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"We Shall Overcome" The hymn quickly became the anthem of the movement"
A common sight during the civil rights movement: King joining hands with other clergymen at the end of a meeting to sing "We Shall Overcome." The hymn quickly became the anthem of the movement. In October 1961, eight months into his presidency, John F. Kennedy invited King to the White House. Their meeting had been a long time coming. King had wanted to talk about civil rights ever since the election, but the president kept putting himoff. Finally, when they were together in the president's study, King pressed for legislation to safeguard black voting rights. He reminded the president that 100 years earlier Abraham Lincoln had worked in the very room where they were sitting. What better way to honor the great man's memory, King asked, than for Kennedy to issue a "seconc Emancipation Proclamation," declaring all forms of segregation illegal. When King finished laying out his case, Kennedy replied with a lesson in practical politics. It was a bad time for civil rights legislation, he said. Elected championing the cause of blacks would cost him the support of southern Democrats. Civil rights would have to wait. King was disappointed but not surprised. By 1961, surely he realized that it was not in the cards for a president of either party willingly to join the civil rights movement. Kennedy and virtually every other American political leader would delay and temporize forever unless prodded and pushed. And blacks had but one way to pressure the federal government: Massive protest---the nonviolent direct action of demonstrations and sit-ins--got results. The Freedom Rides of 1961 had shown that. In December 1960, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregation in railroad stations and but terminals as well as in the trains and buses that crossed state lines. But the South acted as if it had not heard of the decision and kept its facilities as segregated as ever. James Farmer, the head of a pioneer civil rights organizations, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), decided to dramatize the South's defiance of the court. In May 1961, two interracial groups, sponsored by CORE, boarded buses in Washington, D.C., and headed southward. Along the way, the Freedom Riders asserted their constitutional rights by ignoring Whites Only and Colored signs in southern bus stations. King gave them his support and had dinner with some of the riders when they passed through Atlanta. Although it was a CORE operation, the SCLC promised cooperation, even paying for the riders' bus tickets to Alabama. Through Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, the Freedom Ride proceeded uneventfully. This tranquillity bothered farmer. "We planned the Freedom Ride with the specific intention of creating a crisis," he recalled. "We were counting on the bigots in the South to do our work for us. We figured that the government would have to respond if we created a situation that was headline news all over the world." In Anniston, a white mob burned one bus and attacked every Freedom Rider it could lay its hands on. The second bus raced to Birmingham, where the police told a gang of KuKluxKlansmen they would not interfere with them for 15 minutes. The Klan, in that quarter hour, went after the riders in its preferred way: with lead pipes, baseball bats, and chains. The ourtrageous brutality, as Farmer hoped, forced the federal government to act, and it fell to U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, the president's brother, to protect the Freedom Riders. He sent several assistants to Birmingham, and over the telephone he told an executive of the Greyhound line, "Somebody better get in that damn bus and get it going and get these people on their way." It got as far as Montgomery. There, howling whites surrounded the terminal, and when the Freedom Ride bus pulled in, they screamed, "Get 'em get "em and attacked. Clearly, local law enforcement was incapable of protecting the Freedom Ride, so Kennedy ordered 500 U.S. marshals to Montgomery to restore order. etc...
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The movement just made a giant leap forward.
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This intel was contributed by bjk48
bjk48
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May, 2012
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