American History Tellers - Civil Rights - On The March | 5

Episode Date: October 31, 2018

As the Civil Rights movement entered the landmark years of 1963 and 1964, activists had faced many challenges - but had also won many victories. Now, they sought to launch new campaigns in Alabama and Mississippi and mass demonstrations in Washington D.C. and New York City. In the span of sixteen remarkable months, the movement and the nation itself would be transformed, walking the razor’s edge between triumph and tragedy.Support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's December, 1962. A cold and overcast day in Birmingham, Alabama. You're a 42-year-old woman, home from the holidays from Ohio. You're walking back to your cousin Mary's home after seeing some old friends. Those children are so big now. They ought to be as much as they eat.

Suddenly, from a few blocks away, you hear a loud rumbling. It rattles a few of the windows on the houses around you. Oh, Lord. That sounded like a big one. What was that, few of the windows on the houses around you. Oh lord, that sounded like a big one. What was that, thunder? You really have been gone too long. You forgot what dynamite sounds like? Come on, let's go see if we can help. You cross the street and hurry toward the rising cloud of gray-black smoke up ahead, hoping that no one was injured. You hadn't forgotten about the bombings here. You and your cousin still refer to one neighborhood in town as Dynamite Hill. But you don't know if you've ever been as close to one of the blasts.

It's Bethel. They bombed the church again. She shakes her head. Again? They've bombed it before? This is the third time. Look, there! Is everyone alright?

Behind a small crowd gathering on the curb, you see the shattered windows of the church and popping electrical wire dangling and shaking from the ceiling inside. You point to a pair of girls sitting on the curb holding white handkerchiefs to their foreheads. Look at those poor children. The handkerchiefs are spotted with blood from the cuts on their faces. It's a godless thing, attacking a church like that, especially with those children inside. Yes, it is. The ambulance, a segregated one,

pulls up a few moments later to take the girls to the hospital. As it pulls off, you and Mary start making your way back home, retracing your steps. You know Dr. King was back here in September? Here at the church? No, here in Birmingham. His group had a big convention. Looked for a while like the city stores might even desegregate.

What happened? They left. Everything went right back to how it was. You think it's ever going to change? I don't know. But word has it they're coming back. Planning something big here this spring. She looks back at the smoke rising from the church.

Lord, I hope they know what they're in for. Anderson. Tabitha Brown. Tony Hawk. Oh, my God. Buy it now. Stream free on Freebie and Prime Video. Have you ever wondered who created that bottle of sriracha that's living in your fridge? Or why nearly every house in America has at least one game of Monopoly? Introducing The Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast about the surprising origin stories of the products you're obsessed with. Listen to The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. We are continuing our six-episode journey through the American Civil Rights Movement. Today, the movement enters the landmark years of 1963 and 1964, launching new campaigns in

Alabama and Mississippi and mass demonstrations in Washington, D.C. and New York City. In the span of 16 remarkable months, the movement and the nation itself would be transformed, walking a razor's edge between triumph and tragedy. This is Part 5, On the March. At the start of 1963, the civil rights movement seemed on unsteady footing. The Freedom Rides had ended a year earlier. Intervening campaigns in places like Macomb, Mississippi and Alabama, Georgia had been blocked by segregationist resistance

and failed to generate much national attention or local progress. Direct action tactics remained deeply unpopular among white citizens. Tensions flared between the major civil rights organizations, and the federal government was, at best, an unreliable supporter of Black Americans' legal rights. Activists were still battling, though, organizing and risking their lives and communities throughout the country. And they achieved a few scattered, hard-fought victories. But there was little to suggest that this would become a ground-shaking, transformational year in the movement's history. If anything, as 1963 arrived, the movement felt and looked vulnerable.

Alabama's state elections seemed to mark the dire state of affairs. New Governor George Wallace proclaimed his devotion to white supremacy at his January inauguration. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever. And in Birmingham, where the Freedom Riders had faced vicious mobs in 1961, the man who helped coordinate that violence, Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene Bull Connor, looked like he had a good shot at becoming mayor. And so when organizers picked Alabama as a stage for what many viewed as the make-or-break campaign in the civil rights movement, the stakes couldn't have felt higher.

Birmingham, the target of the campaign, was a segregationist stronghold unlike any other. Even in a nation full of Jim Crow cities, Birmingham was considered by many to be the toughest and meanest of the bunch. Black newspapers had called it the worst city in America, and a host of others, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., had labeled it the most segregated city in the country. It was a well-earned reputation. Birmingham blended together widespread popular support for segregation with an extraordinary record of violence. Unsolved explosions and arsons were so common in Black neighborhoods that many residents called the city Bombingham. Making matters worse,

Bull Connor used law enforcement to run the town like his own personal white supremacist fiefdom. But the things that made Birmingham so foreboding on the one hand also made it a powerfully symbolic target for civil rights protesters. In a big city with a violent reputation, media coverage was almost certain to draw attention to their demonstrations. They could use Birmingham as a platform to broadcast the continued injustice and violence of Jim Crow life to a global audience. And from a psychological standpoint, many felt that if they could succeed here, they could win just about anywhere.

But there was a flip side to making this gamble. If the Birmingham campaign failed, if it broke easily or ended in finger-pointing and blame, it was unclear how the movement as a whole would be able to recover. The group behind this high-stakes campaign was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC, which counted Martin Luther King Jr. among its leaders. In January 1963, just days before Governor Wallace made his promise to uphold segregation forever, SCLC organizers, including King, finalized plans for actions to take place that spring. They called it Project C. C for confrontation. A multi-stage process of sit-ins, mass meetings, boycotts, marches, and other forms of non-violent direct action.

But Birmingham's mayoral election in March complicated matters. With Bull Connor running against a somewhat more moderate opponent, many in Birmingham's Black communities did not want to risk mobilizing white supremacist voters and handing Conor even more power. And when the election failed to establish a clear winner and headed to a runoff in early April, the plans for Project C were pushed back even further. Conor eventually lost the runoff, but he refused to relinquish his office, leaving him in charge of the police as the protest finally launched. On April 3rd, 1963, the Birmingham campaign, Project C, began. And it started terribly.

King and the other organizers expected between 250 and 350 protesters to stage sit-ins and be arrested on the opening day. They hoped to escalate from there. Instead, only about 70 demonstrators showed up, and just 21 faced arrest. The poor turnout continued. By the end of the third day of protests, only 35 people had gone to jail, one-tenth of expectations. A flurry of arrests on April 6th, when protesters marched to City Hall instead of staging a sit-in, gave some hope. But the following day, a planned march led by Reverend A.D. King, Martin Luther King's younger brother, drew less than 30 people. A week into the demonstrations, the defining feature of the campaign appeared to be

indifference. Birmingham's Black communities remained skeptical of the SCLC's tactics and timing. And more worrisome was that Bull Connor seemed to have mustered a level of restraint that no one thought possible. The SCLC's campaign hinged on the assumption that Connor would be unable to keep his cool with the protesters, that he would inevitably erupt with a heavy-handed white supremacist repression that had made him famous. The protesters knew that it was images of violence that often had the greatest impact on the public and politicians. The contrast between peaceful demonstrations and the brute force of segregationists was powerful. But Conor muzzled most of his worst impulses, content for now to keep arresting the small groups that marched.

A series of procedural obstacles worsened the SCLC's predicament by the start of the second week. Birmingham suddenly required payment of bail in cash, stripping the SCLC of funds it needed to continue. Then, white city leaders went to court and obtained an injunction, legally prohibiting demonstrators from engaging in public protests. The injunction meant that marchers would now go to jail for violating a court order, instead of being arrested on whatever trumped-up charges Conner could manufacture. And there was no guarantee that there would be enough bail money for them to get out and carry on the movement. On the brink of disaster,

Martin Luther King Jr. gambled on one more effort to rally the campaign. He would lead one of the marches himself. On April 12th, Good Friday, he departed from the 16th Street Baptist Church and marched until Conner's policemen grabbed him off the street and shoved him into a waiting police van. He would spend Easter weekend in solitary confinement. King's arrest sparked condemnation, though most of it was directed at the SCLC. Public officials, reporters from across the country, and a group of self-proclaimed liberal white clergymen from Birmingham

all scolded the campaign's organizers. It was wrong, they said, to defy the court's injunction. And it was wrong to launch their demonstrations before the newly elected mayor had a chance to show what, if anything, he might do differently. From his jail cell in Birmingham, King composed a searching and eloquent letter justifying his actions in pleading the cause of justice. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. One day, the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream.

But as a sign of the disinterest that had taken hold, hardly anyone outside of his inner circle bothered to notice the letter for more than a month. In the short run, King's arrest and his nine days in jail did little more than to prolong the campaign a couple of weeks. But by the end of April, even that momentum had disappeared. And then, just as the campaign and maybe the movement itself was about to endure its most humiliating defeat, the children of Birmingham's black community saved it. They came by the hundreds to the 16th Street Baptist Church.

Kids, some as young as six years old, filed in and prepared themselves to march, and possibly to go to jail. Some were encouraged by parents, but remarkably, many were there in defiance of their family's wishes. On May 2nd, the children took over the front lines of the Birmingham protest. They were responding to the efforts of 26-year-old organizer James Bevel. A Nashville Movement veteran, Bevel felt that Birmingham's Black youth were the campaign's only hope to stay alive. It was a controversial move and risked alienating local activists even further,

but almost immediately, it rescued the campaign from oblivion. On the first day, nearly a thousand students marched, singing as they left the church. Police, reporters, and spectators were stunned by the sight. When they had filled every police wagon with arrested children, officers conscripted school buses to haul hundreds more off to jail. Six hundred children filled the cells. By the second day, the church was even more jam-packed, though now most of the kids were on the older side. They set off from the church into neighboring Kelly Ingram Park, on the move toward the city center.

And then finally, Bull Connor lost his cool. Imagine you're a 30-year-old reporter from Los Angeles, sent by your paper to cover the unfolding drama in Birmingham. Up until now, your editors had taken relatively little notice. But after the reports of a thousand children marching yesterday, they put you on an overnight flight to Alabama with your photographer, Mike. It's early afternoon. The crowd at Kelly Ingram Park is growing. You make a few notes about the mood, starting to mentally draft the opening of your article. You note the firefighters lining the street,

hoses at the ready, a phalanx of police officers, grim and sweating, a crowd of several hundred black adults watching and waiting under the shade of the park's elm trees. Then, at the corner edge of the park, you see the doors of the church open. Here they come. They really are just kids. Columns of marchers, most of them just teenagers, start walking down the steps toward the street. They haven't gotten very far, up towards 17th Street, when you hear warnings being shouted through a bullhorn. Then, the hiss of fire hoses. The force of it knocks several of them off balance. They crash to the sidewalk, some rolling into the gutters. A teenage girl picks herself up as the hose turns away, blood starting to pour from her nose.

Mike, are you getting this? Yeah. He is furiously snapping furrows. As the marchers try to regroup, the crowd among the elm trees start booing, which brings the hoses onto them. Then the dogs start to move them. Six German shepherds, snarling and pulling their leashes tight, are moved across the street toward the park. You see one of them headed straight for a young girl, no older than eight,

the same age as your daughter, and you cry out to warn her. Look out! She spins just as the dog lunges and is knocked down. The officer gripping the leash yanks it back and glares in your direction. Mike grabs your arm and practically lifts you as he moves down the sidewalk away from the barking dog. Come on. You're going to get those hoses turned on us if you interfere. Let's set up on the other side of the park. It looks like they're going to be at it for a while.

Jesus, Mike. If I wasn't seeing this with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe it. We're not the only ones who will see this. He taps his camera. Sure enough, the images that film crews and photographers captured that day, the stories that reporters told, shocked the nation. The SCLC had believed that eventually, Connor would show his ruthless self to the world, and now he had. The marches and clashes continued

over the next several days. Public pressure on Birmingham officials began to mount. Finally, SCLC executives and city leaders hammered out an agreement. They settled on a plan of gradual desegregation in city stores, the hiring of African-American clerks and salesmen, a resolution of the arrests and charges against protesters, and the promise of interracial cooperation to address further grievances. It was far from a complete victory. In fact, it was modest at best in its scope. But it served as the vindication that the SCLC needed.

Nonviolent confrontation had gained important ground in one of the most challenging arenas yet, and the ripple effects from Birmingham just grew. In the weeks that followed, new campaigns launched throughout the South. Nearly 200 cities faced demonstrations, and close to 15,000 protesters went to jail. Most of these new efforts didn't get very far in terms of changing Jim Crow practices, but they kept the pressure on. The combined effect of Birmingham and the broader groundswell of protests that followed eventually forced President John F. Kennedy's administration to consider a new civil rights law.

Kennedy took to the airwaves in mid-June and spoke to the American people about the moral urgency of the moment. One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free. That night, Kennedy called for Congress to consider a civil rights bill that would require desegregation on all facilities open to the public. This,

even more than the local concessions in Birmingham, seemed to validate the SCLC's campaign. Meaningful national change was possible. But on the same night that Kennedy spoke, a reminder came of the deep currents of hatred and rage that sustained Jim Crow. In Jackson, Mississippi, a white supremacist drifter lay in wait under cover of darkness. Armed with a rifle, he hid among the honeysuckle bushes near the home of prominent civil rights activist Medgar Evers. Evers died that night,

shot in the back in his own driveway. His widow, Merle Evers, spoke at a mass meeting the next day. I am left without my husband and my children without a father. But I am left with the strong determination to try to take up where he left off. And I come to make a plea that all of you here

and those who are not here will, by his death, be able to draw some of his strength, some of his courage, and some of his determination to finish this fight. Nothing can bring Medgar back, but the cause can live on. It was his wish that this movement be one of the most successful that this nation has ever known. We cannot let his death be in vain.

The movement had suffered new losses and won new victories. It felt the weight of tragedy and triumph and needed to find ways to move on through both. The tumultuous year of 1963 was not even halfway over. That summer, a single day in the nation's capital galvanized hope. But that autumn, violence came again to Birmingham, and it shocked the nation. In November 1991, media tycoon Robert Maxwell mysteriously vanished from his luxury yacht in the Canary Islands. But it wasn't just his body that would come to the surface in the days that followed. It soon emerged that Robert's business was on the brink of collapse, and behind his facade of wealth and success was a litany of bad investments, mounting debt, and multi-million dollar fraud.

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in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Ten days after President Kennedy's address, representatives from the SCLC and a coalition of Black labor organizers announced that they were bringing their fight directly to Washington, D.C. They planned a massive march on the nation's capital in August to pressure Congress into action on civil rights reforms. The idea for the march had come together months before. In January 1963, a longtime organizer named Bayard Rustin proposed a campaign of mass demonstration in Washington to support what he called a broad and fundamental program for economic justice. Rustin had spent nearly three decades deeply immersed in civil rights causes. He had been an advisor to Martin Luther King Jr. during the Montgomery bus boycott

and was an old friend of labor organizer and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph. It was Randolph who had launched the March on Washington movement 20 years earlier during the build-up to World War II, and he had handpicked Rustin to design this new campaign in 1963. By June, plans for the march were in full swing. Rustin recruited an unprecedented coalition of all the nation's leading civil rights groups to join the program. Over the past several years, these organizations had had a hard time cooperating through tensions, competition, and tactical disagreements. They pushed all of those differences to the side for at least a few days in August.

It was a remarkable display of unity. But leaders from the NAACP balked. They insisted that if they joined, Rustin could not serve as director. His personal history made him unacceptable to many as a public figurehead for the movement. Of particular concern for the NAACP was the fact that Rustin was an openly gay man, and he had been arrested and jailed in California in 1953 on a morals charge when police interrupted a romantic encounter. They feared this information would be used to tarnish the march and the movement. Randolph enthusiastically defended Rustin, despite the NAACP's resistance. But eventually, he agreed to step in as director, as long as Rustin could stay on as deputy.

From this role, Rustin would lead the organizing efforts, but would not be the public face of the march. Rustin kept up his tireless work, and soon the march had drawn even more sponsors. The powerful United Auto Workers Union, the American Jewish Congress, and the National Council of Churches all lent vocal support as August came. This broad-based, interracial, interfaith backing signaled that the march might be even bigger than its organizers had hoped.

Now called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the organizers demanded expansive federal action that targeted racial discrimination not just in the South, but in the North as well. At the same time, they called for federal intervention to raise the minimum wage and provide job training and placement programs to unemployed workers of all races. Their vision was ambitious and far-reaching. But this vision was far more limited when it came to the role of Black women in the movement. Despite the efforts of organizer Anna Arnold Hedgeman, a key contributor to the march preparations,

Rustin and Randolph refused to allow Black women's groups to join the march's leadership. Until a few days before the march, no women were even going to have a speaking role in the program. Finally, pressure from Hedgeman and others led to a modest concession. Daisy Bates, the veteran journalist and leader of the Little Rock desegregation struggle six years earlier, read a brief statement written for her by an NAACP official. It pledged that the women of the country would join hands with those fighting for civil rights. For months afterward, women organizers challenged the men in the movement about the dismissive treatment they had received.

Apart from this clash and the tensions it created, the march looked poised for resounding success. Communities all across the country had chartered thousands of buses and dozens of trains to deliver protesters to D.C. for the occasion. resounding success. Communities all across the country had chartered thousands of buses and dozens of trains to deliver protesters to D.C. for the occasion, and it looked like the initial expectation of 100,000 marchers would easily be surpassed. Among white observers, and especially within the Kennedy administration, there were fears of what might happen at such a massive demonstration. After all, nearly every major civil rights campaign thus far

had met with some sort of violence. Federal officials feared the worst, both from the marchers and from whoever might oppose them. Washington police cleared out the cells in city jails, preparing for mass arrests. A combined force of 10,000 police, firefighters, and soldiers mobilized in case they were needed to intervene. As the day of the march arrived, the city was on edge. More than 80,000 people in Washington stayed home from work on the morning of Wednesday, August 28th, and half the city's businesses didn't even bother to open. Hundreds of thousands of marchers streamed into the city by rail, bus, car, and plane. Some even walked.

They gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial as the program of speakers began. Those assembled and the mass television audience at home heard powerful speeches about the urgent need for reform, demands for a moral reckoning on racial equality. The speakers insisted that the nation could not afford to wait any longer. They called for immediate federal intervention to secure American civil and economic rights. Most memorable of all the speeches that afternoon would be Martin Luther King Jr.'s turn at the podium. There, he told of his dream for the future of America,

captivating those who saw it with his vision of justice and brotherhood. In the end, the crowds were much larger than anyone had hoped for. Nearly 300,000 people. Organizers were equally thrilled by the praise the march got from the media. All the major news networks broadcast the three hours of speeches in their entirety. Life magazine hailed the march as perhaps the best evidence yet of the civil rights movement's potential as a moral force in America. An NBC correspondent went further,

declaring, There comes a time, there even comes a moment in the affairs of men, when they sense that their lives are being forever altered. We are experiencing a revolution. Even President Kennedy, who still kept his distance from civil rights protests when possible, praised the march for having made a significant contribution to the future of all mankind. But the question remained, would the march actually change anything? Even those who praised it acknowledged that it probably hadn't shifted many votes in Washington. The majority of white Americans throughout the country still objected to the idea of mass marches and direct action protests by African Americans.

And civil rights leaders worried, with good reason it turned out, that the Kennedy administration would back away from the proposed civil rights bill if it became politically convenient to do so. Segregationists had a predictable reaction to the march and the movement it publicized In Alabama, the week after the march, Governor George Wallace was fuming over the impending desegregation of Birmingham schools Speaking with a New York Times reporter, he practically spat

What this country needs is a few first-class funerals, and some political funerals, too. Imagine it's September 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama. It's Sunday, around 10 a.m., and you're inside the 16th Street Baptist Church, helping prepare for the morning service. A little over 100 people are in the building, attending to various tasks or finishing Sunday school classes. You look up and see your friend May walking to the sanctuary from the church office. The phone's been ringing off the hook today. But you know what's strange? Every time I pick it up,

it's just silence on the other end. Well, if they call again, you just tell them they ought to go on and get to church. May smiles and leans towards you with a whisper. I'll tell you what I want to say to them. I want to say something like... You and May are both knocked to the floor. A haze starts to fill the sanctuary. You shake your head, trying to regain your bearings. May, are you all right? May, I'm fine, just a little shaken up.

Oh, Lord, the children! You see one of the pastors hurrying toward the stairs to the basement. He stops, puts his hand on your arms. Miss May, Miss Sarah, you all right? We're fine, Pastor, but the children, I'm going to check on them now. You all go get on outside. You and May press with others through the smoke and dust toward the front doors of the church, joining a crowd gathering outside.

You scan for familiar faces, a wash of relief every time you recognize someone who had been inside. A cloud of gray smoke rises from the back of the church. A few minutes later, the pastor comes out of the front doors and is handed a bullhorn. I've checked the classrooms in the basement. It looks like the children are all right. They're okay. Thank God. Now, folks, let us be forgiven as Christ was forgiven.

Go home, everyone, and pray for the men who did this evil deed. We must have love in our hearts for these men. But no one in the crowd is in a forgiving mood. The pastor slowly makes his way down the steps and heads around to the side of the church. The crowd moves with him. You follow, too, still half stunned, the ringing not fully out of your ears.

The northwest wall of the church is a smoldering crater, a gaping hole at least seven feet high and just as wide. You pick your way through the glass shards and broken brick on the sidewalk, peering at the wreckage. The men inside have started pulling back the debris, carefully lifting the layers of brick. Suddenly one of them stops. His face drains. There, in the rubble at

his feet, you see a child's shoe, caked with dust and spattered with blood. From the ruins of the church basement, the bodies of four girls, 11-year-old Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Carol Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley would be recovered. The 16th Street church bombing, carried out by local members of the Ku Klux Klan, left Birmingham and other Black communities wrestling with how to move forward, what to do with their sorrow and outrage, and how to reclaim hope. In November 1963, Americans faced tragedy again with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy's death was a staggering blow to the country, an act of violence so extraordinary that it seemed to confirm America's worst fears about the chaos engulfing the nation. For civil rights activists, the president's assassination

carried with it an additional layer of concern. The man who now assumed the presidency, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was a Southerner. Though Johnson had a solid legislative record on civil rights issues while representing Texas in the U.S. Senate, no one really knew if he would support the growing movement or Kennedy's proposed legislation. Five days after Kennedy's assassination, however, President Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress and affirmed his commitment to the Civil Rights Bill. First, no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the Civil Rights Bill for which he fought so long.

We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for a hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter and to write it in the books of law. Johnson had now proclaimed the importance of civil rights in his agenda, and civil rights activists hoped that they had an ally in the new president. But as activists sorted through the lessons of the year's campaigns and looked ahead to the future, they were left with more questions than answers. 1963 was a whirlwind year, with each step of progress met with violent and often fatal resistance. Would the next year see the movement

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crime shows like morbid early and ad free right now by joining wandry plus check out exhibit c in the wandry app for all your true-form listening. The dawn of 1964 brought the movement once again into uncertain territory. In Washington, the Civil Rights Bill was still pending under President Johnson's six-week-old administration. Johnson had indicated, both privately and publicly, that he intended to see the bill made into law. But those within the movement knew better than to rely on political promises. Johnson might see the legislation through, or he might not. And even if he succeeded, the experience of Brown v. Board of Education 10 years earlier had shown activists that legal

rights were a starting place and not an ending point. Organizers were determined to keep fighting, continuing to put pressure on Congress and moving ahead with new local campaigns. That spring witnessed the start of two major efforts. First came a new mass demonstration in New York City. Though civil rights issues in the South had received the most public attention, racial discrimination had never been a strictly Southern phenomenon. Civil rights groups like CORE and the NAACP had a strong presence in northern cities, fighting against police brutality and discrimination in housing, jobs, and schools. Northern school districts, often building upon patterns of

residential discrimination, were also highly segregated. In cities like New York, not only were many schools divided along racial lines, but they were often disturbingly unequal. Faced with these conditions, a coalition of civil rights leaders in New York City looked for a way to raise public awareness and combat these inequalities. They enlisted the expertise of Bayard Rustin, fresh off of his success in Washington. Rustin began planning a one-day boycott of New York City's public schools. Scheduled for February 3rd, the response he got was nothing short of amazing. On the day of the boycott, at least 450,000 students, predominantly from Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, stayed out of city schools. Many of the students and their parents joined

picket lines at their campuses or protests at the Board of Education offices. Rustin proclaimed it as the largest civil rights demonstration in the nation's history, one and a half times the size of the March on Washington six months earlier. In the end, however, the protests yielded little change. Newspapers, city officials, even some advocacy groups that supported school integration all responded to the boycott with indifference or criticism. And without real progress, New York City schools would continue deepening their patterns of inequality in the years ahead. As the students in New York City schools would continue deepening their patterns of inequality in the years ahead. As the students in New York were taking their stand, plans for a new campaign of political empowerment were also underway down in Mississippi.

The SNCC organizers who had come to the state in 1961 during the summer of the Freedom Rides had never really left, but the hostile resistance they encountered had kept their progress slow during the intervening years. By 1964, less than 7% of eligible Black Mississippians were registered to vote. But with a national election coming up in the fall, civil rights workers launched two statewide efforts to mobilize Black voters. The first, starting in April, was the formation of a group called the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, or the MFDP. The MFDP was meant to challenge the all-white, segregationist Democratic Party establishment of the state. MFDP members prepared to send an alternative, integrated delegation to the Democratic National Convention in August and challenged the party's credentials committee to recognize them as the rightful representatives of the state. One of the leading figures in the MFDP's mobilization was Fannie Lou Hamer, a 47-year-old former cotton plantation worker from Sunflower County, Mississippi.

Hamer had begun organizing alongside members of SNCC in 1962 after she attempted to register to vote. She quickly suffered eviction, threats, and economic reprisals, but they only drove her further into the movement. In the summer of 1963, just as President Kennedy made his national address on civil rights, Hamer had been part of a group of activists detained by police and brutally beaten after staging a sit-in at the town of Winona. A few months later, Hamer unsuccessfully ran for Congress in Mississippi's 2nd District, attempting to unseat one of the state's entrenched segregationists. Her efforts helped lay the groundwork for the MFDP's broader campaign that

summer, and she would serve as vice chairwoman of the MFDP's delegation. Hamer's work with the MFDP occurred alongside the second mobilization program, what organizers were calling the Freedom Summer Project. In the Freedom Summer, scheduled to run from June through August, a coalition of civil rights groups in the state invited volunteers from across the nation to organize in Mississippi. Their work would involve registering voters and launching educational programs known as Freedom Schools. The campaign ultimately drew hundreds of volunteers, 90% of them white, which all but assured that media coverage would follow.

Even before the Freedom Summer campaign began, news from Washington gave reason for hope. The civil rights bill made a crucial breakthrough in Congress. A lengthy filibuster, the longest in the Senate's history at 75 days, finally broke. The following week, the Senate passed the bill, 73 to 27, sending it to the House of Representatives for one final vote. While the debate raged on in Washington, the Freedom Summer Volunteers spent a week in Ohio training for their campaign, but nothing could have prepared them for the violence that awaited. The fury of Mississippi's white supremacists descended immediately. Just as the first wave of volunteers arrived, three civil rights workers,

two white, one black, disappeared in Neshoba County. As their families and fellow organizers feared the worst, the local sheriff, whose deputies had participated in the abduction, insisted it was all just a publicity stunt staged by movement activists. By then, Klansmen had already executed and buried the three men. Though a handful of the volunteers still waiting in Ohio dropped out after the news, the vast majority continued on, boarding the next wave of buses. Imagine you're a white college student on the 700-mile bus ride from southern Ohio to central Mississippi.

You cross the Mississippi border a little over an hour ago, and you know it won't be much longer to your destination. You lean over to the young black woman across the aisle. I've never really seen anything like this. What do you mean? I mean, there's just hardly anything out here. Where are you from? Boston. Well, it definitely isn't city living.

You ever been to the South before? Can't say that I have. You? I was born in South Carolina, in a town not too much different than where we're going. You look back out the window as the bus turns into a narrow road. It's almost dusk and the sky is starting to light up with color. Are you scared?

She pauses. You mean, do I think I might die? Sure. I mean, look what's happened already. But nothing's ever going to be different if that's enough to stop us. Of course. You're right. I can't tell you everything's going to be okay. What I can say is that we're going to keep fighting for it. We're going to keep coming back. So if we die, if it's my time while we're down here, well, I know I'm doing God's work and that it won't be in vain.

You stay quiet. Not really sure if she was talking to you or maybe convincing herself. Is that the headquarters? Everyone toward the front of the bus starts crowding the windows on the left-hand side. As the bus pulls to a stop, you see a small wood-framed building, but consumed by fire,

sparking into the night and sending ash floating through the air. They burned it down? Mary is clenching her hands into fists, fingernails digging into her palms. Welcome to Mississippi. The violence continued throughout the summer. 35 shootings, 65 arsons or bombings, including some three dozen churches, nearly a hundred severe beatings, more than a, including some three dozen churches, nearly 100 severe beatings,

more than 1,000 arrests, and six murders, including the volunteers in Neshoba County. It was a staggering and terrifying display of force. As the events in Mississippi made national headlines and federal agents headed south to search for the three missing men, the campaign for the Civil Rights Bill reached its triumphant climax. On July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed the bill into law. The final legislation prohibited discrimination in most public accommodations, banned employment discrimination on the basis of race or sex, and equipped the federal government with additional powers to end school segregation.

It was the movement's greatest legislative victory to date. But the new law gave little comfort to the Mississippi vanguard. July only brought more violence, and the slain workers in Neshoba County were still missing. It was only on August 4th, six weeks after their disappearance, that an anonymous tip led to the bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner. They had been buried 15 feet deep in the soil of a nearby cattle farm. Their abduction had haunted the Freedom Summer from the start. Now, those lingering fears were confirmed. By the end of August, civil rights workers could point to only a few victories from their months of sacrifice. The depth of Mississippi's white supremacist resistance had stalled or crushed most of the

Freedom Summers' efforts. The organizers had, however, succeeded in bringing extensive press coverage to the injustices in the area and had drawn surprisingly enthusiastic participation in their freedom schools. Still, with fewer than 1,600 new registered voters and growing feelings of frustration and disillusionment, the summer's political harvest had proven disappointing. These frustrations only deepened as the Democratic National Convention began during the final weeks of August. Fannie Lou Hamer's MFDP protest delegation arrived in Atlantic City to an anxious reception. Privately, President Johnson was fuming about the MFDP challenge, worried that it might cause a walkout of Southern delegations that were already on edge after his support of the Civil Rights Act. And in fact, Mississippi's segregationist contingent had already refused

to sign a pledge supporting Johnson in the general election. And sure enough, for the first time since 1872, Mississippi's electoral votes would go to the Republican candidate that November. In any event, the MFDP was poised to receive major media coverage. The day after their arrival, MFDP delegates testified to the Credentials Committee in televised hearings about their right to be seated. They were joined by Martin Luther King Jr., leaders from the NAACP and CORE, and Freedom Summer worker Rita Schwerner, Mickey Schwerner's widow. But it was Hamer's testimony that was the most compelling. As she recounted her experiences and described the brutal beatings she received in the Winona Jailhouse the previous summer, members of the committee were moved to tears. President Johnson was so concerned about the impact of her comments that he hastily called a press conference, forcing the networks to cut away from their live coverage of Hamer.

His important announcement to the American people was only a solemn reminder that that day was the nine-month anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. Recognizing the president's ploy, the evening news aired the rest of Hamer's testimony to an even larger audience. As the convention opened, the MFDP's demands to be seated were still unresolved. Both the MFDP and segregationist delegations attended the first day, sitting in the same gallery. Soon, a compromise emerged. The convention would seat Mississippi's original delegation, but would also provide voting seats to two MFDP delegates.

Before Hamer and the other MFDP members had even heard the proposal, it was announced publicly that they had accepted the arrangements. This deception forced a split within the group. Hamer and most of the delegates were furious and refused to accept the compromise. But other civil rights leaders pressed them to make the best of a bad situation and avoid the perception that they were backing out of a deal to which they had already agreed. Bayard Rustin, in town to help navigate the tensions, urged the MFDP members to accept the compromise, but tried to win one key change. He suggested to Democratic Party officials that Hamer be granted one of the two seats. In response, Senator Hubert

Humphrey, the man who had led the fight in the Senate to pass the Civil Rights Act and was soon to be vice president, shot back that the president would not allow that illiterate woman to speak from the floor of the convention. MFDP delegates staged a protest in the convention hall the next day, but their momentum had been broken. They left Atlantic City in a state of disgust and frustration. As Hamer put it, we didn't come all this way for no two seats. The civil rights movement had indeed come a long way by the end of 1964, bounds ahead from where it stood just 16 months earlier. The major demonstrations and the passage of the Civil Rights Act

had shown what was possible for the movement to achieve. But after each victory, Black communities faced indifference or violent retaliation. They were left to wrestle with ongoing injustice and determine what new steps were left to be taken. Much had happened since Birmingham, but civil rights organizers knew their journey was far from finished. On the next episode of American History Tellers, activists launch a renewed campaign for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, as the broader movement wrestles with the work left to be done

and what challenges would remain for the next generation to face. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go,

tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. From Wondery, this is American History Tellers. American History Tellers is hosted, sound designed, and edited by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship. Additional production assistance by Derek Behrens. This episode is written by Jeffrey Gonda, edited by Jen Chien, edited and produced by Jenny Lauer, produced by George Lavender. Our executive producer is Marshall Louis,

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