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minority,” but “it is their attitude that is spreading and the more passive one that is on the wane as . . . ideas of what is due the individual citizen penetrate ever more
Response was slow at first but quickened with the 1944 Supreme Court decision outlawing the white primary. Before that decision, Wilson said, people were “indifferent, disinterested, but when we worked up this case of registering and voting them because the Supreme Court decision gave us to understand that we could vote, then they began to go register.”
In 1940, only three percent of Southern Blacks were registered, a figure that had not changed much since the turn of the century. By 1947, twelve percent were registered; by 1952, twenty percent.
a Negro from the polls on election day was to pay him a visit at home the evening before, a message he spread with increased vigor after the all-white primary was outlawed. Indeed, some observers thought many white Mississippians
before the Senate reached a final decision on his seating, but he had served a purpose, providing Blacks with a symbol so universally hated that Mississippi Blacks with some help from out of state were able to mobilize publicly against it. In the context of this mobilization, Black voter registration
“Negro leaders in the state point out that perhaps the most crucial factor in this remarkable increase was the stimulation and courage” provided by the Bilbo hearing. The surge in Black registration started immediately after the war and continued for several years. There were seventeen thousand on the rolls by 1952, of whom perhaps fifty-six hundred were voting. The number of registrants peaked around 1954 or 1955, somewhere between twenty and twenty-five thousand, the highest figure in the twentieth century.
Regional Council of Negro Leadership.
who saw RCNL as a parallel to the white Delta Council, an organization that allowed a variety of white economic interests to speak with one voice on matters of public policy.
The Council was composed of Black leaders from the full range of traditional organizations—ministers, heads of fraternal organizations, businesspeople, and NAACP officials.
One of their first organizing efforts was a campaign that tried to get Negroes to stop buying gasoline at places where they couldn’t use the restroom. They at least discussed using similar tactics within the Black community, by boycotting Uncle Toms. They also attempted to make segregation too expensive to maintain by insisting that the state live up to the “equal” part of the separate-but-equal doctrine.
This illustrates what many local leaders found frustrating about the national office. It was seen as being too committed to producing change through litigation to allow local leaders much initiative.
Moore saw that style as a contrast to the more personal, direct involvement of the SNCC workers who came later. Although he never joined SNCC in any official capacity, by the early sixties he was spending so much time with them and so little with the NAACP as to create strain between himself and some of his NAACP comrades.
Medgar Evers, built
Herman Perry, a land-owning farmer who was one of the earliest members, thinks that the other person who deserves credit for the rapid growth of the Cleveland branch was a local barber with a gift for selling the NAACP while clipping hair.
His main operational base was New Hope Baptist church, which received several threats because of Moore’s activity. After one NAACP meeting there in May 1955, the church was burned to the ground.
1954, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling making de jure school segregation illegal, a ruling that represented the fruition of twenty years of NAACP efforts. The initial reaction from some southern leaders was rather mild.
politicians, he felt, who needed to whip up hatred so that poor whites could be played against poor Blacks.
In Mississippi, one of the most important reactions to the decision was the formation, in October 1954, of the White Citizens’ Council (wcc), pursuing the agenda of the Klan with the demeanor of the Rotary. Comprising professionals, businessmen, and planters, the Councils officially eschewed violence and other extralegal tactics, instead launching a wave of economic reprisals against anyone, Black or white, seen as a threat to the status quo.
White resistance
What is different about the 1950s is not the presence of Blacks willing to resist but the fact that as the state became less isolated, politically and economically, as Black organizations like the NAACP and the RCNL became able to draw on a wider range of resources, it was possible for some of these leaders to survive long enough to begin making a difference.
The Till case is interesting in at least two respects. First, the national reaction illustrates again that Mississippi was becoming less isolated, and the fact that Mississippi bothered with even a sham trial again suggests that whites in Mississippi were worried about the implications of the change.
If people like Amzie Moore and Medgar Evers and Aaron Henry tested the limits of repression, people like Septima Clark and Ella Baker and Myles Horton tested another set of limits, the limits on the ability of the oppressed to participate in the reshaping of their own lives.
All three espoused a non-bureaucratic style of work, focused on local problems, sensitive to the social structure of local communities, appreciative of the culture of those communities. Above all else, perhaps, they stressed a developmental style of politics, one in which the important thing was the development of efficacy in those most affected by a problem.
Organizing means helping others develop their own potentials, and participatory social forms are a key part of that process.
Starting from scratch meant identifying a campaign chair, identifying workers and dividing them into competing teams, outlining a publicity plan, lining up speakers, doing advance canvassing of community groups, businesses, fraternal groups, churches, social clubs, unions, all while refereeing the personality conflicts that debilitated many branches.
Factionalization within branches required her to act as “Mother Confessor to the Little Folk”:
She argued that the overall structure of fieldwork in the Association made no sense. Three or four field workers were responsible for the whole country. They barely had time to organize membership campaigns, let alone help branches develop local programs. Getting the man or woman in the street need not be all that difficult if the organization made it a priority:
An important part of the organizer’s job was to get the matron in the fur coat to identify with the winehead and the prostitute, and vice versa.
Everyone has a contribution to make. The organizer has to be aware of class exploitation, sensitive to class snobbery, without losing sight of the potential contribution to be made by those who do succumb to it. Just as one has to be able to look at a sharecropper and see a potential teacher, one must be able to look at a conservative lawyer and see a potential crusader for justice.
Prophetically, she tried to get the organization to place more emphasis on women and young people, reflecting her sense of how southern Black organizations worked:
Under the best circumstances, traditional leadership creates a dependency relationship between the leaders and the led. Talk of leading people to freedom is almost a contradiction in terms. “Strong people,” she said in one interview, “don’t need strong leaders.”
Thus, leadership should be a form of teaching, where the leader’s first responsibility is to develop the leadership potential in others: “I have always thought what is needed is the development of people who are interested not in being leaders as much as in developing leadership in others.”
Another of her contributions was the style of interpersonal interaction she modeled for the young people.
The southern students, in contrast, came with what she saw as “a rather simple philosophical orientation, namely of the Christian, non-violent approach,”78 but they had been the ones actually involved, demonstrating their capacity for suffering and confrontation in ways that the northern students had not. They were the ones who suffered from the problem and it was important to her that they be allowed to determine the shape and substance of the response to it. The southern character of the movement had to be preserved.
In the same sense, SNCC may have the firmest claim to being called the borning organization, SNCC initiated the mass-based, disruptive political style we associate with the sixties, and it provided philosophical and organizational models and hands-on training for people who would become leaders in the student power movement, the anti-war movement, and the feminist movement.
In 1962 or 1963, even King was considered too radical by many of the powers-that-be. The development of a left wing in the movement, essentially SNCC and CORE, made centrist organizations like SCLC more acceptable. Given a choice between the relatively reasonable ministers of SCLC or the sometimes brash, frequently uncompromising young people of SNCC, business and political leaders were likely to choose SCLC.
BEING A LOCAL ACTIVIST in Greenwood in 1962 or 1963 called for substantial independence of spirit. It meant refusal to conform not just to the expectations of white supremacy but to the fears and pleadings of one’s own community as well. The
Put differently, the more intense movement of the 1960s was built on earlier work, not only in the sense that it was able to draw resources and inspiration from older organizations and activists but also in the sense that it was able to draw some of its most important members from families that had, if you will, been grooming its members for such roles.
MORE HAS BEEN WRITTEN about the role of oratory in the movement than about the role of organizing. Historian David Garrow contends that the real emergence of a sustained, widespread movement in the South can be traced in many respects to SNCC’s decision in the summer of 1961 to create a cadre of locally based, full-time, grass-roots organizers, marking the first time that indigenous activists had such day-to-day assistance available to them.
