Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South: Louisville, Kentucky, 1945-1980

Conclusion: Where Does the Story End?

285 Conclusion Where Does the Story End? What is, after all, a beginning? . . . Is there, after all, a truly appropriate incipit for a story? Or isn’t there always—latent but always there—a beginning before the beginning? —Amos Oz The lawsuit was the beginning of a struggle that continues to this day. The struggle has been to try and get for black kids in the public schools an equitable educational opportunity . . . . [But], even though we desegregated the buildings in 1975, we really did not do anything to dismantle racism. So no, I never thought the civil rights movement was dead. —Suzy Post In pondering where to begin a story, Amos Oz raises a fundamental problem in any historical narrative, including histories of popular struggles such as the civil rights movement. Just as we can always push back the birthing moment by looking at deeper roots or links to earlier precedents, we can extend the story until it meets the present. Indeed, when I asked movement participants a modified version of Oz’s question —Where does the story of the local struggle end?—the majority of answers echoed Post’s assertion that it never did. Cheri Hamilton noted in 1999, “We’re coming to the end of the millennium and we’ve been in this struggle forever, always the struggle continues. . . . I don’t know when you can end it.” Or, as Woodford Porter put it, “The civil rights movement as far as legalizing everything is just about over, but now the fight to keep your civil rights, to exercise your civil rights will 286 Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South never end. . . . Let’s don’t kid ourselves. Human beings won’t ever let it end.”1 For my immediate concern, deciding when I could stop writing, such answers were not helpful. But if the connection these participants see between the movement in the past and ongoing battles against racism today complicates the question of how to tell the end of the story, it also raises the more interesting issues of what the movement meant and continues to mean to people, and how they experienced it. Focusing on what participants saw as the problems to be addressed, what they did about them, and how such concerns continue to direct their lives and shape their community in turn illuminates the interconnections across time, people, and issues and strategies in the civil rights struggle. Post’s blunt assertion—“I never thought the civil rights movement was dead”—speaks directly to the experiences of many of the people who participated in the Louisville movement. They reject the idea that the movement has ended or that its narrative has a conclusion, insisting that it persists, even if it takes different forms. Some activists reflect this sense of ongoing struggle in the stories they tell, linking postwar campaigns to the more recent past and current debates. Others merge the story of the black freedom struggle with antiwar, women’s rights, and anti–death penalty campaigns, portraying it as part of a larger, broader, and ongoing movement for social justice. Thus Dolores Delahanty , the wife of one of the lawyers who represented the Black Six, suggested the story continues at least through the 1990s in the work of the local progressive community. For white west end resident and open housing supporter Fred Hicks, labor and Central American solidarity campaigns represent later chapters of social justice protests. Others insist that, although much of the energy of the black freedom struggle has dissipated, the movement continues as long as there is a vanguard that raises issues and demonstrates. For example, Louis Coleman, whom the local media often disparaged as someone who couldn’t let go of the 1960s, praised the coterie of dedicated activists he could count on to carry on the struggle.2 Indeed, many of the men and women, black and white, who joined the struggle against racism in earlier decades remain engaged in actions that reflect their ongoing commitment. Sit-in leader Raoul Cunningham, after a career working for Democratic senators and governors , returned to Louisville and has served as the director of NAACP voter registration projects and the president of the local branch. Tom Moffett, the white minister who joined WECC and the open hous- Conclusion 287 ing campaign, left his parish and devoted himself to working with the Kentucky Alliance against police brutality and other expressions of social...