Civil Rights Movement & Nation of Islam Lecture Notes

Exam Information

• Exam on Wednesday is the last and only day. No exceptions will be made.

• Zero will be entered for missed exams.

Episode 5: Murder of Ned Rivers

• Facing a real situation that will occur, like a mob at a courthouse.

• Students playing the mob should get used to saying things calling people names like "ni***r" or "lepers".

• One student loses their cool, those with agency undermine the whole thing, because that one outlier is all that those with agency and the press look at.

Mississippi State Line

• Students were warned of violence and the possibility of death.

Murder of Civil Rights Workers

• First wave of recruits left Saturday, June 20 for Mississippi.

• 20-year-old Andrew Goodman from New York City, rode with James Cheney (21) and Michael Schwerner (24).

• Sunday, June 21, the three men drove to investigate the burning of a black Methodist church.

• The church had been the scene of a civil rights meeting weeks before.

• Around 3:00 PM, their 1963 blue Ford station wagon was stopped by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price outside Philadelphia.

• The three young men were released by Deputy Price around 10:30 PM that night and then disappeared.

• Volunteers in Oxford, Ohio were waiting to travel south.

Disappearance

• Students had to be told that arrest and removal from jail meant almost certain death.

• The disappearance became national news within days.

• President Lyndon Johnson ordered a massive search.

• 200 sailors from the naval air station in Meridian moved into the Philadelphia area and rejoined there by FBI agents.

• Rita Schwerner, wife of missing Mickey Schwerner, flew from Oxford. She was greeted by James Farmer, head of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality).

• Injustice and indifference towards white northerners is needed so the people register concern.

• If Mr. Cheney, a native Mississippian Negro, had been alone at the time of the disappearance, the case would have gone unnoticed.

Concerns

• The disappearance had the opposite effect on people.

• This is what it is with agency, the press doesn't care unless a white person is missing or has violence visited upon them.

• Native American women are disappearing all over the place with shocking frequencies, but national news does not care.

Agency

• Heaven forbid, two young white men end up missing the violence visited upon them, all of a sudden this is a big, freaking deal.

• Incidents like this happen fairly often.

• People become more and more determined to stay in the state and fight the ecosystem that people have to live under here.

• Freedom is entangled with the freedom of every other man, and if another man is not free, then I'm not free, so I'm fighting for my own freedom here.

• Everyone is afraid, but they knew before they came down what it's gonna be like, and nobody is turning back because of things like this that happened.

FBI

• The FBI will not give civil rights workers protection because it is an investigative organization, not a police organization.

• The protection of individual citizens is a matter for the local authorities.

• Volunteers arrived in full force by early July.

• During the summer, 80 civil rights workers were beaten, and 1,000 arrests were reported.

Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party

• One of the most dangerous jobs was traveling from house to house in isolated rural areas to build support for a new political party.

• Organized into the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

• Holding a freedom registration drive throughout the state, encouraging every Negro and white who wants a stake in his political future to prove it by getting his name on a freedom registration book.

• Scheduled precinct meetings and district caucuses.

• On August 6, in Jackson, a state convention will be held to elect a slate of delegates to the national convention in The United States.

• The only democratically constituted body of Mississippi citizens worthy of taking part in that convention's business will present themselves for seating.

• Volunteers collecting signatures found themselves openly challenging the way life had been lived in Mississippi for three quarters of a century.

• Shaking a black person's hand was an unusual thing for a white person to do in Mississippi at that time.

• Frequently, people would respond by not looking people in the eye.

• At the end of every phrase, there would be a ma'am or a sir, depending on who was there, and they would say yes to everything.

• Knew they were just waiting for people to go away because people were a danger to them.

• People had much less to risk than they did.

• This was their lives, their land, their family, and they were gonna be here when people were gone.

Fear

• 60,000 signed up as members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, despite the fear.

• This mass political awakening reminded segregationists of the years following the civil war, a time when blacks had been elected to high political office.

• People have had experience in the past with Negro political domination.

• It was known as the Reconstruction.

• There are some who call this present attempt to build up political power through a mass registration of unqualified Negro voters, the second Reconstruction.

• Operative word here is unqualified.

• Intentional obstacles were put in place to prevent black folks from exercising their constitutional right to vote.

• Neighbor should control the making of the law that controls me, to control the government under which I live.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

• While the search for the missing civil rights workers continued, president Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

• The new law increased the federal government's power to ban discrimination in public places, but did little to give southern blacks the vote.

• Civil rights groups pushed forward with the drive to sign up members for the new Freedom Democratic Party.

• Summer volunteers also supplied legal and medical services and set up a system of community centers and alternative schools, all part of Freedom Summer.

Freedom Summer

• For years, most blacks in Mississippi had been denied the right to a decent education.

• SNCC opened 41 freedom schools across the state.

• By day, the volunteers taught everything from the three r's to innovative courses in black history.

• By night, the schools were used for political meetings to explain the new party and to sign up new members.

• These activities and the presence of white volunteers teaching in black schools and living in black homes offended many white Mississippians.

• When the civil rights workers invaded the state in the summer of nineteen sixty four to change us presumably into their own image, they were met with a feeling of some curiosity, but mostly resentment.

• They fanned out across the state, made a great to do of breaking up our customs, of plumbing, social practices that had been respected by people here over the years.

• That was a time of the hippies just coming in. Many had on hippie uniforms and conducted themselves in hippie ways.

• They were not exactly the types of models that most people that people wanted to emulate.

• The arrogance that they showed in wanting to reform a whole state in the way they thought it should be created resentment.

• By late July, the three young men had been missing for six weeks.

• Many lost hope that they were still alive, but the goals for Freedom Summer were unchanged.

• Volunteers wanted to prove that black and white could live and work together.

• Cooking pinto beans, sitting around the clock, white people coming around, sitting on the floor, talking, laughing, and becoming very real and very human.

Bodies Discovered

• On August 4, on a farm outside Philadelphia, the bodies of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were discovered buried together in an earthen dam.

• The autopsy reports indicated that the men had been killed by 38 caliber bullets.

• James Chaney, the one black victim, had also suffered severe bone and skull fractures.

• Throughout our history, countless Americans have died in the continuing struggle for equality.

Funeral of James Chaney

• August 7, 1964, the funeral of James Chaney in Meridian, Mississippi.

• Living debt that we have right among our midst, not only in the state of Mississippi, but throughout the nation.

• Those are the people who don't care, those who do care but don't have the guts enough to stand up for it, and those people who busy up in Washington and other places using my freedom and my life to play politics with.

• That includes the president on down to the governor of the state of Mississippi.

• The people in Washington, DC

• This country operates operated then and still operates on violence. An eye for an eye.

• The parents of Cheney and Schwerner wanted their sons buried side by side in Meridian, but Mississippi law enforced segregation even in death.

• James Cheney, age 21, was buried alone in a segregated cemetery.

Consequences

• The state never brought anyone to trial for the murder of the three young men.

• In federal court, deputy Cecil Price and six others were found guilty of civil rights violations in connection with the killings and received sentences ranging from three to ten years.

• Mississippi Burning talks about what the federal government did in discovering the bodies of Cheney Goodman and Schwerner and the consequences of that.

• Tragic and frustrating and angering that it has to come down to the death of individuals fighting for civil rights before the federal government is actually gonna do anything.

• As a result of the murder of these three young men, the federal government started to take a more active role in ensuring civil rights were carried out.

• A series of civil rights acts and Supreme Court decisions that happened after 1964.

• The murder of Chaney, Goodwin, and Schwerner are a turning point in the federal government beginning to take a more active role and in the tone, tenor, and direction of civil rights.

Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)

• The MFDP held its caucus, did elect its representatives to be sent to the Democratic National Convention in 1964, and they were not seated.

• The Democratic Party would not recognize them because Southern Democrats, particularly Southern Democrats in the state of Mississippi, would not tolerate that.

• The party decides who its candidate is gonna be.

• 19 states don't have civics, and people don't understand that or get that.

• The political power that whites in the Deep South had and certainly laid bare the challenges that those fighting for civil rights had to face when you've got even institutions like a political party who are blown up.

Citizens Councils

• The citizens councils are the ones that were running the state.

• The sheriffs of Nashua County, where Philadelphia is, those individuals never got charged.

• It took the federal government stepping in before the murderers of Chaney Goodwill were brought to justice

• Faye Loubam gave an impassioned speech about being sick and tired about the trying to fight a system that was blowing up obstacles.

• The Nasal Nub wanted to replace the current democratic parties. That is.

Nation of Islam

• Originated in the 1930s.

• Founded by Elijah Muhammad.

• When Africans were stolen from their homes and brought to be free labor in The Americas, these individuals were literally stripped of their identity.

• Their West African names were replaced with the names of these slaveholders.

• Their culture was stripped.

• Their language was stripped.

• The religion of these West Africans was also taken from them.

• Christianity is a relatively recent arrival, largely the result of missionaries of the the nineteenth century.

• Traditional African animist religions.

• Islam spread to West Africa in the 11 hundreds, the the twelfth century.

• Many West Africans were Muslim.

• Elijah Muhammad said to get in touch with African roots and reconnect with this past by converting from the religion of our aggressors, the systemic institution of Christianity imposed by white slaveholders, and embracing the religion of our forefathers as law.

Malcolm X

• Born Malcolm Little.

• His father was murdered when he was a kid.

• He was a thug and a pimp and a thief and not a very nice person until he went to prison.

• The autobiography of Malcolm X is a really good read.

• He writes in a conversational tone.

• He talks about the fact that he was a very unpleasant person before he arrived in prison and how he got an education in prison.

• He did what the proponents of prison say a prison is supposed to do and reform you.

• While he was there, getting his education, he came across the nation of Islam, the lives of the Muslims, and converted to Islam and changed his name from Malcolm Little to Malcolm X.

• Little is my slave name.

• I don't know the name of my ancestors.

• Most enslaved peoples took the name of their enslavers when when they were free.

• I'm not Malcolm Little. I don't know. And let X stand for that which was taken from me and my ancestors.

• Distant relative who was stolen from Africa.

• My past, my heritage has been taken from me, and let that X stand for that which has been lost.

• Malcolm X was part of the civil rights movement.

• As a northerner, he was primarily living and writing and speaking and based out of Chicago.

• His focus and perspective and advocacy for civil rights came from a very different place than than Martin Luther King Junior, who was a child of the South, grew up in the segregated South, lived in the segregated South, and therefore, in not and doctor King's fighting for civil rights had to work within the system established to keep African Americans as second class citizens in the South.

• Nonviolence and all that sort of thing.

• Malcolm X constitutional guaranteed the same rights as the rest of y'all.

• If you meet me with a smile, I'll meet you with a smile, but if you meet me with a gun, I'll meet you with a gun too. I'm not gonna I'm not nonviolently noncooperating.

• Black folks, did not land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock landed on us.

• Both of these individuals admired one another.

• Both of these individuals were fighting for civil rights.

• Doctor King would not have been as successful or as popular had there not been a Malcolm X to contrast him with.

• The idea that if you do not stand and support with this guy, this is the alternative is gonna be the thing that's going to push some white folks through the race of Doctor. King.

• Malcolm X and the nation of Islam was much, much more popular in terms of fighting for civil rights in places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Omaha.

• Malcolm X speaking from a very different perspective at a very different place than Doctor. King, who is much, much more popular in places like Texas and Alabama and Mississippi and North Florida.

Assassinations and Civil Rights

• Malcolm X was murdered in 1965 by other black people who are in the nation of Islam who are not okay with the direction that Malcolm X wanted to take the organization.

• Three years later, Doctor King is also murdered, this time by a white guy in Memphis, Tennessee.

• The leadership of Malcolm X and and and Martin Luther King Junior, therefore, creates kind of a power. Who's going to fill this leadership role of the civil rights movement now that these two men have been murdered?

• Marginalized people know they've been marginalized.

• Black people by 1968 were angry at the very slow pace at which civil rights had been progressing.

• The rights that black people should have had and constitutionally do have, but the systemic institutions that have been keeping black people as second class citizens to look is so slow to change.

• Those with agency are so resistant to providing marginalized groups, in this case, specifically black people, those rights.

• Black people are trying to be polite and nice and work through the system that y'all have created.

• Even when the judicial system says, knock that shit off, all y'all white folks are still bombing us, murdering us, putting up obstacles, dragging your feet to integrate schools.

• By 1916, it's been thirteen years since the Brown v. Board decision, and schools are still not integrated into themselves.

Watts

• Watts and Compton are working class neighborhoods.

• There were red lined neighborhoods where black folks were prevented from having getting loans to own houses and businesses anywhere else than there.

• Watts is kind of like what Inner Northeast and North Portland was like before gentrification.

• The police in the August were being physical with a individual that that they had pulled over that they suspected of drunk driving.

• The police in Los Angeles in the nineteen sixties and prior were overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly over police.

• Driving while black.

• They would just pull you over and were overly physical with this individual, and it drew a crowd, and the cops got nervous.

• The cops started yelling at the crowd, and it sparked a riot that lasted for three days.

• All of pent up frustration and anger and bitterness and resentment that was geared towards Los Angeles Police Department specifically and towards institutional systemic racism written more broadly just exploded in a riot.

• This is a year after the Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodwin murders.

• This is the two months after the three months after the murder of of Malcolm X.

• It's the beginning of a movement called black power, where the sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters of those who had left the Deep South as part of the the great migration, feeling frustration and anger and bitterness, started to recognize their power and and and to some extent political power, but more social and economic power.

• Nineteen sixty five song by think I can see his face. I can't think of his name. James Brand.

• I'm black and I'm proud.

• You would never hear anybody say that prior to 1965, '19 '60 '6.

Black Panthers

• In the nineteen sixty eight Olympics, two African American athletes won a bronze and a gold medal and held up this black power salute where the national anthem was being played for The United States.

• They got stripped of their medals because The United States said, you can't make this political speech.

• Out of this power vacuum that was left with the death of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, you have another group called the Black Panthers that emerges.

• Stokely Carmichael is one of the founders of the Black Panthers.

• The Black Panthers originated in San Francisco.

• They had a uniform, a black leather jacket and a black beret.

• Black Panthers started out just policing the police.

• Police then, as now, tend to over police persons of color.

• The Black Panthers began by just watching, just standing witness to the way in which white police officers in San Francisco interacted with black members of the public.

• Stokely Carmichael and these others created this Black Panther party.

• Malcolm x, doctor King, lunch counter sit ins, Montgomery boycott, the Children's Crusade, the marches, doctor King's I have a dream speech, all of that stuff has done very little to get the federal government and, more importantly, the state government to help and support and act on behalf of black members of their community.

• Black people are gonna take care of themselves.

• The Black Panther Party needed to help determine the destiny.

Issues

• Economic issues: More African Americans are disproportionately unemployed as a percentage of the population.

• Redlining and housing discrimination.

• The fact that not only are schools supposed to be desegregated, but even in non segregated schools, like Grant High School, like Portland Public Schools, black history is American history but it is largely not taught.

• Black veterans are like, dude, our history is important as well.

• Black Lives Matter, knock off the over policing.

• Black people need to be tried by a jury of their peers, not by a jury of white people.

• Advocating for fighting for struggling for civil rights for marginalized groups.

• Like Malcolm X these individuals publicly show up armed, but there has been for so long this double standard.

• The constitution does not decree the right to keep and bear arms. It says the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

J. Edgar Hoover

• Chairman of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

• The FBI is an investigative agency. We're not here to enforce laws. We're not going to police people.

• In Philadelphia, in 1971, headquarters of the Black Panthers were located.

• The FBI was conducting a raid on the Black Panthers there, and they literally dropped bombs from helicopters onto the building, blew up the building that caught a fire and burned down, like, a whole city block.

• The federal government really tried to push back and treated and seeing the Black Panthers as a terrorist organization, the civil rights movement kind of fractures and splinters.

Loving vs. Virginia

• In 1967, the Loving case was brought before the Supreme Court.

• They were an interracial couple who lived in Virginia.

• Virginia had miscegenation laws that said people of different races could not marry.

• They went into Maryland where they could get married and moved back to Virginia, but Virginia would not recognize their marriage.

• They sued and won the idea that the fourteenth amendment guarantees equality before the law and civil rights, and being married is a civil right.

• Any state that had miscegenation laws were overturned.

• Race should not be a criteria when one gets married.

Segregation and Integration

• The Brown decision of 1954's problem was with all due haste.

• By the nineteen seventies, we're talking fifteen years, almost twenty years after the Brown decision, schools were still segregated in many parts of the country.

• Result of redlining and discriminatory housing practices like here in Portland.

• School Officials in North Carolina argued was slow in desegregating and that white kids and black kids were receiving a very different education and that that was in violation of both the fourteenth and fifteenth amendment, but also in violation of the previous crown decision.

• The Supreme Court stepped in and said, yeah. With all due haste, it's too vague, and so we need to properly integrate schools.