Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings: The Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn

2. "Pass Them By! Support Your Brothers and Sisters in the South!": The Origins of Brooklyn CORE

2 “Pass theM By! suPPort your Brothers and sisters in the south!” The Origins of Brooklyn CORE We were the first to picket in the North. We were the first to call for a nationwide boycott. We were the first to enter into negotiations with the managements of the chains. —James Robinson, national director of CORE, 1960, on CORE’s support of the student sit-in movement I was impressed with the militancy of their demeanor. They were clean. They were neat. They were forceful in what they had to say. —Maurice Fredericks, speaking in 2001 about the first time he saw Brooklyn CORE members picketing Woolworth’s CORE’s Early History, 1942–1960 The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) formed in Chicago in 1942. Initially, CORE was a spin-off group of an interfaith, pacifist organization called the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). In the early 1940s a handful of FOR members formed CORE as an organization committed solely to attacking racial segregation in America. Like FOR, CORE was committed to philosophies of nonviolence promoted by the Indian anticolonial nationalist and pacifist leader Gandhi. The other pillar of CORE’s principles was its strict devotion to interracial membership. CORE hoped to create an interracial, nonviolent army that would end racial segregation in America with campaigns that employed what Gandhi called satyagraha, which translates as “soul force” or “truth force.” 32 • Fighting JiM Crow in the County oF Kings CORE founders believed that local chapters’ public displays of interracial solidarity and disciplined use of nonviolence would transform America into a truly color-blind democratic society.1 During CORE’s first five years local chapters formed in nineteen cities , but in that time six of the groups disbanded. All these chapters were outside the South, and most were located in the Midwest. CORE also created a central committee, called the National Action Council (NAC), which was headquartered in New York City. In 1947 the NAC sponsored the Journey of Reconciliation, which sent interracial teams into the South to test local compliance with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Morgan v. Virginia (1946). In Morgan the Court declared that racially segregated accommodations on interstate buses and trains and in depot waiting rooms were unconstitutional. CORE hoped the Journey of Reconciliation would bring national attention to racial segregation in the South, but other than a handful of arrests and one violent showdown in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the campaign did not attract much notice. CORE limited the journey to the upper-South states of Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky, where few whites knew about the Morgan decision and local law enforcement paid the CORE activists little attention. Significantly, CORE did not repeat this strategy in 1961, when it initiated the Freedom Rides and sent those interracial teams to the Deep South, where they encountered bombings and beatings and focused the entire country’s attention on CORE’s nonviolence and the brutality of Southern segregation.2 But CORE almost did not survive the 1950s. From New York City the NAC struggled a great deal to create and support vibrant, active chapters. In the early 1940s CORE chapters in Columbus, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York, among other places, addressed local forms of racial discrimination in housing, restaurants , barber shops, amusement parks, beaches and other public places, and employment. Their victories were often limited in scope. CORE chapters might successfully desegregate a downtown roller-skating rink or open up housing for a handful of black people, but the process CORE chapters had to follow was prolonged and laborious. First, members thoroughly investigated potential racial discrimination. Then CORE members attempted to use moral suasion tactics, such as appeals to democratic and Christian ideals, to change bigots’ hearts and minds. If that failed, CORE members threatened to wage a direct-action protest campaign . At first, this was only a threat that CORE hoped would leverage a negotiated settlement. If negotiation efforts stalled without any progress on CORE’s demands, CORE members finally initiated nonviolent “Support Your Brothers and Sisters in the South!” • 33 direct-action protest in the form of pickets, sit-ins, and boycotts. Such drawn-out procedures made attracting new members, keeping existing members, and actually completing campaigns difficult. If a local CORE chapter met with stiff resistance from a landlord or restaurant owner, the NAC gave little assistance. Mostly, throughout the late 1940s and the 1950s, the NAC was plagued...