-
8. Crisis after Crisis
- University of Missouri Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
CHAPTER 8 Crisis after Crisis 119 S egregationist mobs whipped up crisis after crisis in the final year of Eisenhower’s presidency and the opening months of Kennedy’s. The first and most important of these crises, the sit-in movement of 1960, mobilized black Americans across the South with astonishing speed. The violent reaction to the sit-ins was matched in intensity (though not in scale) later in the year when the New Orleans public schools were desegregated. As sit-ins continued across the South and the turmoil in New Orleans spilled over into January 1961, new disorders appeared as mobs attempted but failed to keep the color bar intact at the University of Georgia. The sit-ins would bring significant changes to the strategy, tactics, pace, and leadership of the civil rights movement, but they started in a minor key. Four black college students who had been refused service at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, launched the first demonstration on February 1, 1960. The tactic itself was not novel: Labor unions had conducted sit-down strikes in the 1930s, and the NAACP tried out the tactic two decades later, but the black students proved its effectiveness on a mass scale across an entire region. During 1960 and 1961 as many as fifty thousand persons, most of them African Americans, joined demonstrations in a hundred or more cities (some were outside the South), and more than thirty-six hundred persons were jailed. The students’ fight against Jim Crow—and their struggles against their elders’ domination of the civil rights movement—signaled that the youngsters would be a force to be reckoned with.1 The press awoke to the import of the sit-ins belatedly, partly because of preoccupation with the Civil Rights bill pending in Congress, but more so, probably, as Claude Sitton of the New York Times acknowledged, because journalists didn’t take the sit-ins seriously, but “as another college fad of 120 thE OPINIONS OF MANKIND the ‘panty-raid’ variety.” They were disabused of that notion, however, as the sit-ins “spread from North Carolina to Virginia, Florida, South Carolina, and Tennessee.”2 The Times published at least ten items with references to foreign public opinion about the new campaign. Harold C. Fleming, the executive director of the biracial Southern Regional Council, wrote the most thoughtful article, one predicting that the sit-ins would create an “international scandal over the region’s racial problem.” To Asians and Africans, Fleming elaborated, “racial incidents are atrocities of an undemocratic and unchanging society,” which were interpreted as “the archenemy colonialism in American dress and on the ascendancy.” The episodes of violence, he warned, were “made to order for Communist propagandists,” who, in point of fact, took much of their material about them from the domestic U.S. press.3 OtherreportsdealtwithU.S.racismingeneral.Onearticlewasa“debate” of sorts between Dmitri S. Polyansky, the premier of the Russian Republic, and Representative Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn. (It was one-sided: Celler was quoted, but not the Russian.) While admitting to America’s racial failings , Celler contended they were being gradually eradicated and made this observation about critics in glass houses: “I could point out to you where Russia is not perfect.” The Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano pointed out instances when America was far from perfect. In Houston, for instance, three whites savagely beat a black man with a chain, carved the letters KKK on his body, then hanged him by his knees in a tree. Austria’s Arbeiter Zeitung published a cartoon of “a gorilla-like southern white refusing service to a Negro girl.” It bore the ironic caption: “That is a free country.” Other stories told of Eleanor Roosevelt likening African independence struggles to the sit-ins, and mentioned the debt owed Gandhi “for inspiring . . . nonviolence in the struggle for racial equality in America.”4 The international factor also showed up in the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek, and no doubt others as well. A sociologist told of African exchange students who influenced their blackAmerican brethren with tales of freedom movements in their homelands, and sometimes reproached their black American brethren “for not being as aggressive.” Columnist Ernest K. Lindley advised Newsweek readers that the violence directed against the sit-ins, along with “every manifestation of . . . racial discrimination in the U.S.,” hurt the country in “the most critical areas in the struggle between Communism and freedom”—Asia and Africa.5 Still, the discourse on foreign public opinion and...