from the Civil Rights
movement. The idea derived from Black Nationalism-the belief that people of
African descent share a common experience, culture, world view, and destiny.
Most Black Power advocates were heavily influenced by Malcolm X, who urged
African Americans to band together and take control of their communities
"by any means necessary." Like Malcolm X, they generally eschewed the
goal of integration and the strategy of nonviolence. But Black Power meant
different things to different people. Most whites and some older blacks saw it
as synonymous with violence. For younger black activists, it usually referred
to self-reliance, race pride, and political and economic empowerment. The
rising importance of Black Power became evident in 1966 when both SNCC and CORE
embraced this more radical direction.
Black Power advocates shared a common
goal empowering black communities-but they differed on how that would best be
achieved. Revolutionary nationalist groups, such as the Black Panther Party,
called for armed struggle and espoused Marxist thought. Seeing racism as an
inevitable product of capitalism, they welcomed alliances and coalitions with
like-minded whites. Cultural nationalist groups, such as the US Organization
based in Los Angeles, insisted that African Americans could liberate themselves
from white domination only after they had adopted a cohesive culture,
completely divorced from white ways. Its founder and leader, Maulana Ron
Karenga, urged his fellow blacks to adopt African clothing and hairstyles,
abandon their European surnames, learn Swahili, and celebrate distinctive
holidays like Kwanzaa. He viewed Marxism as alien to the black struggle,
rejected alliances and coalitions with whites, and maintained that armed struggle
was impossible until blacks had rediscovered their cultural roots. By the time
the Black Power movement drifted into decline in the 1970s, both approaches had
left their mark. Revolutionary nationalists had raised the political and
economic consciousness of a generation of African Americans, while cultural
nationalists had revolutionized their cultural values and practices. These
changes were to be the chief legacies of Black Power.
Malcolm X, Black Nationalism and
Black Revolution
Most
Black Power advocates were inspired by the life and legacy of Malcolm X
(1925-1965). Born Malcolm Little, he suffered through a troubled childhood,
only to become a teenage hustler, pimp, and cocaine addict on the streets of
Boston and Harlem. After a bungled burglary, he was sent to prison, where he
read voluminously and converted to the separatist doctrines of Elijah Muhammad
and the Nation of Islam. Released in 1952, he was appointed the minister of a Harlem
mosque. Before long, his trenchant analysis of white racism, his
confrontational language, and his charismatic style made him into the chief
evangelist for the Black Muslims. But his growing popularity and independence
brought estrangement from Muhammad and the Nation. After a 1964 pilgrimage to
Mecca, Malcolm X became convinced of the possibility of white redemption,
rejected his unequivocal separatism, and considered politics as a possible
vehicle for black empowerment. But to the end, he continued to preach the
value of Black Nationalism and the likelihood of black revolution, as in the
following 1964 speech. After his assassination one year later, The
Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) became a "nearly universal sacred
text" for the Black Power movement.
Friends and enemies, tonight I hope that I can have a little fireside chat with
as few sparks as possible being tossed around. Especially because of the very
explosive condition that the world is in today. Sometimes, when a person's
house is on fire and someone comes in yelling fire, instead of the person who
is awakened by the yell being thankful, he makes the mistake of charging the
one who awakened him with having set the fire. I hope this little conversation
tonight about the black revolution won't cause many of you to accuse us of
igniting it when you find it at your doorstep....
I'm still a Muslim but I'm also a nationalist, meaning that my
political philosophy is black nationalism, my economic philosophy is black
nationalism, my social philosophy is black nationalism. And when I say that
this philosophy is Black Nationalism, to me this means that the political
philosophy of Black Nationalism is that which is designed to encourage our
people, the black people, to gain complete control over the politics and
politicians of our own community.
Our economic philosophy is that we should gain economic control over
the economy of our own community, the businesses and the other things which
create employment so that we can provide jobs for our own people instead of
having to picket and boycott and beg someone else for a job.
And, in short, our social philosophy means that we feel that it is
time to get together among our own kind and eliminate the moral evils that are
destroying the moral fiber of our society, like drug addiction, drunkenness,
adultery that leads to an abundance of bastard children, welfare problems. We
believe that we should lift the level or the standard of our own society to a
higher level wherein we will be satisfied and then not inclined toward pushing
ourselves into other societies where we are not wanted....
By the hundreds of thousands today we find our own people have become
impatient, turning away from your white nationalism, which you call democracy,
toward the militant uncompromising policy of Black Nationalism. I point out
right here that as soon as we announced we were going to start a black
nationalist party in this country we received mail from coast to coast,
especially from young people at the college level, the university level, who
expressed complete sympathy and support and a desire to take part in any kind
of political action based on black nationalism, designed to correct or
eliminate immediately evils that our people have suffered here for 400 years.
The black nationalists too many of you may represent only a minority
in the community. And therefore you might have a tendency to classify them as
something insignificant. But just as the fuse is the smallest part or the
smallest piece in the powder keg it is yet that little fuse that ignites the
entire powder keg. The black nationalists to you may represent a small minority
in the so-called Negro community. But they just happen to be composed of the
type of ingredient necessary to fuse or ignite the entire black community. And
this is one thing that whites-whether you call yourselves liberals or
conservatives or racists or whatever else you might choose to be-one thing that
you have to realize is, where the black community is concerned, although there
the large majority you may come in contact with may impress you as being
moderate and patient and loving and long-suffering and all that kind of stuff,
the minority who you consider to be Muslims or nationalists happen to be made
of the type of ingredient that can easily spark the black community. This
should be understood. Because to me a powder keg is nothing without a fuse.
1964 will be America's hottest year; her hottest year yet; a year of much
racial violence and much racial bloodshed. But it won't be blood that's going
to flow only on one side. The new generation of black people that have grown up
in this country during recent years are already forming the opinion, and it's a
just opinion, that if there is to be bleeding, it should be reciprocal-bleeding
on both sides....
So today, when the black man starts reaching out for what America says
are his rights, the black man feels that he is within his rights-when he
becomes the victim of brutality by those who are depriving him of his rights-to
do whatever is necessary to protect himself. An example of this was taking
place last night at this same time in Cleveland, where the police were putting
water hoses on our people there and also throwing tear gas at them and they met
a hail of stone, a hail of rocks, and a hail of bricks. [A] Couple weeks ago in
Jacksonville, Florida, a young teenage Negro was throwing Molotov cocktails.
Well, Negroes didn't do these ten years ago. But what you should learn
from this is that they are waking up. It was stones yesterday, Molotov
cocktails today; it will be hand grenades tomorrow and whatever else is
available the next day. The seriousness of this situation must be faced up to.
You should not feel that I am inciting someone to violence. I’m only warning of a powder-keg
situation. You can take it or leave it. If you take the warning perhaps you
can still save yourself. But if you ignore it or ridicule it, well, death is
already at your doorstep. There are 22,000,000 African Americans who are ready
to fight for independence right here. When I say fight for independence right
here, I don't mean any non-violent fight, or turn-the-other-cheek fight. Those
days are gone. Those days are over.
If George Washington didn't get independence for this country
non-violently, and if Patrick Henry didn't come up with a non-violent
statement, and you taught me to look upon them as patriots and heroes, then
it's time for you to realize that I have studied your books well....
This is a real revolution.... Revolution is never based on begging
somebody for an integrated cup of coffee. Revolutions are never fought by
turning the other cheek.
Revolutions are never based upon love your enemy, and pray for those
who spitefully use you. And revolutions are never waged singing, "We
Shall Overcome." Revolutions are based upon bloodshed. Revolutions are
never compromising. Revolutions are never based upon negotiations. Revolutions
are never based upon any kind of tokenism whatsoever. Revolutions are never
even based upon that which is begging a corrupt society or a corrupt system to
accept us into it. Revolutions overturn systems, and there is no system on
this earth which has proven itself more corrupt, more criminal than this .system,
that in 1964 still colonizes 22,000,000 African Americans.
Questions:
Stokely
Carmichael, Black Power Defined
In 1966 Stokely Carmichael (1942-1998),
the new chairman of SNCC, gave the growing black nationalist sentiment among
younger activists both a name and a slogan when he called for "Black
Power." Born in the West Indies and raised in New York City, he became
active in SNCC while a student at Howard University then participated in
Freedom Summer in Mississippi. In the following document, written in 1966,
Carmichael defines and explains the need for Black Power. He later expanded
this discussion in the volume, Black
Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (1967), which he coauthored
with a political scientist. Carmichael eventually adopted a Pan African
perspective, changed his name to Kwame Ture, and moved to the African nation of
Guinea.
We shall have to struggle for the right to create our own terms
through which to define ourselves and our relationship to the society, and to
have these terms recognized. This is the first necessity of a free people....
Negroes are defined by two forces, their blackness and their
powerlessness. There have been traditionally two communities in America. The
White community, which controlled and defined the forms that all institutions
within the society would take; and the Negro community which has been excluded
from participation in the power decisions that shaped the society, and has
traditionally been dependent upon, and subservient to, the White community.
This has not been accidental. The history of every institution of this society
indicates that a major concern in the ordering and structuring of the society
has been the maintaining of the Negro community in its condition of dependence
and oppression. This has not been on the level of individual acts of
discrimination between individual whites against individual Negroes, but as
total acts by the White community against the Negro community. This fact cannot
be too strongly emphasized-that racist assumptions of white superiority have
been so deeply ingrained in the structure of the society that it infuses its
entire functioning, and is so much a part of the national subconscious that it
is taken for granted and is frequently not even recognized .... The ghetto
itself is a product of a combination of forces and special interests in the
white community, and the groups that have access to the resources and power to
change that situation benefit, politically and economically, from the
existence of that ghetto.
It is more than a figure of speech to say that the Negro community in
America is a victim of white imperialism and colonial exploitation. This is in
practical economic and political terms true. There are over twenty million
black people comprising ten percent of this nation. They for the most part live
in well-defined areas of the country-in the shanty-towns and rural black belt
areas of the South, and increasingly in the slums of northern and western
industrial cities. If one goes into any Negro community, whether it be Jackson,
Miss., Cambridge, Md., or Harlem, N.Y., one will find the same combination of
political, economic, and social forces are at work. The people in the Negro community
do not control the resources of that community, its political decisions, its
law enforcement, its housing standards; and even the physical ownership of the
land, houses, and stores lie outside that community.
It is white power that makes the laws, and it is violent white power
in the form of armed white cops that enforces those laws with guns and
nightsticks. The vast majority of Negroes in this country live in these captive
communities and must endure these conditions of oppression because, and only
because, they are black and powerless....
SNCC proposes that it is now time for the black freedom movement to
stop pandering to the fears and anxieties of the white middle class in the
attempt to earn its "goodwill," and to return to the ghetto to organize
these communities to control themselves. This organization must be attempted in
northern and southern urban areas as well as in the rural black belt counties
of the South.... We must organize black community power to end these abuses,
and to give the Negro community a chance to have its needs expressed.
[1] Roy E. Finkenbine, “Introduction The Civil Rights
Movement." In Sources of the African
America Past, Second Edition (Pearson Education, 2004)
[3]]"Testimony
of Fannie Lou Hamer Before the Credentials Committee of the Democratic National
Convention," 22 August 1964, Joseph Rauh Papers, Library of Congress.