History

After Reconstruction ended in 1877, African Americans ceased to hold significant political power in the South. Segregation existed but custom, rather than law, enforced it. This changed in the 1890s when the Populist Party, an agrarian movement which sought to raise farm prices and challenge the power of the banks and railroads, attempted to merge the common economic interests of poor African American and white farmers against the white Democratic party elite in the South.

This elite turned to stopping the African American vote to maintain their power. The Fifteenth Amendment forbade racial restrictions on suffrage, but white supremacist used thinly disguised laws to remove African Americans from the voter rolls. These included poll taxes that poor blacks (and whites) could not pay and literacy tests. Racial violence, especially lynching, was used to discourage African Americans from voting as well as to maintain the unwritten racial and economic order that characterized the South.

In addition to disfranchisement, African Americans were also subject to racist laws, known as Jim Crow legislation, which spread throughout the South in the late 1890s. Jim Crow racially segregated all public facilities, including bathrooms, hospitals, schools, and streetcars. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld segregation in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case and endorsed state laws disenfranchising African Americans in the 1898 Williams v. Mississippi decision. It would be more than 60 years before African Americans would regain the voting and civil rights that Jim Crow legislation violently took from them.

Many African Americans, most notably Ida Wells-Barnett, organized protests but their voices did not reach the ears of an America who was deaf to racial injustice.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett remains in my heart and mind as one of Americas greatest leaders and was a fearless anti-lynching crusader, suffragist, women’s rights advocate, journalist, and speaker. She stands as one of our nation’s most uncompromising leaders and a most avid defender of democracy.

If she was alive today, she would most likely say, “leaders what are you doing, organize and save your children from Jim Crow, Jr. and the laws that continue to dis-enfranchise African Americans and poor people.”

Many states are now revisiting racist laws of the past, under the guise of Three Strikes and Mandatory Minimum laws.

Even though the Lt. Governor of Florida is Black, Governor Scott is following a destructive path which will continue to disenfranchise African Americans and the poor, as it relates to their right to vote.

“At no Time do we condone wrongness on either side of the wall”.

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The Civil Rights Movement in the United States has been a long, primarily nonviolent struggle to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to all Americans. The movement has had a lasting impact on United States society, in its tactics, the increased social and legal acceptance of civil rights, and in its exposure of the prevalence and cost of racism.

Many people who were active in the Civil Rights Movement, with organizations such as NAACP, SNCC, CORE, and SCLC, prefer the term “Southern Freedom Movement” because the struggle was about more than just civil rights under law; it was also about fundamental issues of freedom, respect, dignity, and economic and social equality.

The NAACP was formed in 1909 in response to the 1908 race riot in Springfield, capital of Illinois and birthplace of President Abraham Lincoln. Appalled at the violence that was committed against blacks, a group of white liberals that included Mary White Ovington and Oswald Garrison Villard, both the descendants of abolitionists, issued a call for a meeting to discuss racial justice. There were some 60 people, only 7 of whom were African American (including W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell), signed the call, which was released on the centennial of Lincoln’s birth. Following Du Bois’s Niagara Movement, the NAACP’s goal was to secure for all people the rights guaranteed in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution, which promised an end to slavery, the equal protection of the law, and universal adult male suffrage, respectively.

Combining the white philanthropic support that characterized Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist organizations with the call for racial justice delivered by W. E. B. Du Bois’s militant Niagara Movement, the NAACP forged a middle road of interracial cooperation. Throughout its existence it has worked primarily through the American legal system to fulfill its goals of full suffrage and other civil rights, and an end to segregation and racial violence.

In 1910 African Americans were just over a generation out of enslavement, but the number of successful black enterprises, social and civic organizations, and educational institutions in cities such as Atlanta was already impressive. Among the most remarkable were strings of barbershops and insurance companies owned by former slaves. Black institutions of higher learning such as Atlanta and Clark Universities, Morris Brown, Morehouse, and Spelman Colleges-became incubators for black leadership.

When the 60′s began, two main groups, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had already been hard at work on a variety of desegregation efforts in public facilities, transportation, and schools. The decision by students of North Carolina A&T to desegregate the lunch counter at the local Greensboro Woolworth’s store precipitated a new form of student protest in the South which highlighted local official compliance in the violence of an outraged southern white population. Attacks on segregation continued to spread through the efforts of new groups such as the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

A landmark year-long black boycott of public transportation in Montgomery Alabama was victorious after Rosa Parks refused to move to the rear of the bus, but full equality under the law has yet to be universally recognized in the United States. Even after such landmark cases as Brown vs. the Board of Education produced a legal basis for ending school segregation, and school integration became the official law of the land, the process still was far from complete. The 50′s, 60′s, and 70′s did, however, see the struggle for black civil rights reemerge publicly as the most significant social issue the country ever faced. Now, in the early years of the 21st Century, while continuing progress toward common decency is increasingly visible, prejudices still fester.

In past years civil rights organizations showed and expressed an interested in addressing the concerns and needs of African Americans at all levels of the socio-economic ladder. They even held yearly conferences that were often free and affordable for those who needed assistance. The views and voices of the poor and dis-enfranchised could be heard from Selma to Birmingham, New York City to Philadelphia, Chicago to Detroit to Washington DC.

This type of advocacy and care has slowly decreased or ceased, with many mainstream civil rights organizations placing more emphasis on the middle class and upper middle class African Americans as well as money to fund their programs, dinners and fashion shows. This has occurred at the same time that more and more African Americans are homeless, living in poverty, unemployed, in prisons, and with HIV/Aids. It is obvious to me that when our churches, civil rights, political and grassroots organizations had less, our care, and advocacy was greater.

Brothers and Sisters, with willing hearts and social concernment, its time to set a civil and human rights agenda in 2010 to address poverty and its side effects. Those that speak with a hidden agenda or forked tongue will continue to cause hardship on disproportionate numbers of African American and poor people.

I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men and women, in prisons, on street corners, and homeless camps. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through education. I allow them to know that drugs, guns and violence will not solve their problems. It’s a new year and a new season.

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