The new George Lucas produced film RED TAILS reminds American audiences of the heroics of the African American pilots in the Tuskegee training program. In historian J. Todd Moye’s book FREEDOM FLYERS: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, Moye captures the challenges and triumphs of these brave pilots in their own words, drawing on more than 800 interviews recorded for the National Park Service’s Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project. In an excerpt from the book, here is one of their stories:

Horace Augustus Bohannon required no introduction to Jim Crow. The tenth of ten children born into very poor circumstances in Atlanta, Georgia, he knew all about racial segregation and unequal treatment long before he
came of age. “You knew that you didn’t go that way because that was white only, and you know that you’re supposed to be reserved—or preserved—over here. But that’s the way we came up. We had to learn to live with it,” Bohannon remembered. “Somewhere early in life, my mother got us to understand that if you live right, you could do well despite the segregation laws and so forth.” They could survive, if not thrive, even in the unjust system if they followed her simple piece of advice: “You do right.”

Bohannon’s family suffered terribly in the Great Depression, so he got the first of many jobs at the age of eight. His favorite childhood assignment was as a helper on a laundry truck, because the laundry service made pickups and deliveries at Candler Field, Atlanta’s airport: “Once you got there, there were these pilots standing around talking,” Bohannon recalled. “You didn’t get to touch the airplanes, but you were at least in the audience, listening to them talk, which I enjoyed.” The truck’s driver, “a full-fledged Georgia cracker, filled up with all the things that his father had taught him,” noted Bohannon’s interest, took pity on him, and tried to talk the boy out of what was quickly becoming his life’s dream. “Horace, I know you like that stuff, but I think you’re wasting your time,” Bohannon remembered the man telling him. “There is no chance in the world that you could ever work around them or be one of the pilots.”

“I did not argue with him, but I like to look back on it today, and I wish I could see that same man,” Bohannon said before he died in 2003. “He didn’t mean to be destructive; he just thought he was doing me a favor to say, ‘Don’t even dream about it.’ I never quit dreaming about it.” Bohannon worked his way through Booker T. Washington High School in Atlanta and went on to study at Lincoln University just outside of Philadelphia. When Lincoln began a program to train civilian pilots, Bohannon “wasn’t far back in the line of students that went down to sign up. It was so exciting,” he recalled, “because there was something new every day. I don’t care who you were; there was always something that you didn’t know, about flying, about the whole world.”

Bohannon dropped out of college after his junior year and returned home to earn money. A friend in Atlanta let him know about Tuskegee Army Air Field (TAAF), the military base under construction about a day’s drive away, in Tuskegee, Alabama. Tuskegee Institute had been training civilian pilots for a number of years and had just opened Moton Field, a primary flight training base it operated under contract for the Army Air Corps (AAC). Now the War Department was building TAAF from scratch on the outskirts of town.

The idea of building an air base intrigued Bohannon. He found a job at TAAF as a carpenter’s apprentice. Then almost as soon as he got to Tuskegee, he learned of a program in the works to train black instructor pilots for the incoming cadets. Bohannon used the skills he had learned in civilian pilot training to pass the entrance exam for that program, and he began the training course. When the program was unexpectedly interrupted, he found work driving the station wagon that ferried aviation cadets back and forth from their living quarters at Tuskegee Institute to Moton Field and later was hired as the timekeeper in the control tower, tabulating cadets’ flight times.

In March 1943, unable to save enough money to allow him to return to Lincoln, Bohannon quit his job at Moton Field and went back to Atlanta to drive a cab. By September he had saved enough money to resume his studies and was back in Pennsylvania. Once there, he found out that he had been drafted into the Army. He turned back around and reported to Fort Benning, Georgia, in October. He applied for transfer and was accepted into the flying corps, transferred to Keesler Field for basic training, and made his way back to Tuskegee as a flight cadet. Bohannon was surprised at how well he took to military life, but he did, mainly because “in the Army Air Corps you got to know just millions of people who had dreams and desires and so forth.” He cherished the camaraderie he developed with the cadets he met there, young men like Charles Johnson Jr., whose renowned father was the president of Fisk University in Nashville; Mitch Higginbotham, whose first cousin A. Leon Higginbotham would become a distinguished attorney and federal judge; and “Pokey” Spaulding, whose family managed the North Carolina Mutual Insurance Co. in Durham, North Carolina, one of the most prosperous black businesses in the country. At the outset of the program, the AAC only accepted cadets who had completed at least two years of college, so the Tuskegee training program drew from the black elite. Pilot Roscoe C. Brown Jr. may have been correct when he said, “The Tuskegee Airmen were probably the most talented group of African-American men ever brought together in one place.”

Sixty years later Bohannon could still recite the “dodo” verses he was forced to memorize as a cadet. If an upperclassman asked, “What time is it?” he had to stand at attention and say, “ ‘Sir, the inner workings and hidden mechanisms of my poor chronometer are in such a sad state of discord with the great sidereal movement by which all time is commonly reckoned that I cannot with any degree of accuracy give you the correct time. However, without fear of being too wrong or too far off, I will say that it is fifty-eight minutes, twenty-two seconds, two ticks of a tock past the hour of four, sir!’ Oh, we had a good time,” he recalled.

Bohannon remembered December 20, 1944, the day he graduated from the cadet program, as one of the proudest of his life, because he got to show his family around TAAF. “Papa came, and of course on guard at the gate were a black sergeant, a black corporal, a black private. The whole military is black,” Bohannon said. “As he drives up through there, they find some other men doing their work—all over the place, except for the very top cadre of officers, we’re all black. And that place was clean, orderly. I wish you could have seen it.” His family was impressed.

J. Todd Moye is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Oral History Program at the University of North Texas and author of Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II. A historian of the American civil rights movement, he directed the National Park Service’s Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project from 2000 to 2005. He consulted on Double Victory, the Lucasfilm documentary about the Tuskegee Airmen.

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January 1, 1808

US Law abolishing transatlantic slave trade takes effect

On January 1, 1808, the importation of slaves into the United States was formally, and finally, abolished.

The story behind this ban begins at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when slavery lurked beneath several debates and figured in several compromises fashioned to win the support of Southern delegates for the Constitution. One such compromise was a constitutional clause preventing Congress from banning the importation of slaves from Africa for twenty years.

As the years passed, several states outlawed the slave trade in their territory. By 1806, in fact, only South Carolina still imported slaves. Congress, meanwhile, took some steps against the trade, such as making it illegal for any American citizen to trade slaves in foreign ports.

In 1806, President Thomas Jefferson invited Congress to take the final step. In a message to both houses, he expressed his hope that Congress would end the slave trade and “withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights which have so long been continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa.” Congress passed the act in March of 1807, and Jefferson quickly signed it into law. (Great Britain’s similar law, the Slave Trade Act, was passed by Parliament later the same month.) The law set its effective date as January 1, 1808—the earliest date possible under the Constitution.

The act, though significant, had limits. An illegal slave trade did continue, though in smaller numbers than had been true of the legal trade. The law also did nothing to stop the sale of those already held in slavery. For the next several decades, as many a million enslaved African Americans were sold within the United States. Not until after the American Civil War would slavery—and this internal slave trade—be finally abolished.

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December 23, 1867

Madam C. J. Walker born

Madam C. J. Walker tells her own story: “I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there I was promoted to the washtub. From there I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparation… I have built my own factory on my own ground.”

Madam C. J. Walker was born on a Louisiana plantation in 1867 as Sarah Breedlove. Her parents, former slaves, died when she was seven. After several years of farm labor, she married; when her husband died, she moved to St. Louis, to join four brothers who worked as barbers. After marrying Charles Joseph Walker—and taking the name Madam C. J. Walker—she developed and began marketing a hair product that gave African American women’s hair shine and luster. Marketing her product by traveling across the South to sell it door-to-door, she saw success. She built a factory in Indianapolis to manufacture her products and hired hundreds of black women as “Walker agents” to sell her wares across the country. Later she expanded the sales effort to other countries.

Walker was not just a successful businesswoman but also active with philanthropies and political causes. She joined the anti-lynching campaign that was active in the early 1900s and took part in a delegation of African American leaders who went to the White House in 1917 asking for an federal law banning lynching. Her daughter, who carried on the business after her death in 1919, also continued her mother’s interest in cultural affairs: her home became a gathering place for African American writers during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

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December 1, 1955

Rosa Parks refuses to change her seat

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to move—and became the mother of the civil rights movement.

In 1955, strict segregation laws separated African Americans and whites in public settings across the South, including Parks’s home town, Montgomery, Alabama. That December evening, returning home from work, Parks sat with three other African Americans in a row just behind the fourteen whites in the front of the bus. Because the bus was full, a white man had to stand when he entered the bus. Under the South’s Jim Crow laws, whites sat and African Americans stood. The bus driver told Parks and the other three blacks to move to the back of the bus—the black section. The other three did, but Parks refused. The driver insisted, and she refused again.  Faced with continued refusal, he used his powers under a city ordinance to arrest her. The driver summoned the police, and Parks spent the night in jail.

The arrest galvanized Montgomery’s African Americans. The local chapter of the NAACP had long resented the segregated buses and the drivers’ treatment of blacks; now they had a chance to act. The next day, a women’s council called for a boycott of the city bus system. African Americans by the thousands complied.  By December 5, a new group—the Montgomery Improvement Association—was formed to coordinate the boycott. Inspired by young clergyman Martin Luther King, Jr., Montgomery’s African Americans kept up their boycott for more than a year, until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregation on buses unconstitutional. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was one of the early triumphs of the civil rights movement. Parks later admitted her surprise: “I had no idea when I refused to give up my seat on that Montgomery bus that my small action would help put an end to the segregation laws in the South.”

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(Nixon/Express - Getty Images, 1950)

Today, Harlem Globetrotter star Reece “Goose” Tatum will be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. But Tatum also deserves consideration for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Baseball was Tatum’s first sport and first love.

Tatum was a gifted pantomime artist and comedian. Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe claimed to have discovered Tatum in Arkansas and brought him to the attention of Abe Saperstein. Saperstein was impressed with Tatum and sent him to play outfield and then first base for the Birmingham Black Barons in 1941. For most of the 1942 season, Tatum played for the Minneapolis-St. Paul Gophers, a Negro Major League team that also toured with the Indianapolis Clowns and was booked by Saperstein. It was clear to Saperstein and Clown’s owner Syd Pollock that Tatum’s clowning skills were right for the Clowns, and he joined the team in early September. Tatum had been called “the King of showmen” since his days with the Barons. His talents made him a perfect fit not only for the Clowns but, Saperstein realized, also for comedy basketball, and Tatum joined the Harlem Globetrotters. Tatum blossomed in both sports. Except for his time in the Army during World War II, Tatum was the Clowns’ first baseman from 1942 to 1949 while he played for the Trotters in the winter. He was probably the finest comedian to play baseball, as well as a good fielder and hitter. His long frame and arms allowed him to move with great grace at first base as well as on the basketball court. White sportswriter Dick Freeman called Tatum “the best showman I have ever seen on the diamond, and that included Nick Altrock, Al Schacht, Dizzy Dean, Babe Ruth, and the rest.” Clown Prince of baseball Max Patkin agreed: “I have to say that Goose Tatum is the funniest man I’ve ever seen. He had those long arms, and a unique gait and a voice that made people laugh.”

Although Tatum did individual routines at first base, he also teamed up with other Clowns comedians Richard “King Tut” and “Peanuts” Davis. Rare footage from 1946 of the Clowns playing against the Monarchs features Tatum playing first base, catching balls while reading the newspaper, using his long arms and incredible footwork to make catches that would be out of anyone else’s reach. He did a Stepin Fetchit–like slow walk, but also performed lighting-fast play. His pepper game is reminiscent of the way he handled the basketball as a Globetrotter. The footage also captured Tatum’s “down-on-knees prayer” pantomime and a shadow ball sequence with Peanuts Davis and King Tut, who is dressed in tailcoat and crooked baseball cap. The clip closes with the routine using Tatum’s foot as smelling salt to revive Tut. All of these routines were standard in baseball comedy, but the Clowns perfected them and made them their trademark.

Goose Tatum became a great draw, and Pollock traded the Clowns’ regular first baseman so that Tatum could play all the time. That did not please everyone. Manager Bunny Downs fought with Pollock about the move. But Tatum’s value at drawing fans outweighed considerations about winning games. Pollock also felt obliged to please Abe Saperstein, who wanted as much exposure for his future Globetrotter star as possible.

Both Tatum and Ed Davis were in the Army in 1944. After the war Tatum resumed his clowning. He drew attention when he was selected to play first base at the East-West All-Star game in 1947. Sports reporter Ric Roberts was surprised that Tatum could both clown and play strong baseball. He described Tatum’s show-stealing role at the East-West game:

He dug scatter-gut heaves out of the dirt with scoops, backhands and traps; his sensitive bag-thumping foot played tick-tag, hot foot or gave out with the Pavlova… a one-man riot of color, clowning, and cold efficiency, and what was more he’s a solid hitter from either side of the plate.

As major league baseball began to integrate after World War II, rumors circulated that teams were interested in Tatum for his playing ability, not his clowning. Ric Roberts thought that Tatum might have to limit his antics if he made it into the majors, but saw no reason why he couldn’t follow in the tradition of Rube Waddell and Dizzy Dean, major league pitchers who were known for their odd behavior. But this proved to be unrealistic. The black players who were selected were not the comedians but those like Jackie Robinson who were familiar with white culture and mores and who would be more able to blend in. Tatum, like most other Negro League veterans, would also not get serious consideration for the major leagues because of his age. The few teams who showed interest in integrating wanted young talent that they could train in the minor leagues.

After the 1948 season, Abe Saperstein’s relationship with Syd Pollock began to deteriorate. The tension would have a major impact on Tatum and the Clowns. In 1948, Tatum began to miss games. Pollock learned that he was playing in Chicago on local teams “closely associated with Abe Saperstein” instead of traveling with the Clowns, to whom he was under contract. Tatum drew crowds, and Pollock grew angry at Saperstein for keeping him away.

Pollock’s only recourse was to ask the league to suspend Tatum for leaving the team. Tatum returned to the Clowns at the end of the season, signed a contract for the following year, and even organized his own all-star team to tour against the Clowns during the winter. Pollock, in his usual fashion, issued a press release to announce Tatum’s return. In it, he included speculation that the Boston Braves were interested in signing Tatum. The release also included a warning, really addressed to Tatum and not the general public, that the Braves would be watching not only his abilities as a showman and a fielder, but also his “general behavior.”

In response, Saperstein told the Chicago Defender that he was encouraging his friend Bill Veeck to sign Goose Tatum to play for the Cleveland Indians. In fact, Saperstein was encouraging Tatum to play year-round for the basketball Globetrotters, which he began to do in 1950. In 1952, many of the major black newspapers carried an interview with Tatum as part of the Globetrotters’ publicity campaign. In it, Tatum suggests that he got an offer from Veeck in 1945 (possibly to play for the American Association team he owned, since Veeck had not yet purchased the Indians). Tatum wanted to be clear that his choice was between a major league career and playing year-round for the Globetrotters, although it is not likely that his baseball talents would have been sufficient for the major leagues. Tatum credited hours of conversations with Veeck and Saperstein for the decision. Tatum’s interview with Wendell Smith the following year recast the story:

the highest paid basketball player in the world…said, wistfully: ‘Yes, I like basketball. That’s how I make my living. But, you know, if I had it to do all over again, I’d try to be a big league baseball player. Baseball is my first love.’ 

According to this version of the story, Tatum was convinced by Saperstein to make the choice that would provide him with a better salary, and that was true. Tatum credited Saperstein with taking good care of him. “‘I can’t complain. Mr. Saperstein has been very good to me. He picked me up when I hardly knew what a basketball was and taught me all I know about the game.’” But Saperstein was also looking out for his own interests, as Tatum was a brilliant basketball comedian and would go on to be the Globetrotters’ star player and greatest attraction. The relationship between Saperstein and Tatum would end bitterly in 1955, although Tatum never publicly criticized Saperstein. Pollock and Saperstein were running an entertainment business that depended on the labor of talented African Americans, and they did not always treat them with the respect they deserved. Tatum was the finest sports comedian ever to play, and neither the Trotters nor the Clowns would ever regain their brilliance after he left.

Rebecca Alpert is Associate Professor of Religion and Women’s Studies at Temple University and the author of Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball.

This month marked the 60th anniversary of The Catcher in the Rye, so what better way to wrap up July than by examining Holden Caulfield’s affect on the American adolescent rebel? The following is an excerpt from Grace Elizabeth Hale’s new book, A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America.

After 1951, if a person wanted to be a rebel she could just read the book. Later there would be other things to read—Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. But J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye was the first best seller to imagine a striking shift in the meaning of alienation in the postwar period, a sense that something besides Europe still needed saving. The success of this book and the many other novels, autobiographies, and films that followed its pattern made the concept of adolescent alienation commonplace, but in the postwar era the very idea shocked many Americans. Adults who had lived through depression and war believed that children growing up in peace and prosperity—Life named them “the luckiest generation”—should be happy. Salinger’s antihero Holden Caulfield was a particularly unlikely rebel. He lived unconstrained by poverty, racism, or anti- Semitism, and he did not face the narrow options available for ambitious girls. Instead, Holden’s alienation was personal, psychological, and spiritual. Salinger’s novel helped create a model for the rebel of the future by popularizing the problem of middle-class adolescent alienation….

Holden Caulfield becomes a rebel that both intellectuals and young middle-class Americans can bond with and even love. These readers feel connected to Holden and sometimes in turn to other Catcher fans in a kind of pop cultural community of outsiders. The act of telling, Holden’s expression of his own alienation, helps create both a new model of the white well-off adolescent as outsider and a new kind of belonging. In this way, Catcher satisfies contradictory feelings, the urge to be self-determining through resisting social rules and conventions and the urge to be a part of a community. And despite Caulfield’s gender, this reconciliation of contradictory desires through identifying with outsiders and rebels seems to work for some female as well as male readers. A first-person narrative about a person who is neither an adult nor a child, the novel displaces the incompatibility of these desires into the borderlands of adolescence.

Like Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884, Catcher is a radical portrayal of disillusionment with America disguised by its author as a tale of childhood adventure. Critics and scholars have remarked on the connections between the two coming-of-age novels with their white boy protagonists since soon after Catcher was published. Huck’s running away with the slave Jim is the equivalent of Holden’s screaming, “Sleep tight, ya morons! ” as he leaves Pencey Prep. Their upthrust fingers in the faces of their worlds, their attacks on what their societies most value—slave property and a secure, upper-middle-class future—in both cases, rebellion preserves the boys’ innocence and dramatizes their refusal to conform, to accept the compromises adults make with their respective societies. Each novel became a part of the popular culture of its era even as it off ered a serious comment on the limits of that culture.

In Holden, critics and reviewers found a character acutely sensitive to the conformity and spiritual numbness that modern life generates in the world imagined in the novel. One fictional character’s experience of alienation, of course, mattered little historically. Catcher became a powerful model of adolescent alienation across the postwar era because of the intersection of broad historical trends with Salinger’s skill as a writer and changes in the publishing industry. In the 1950s, the paperback revolution transformed book publishing and made novels almost as cheap as magazines. At the same time, the postwar economic boom gave white middle- class teenagers more money to spend and more leisure time in which to enjoy their purchases. Paradoxically, the novel also got a boost from journalists’ and intellectuals’ anxiety about “mass culture”; Catcher sold 1,500,000 copies in paperback in its first decade. Catcher in the Rye offered a model for rebellion against mass culture even as it was also a very profitable part of mass culture.

Though the novel predates the invention of two new popular culture genres aimed at the same white middle-class youth market, Catcher, rock and roll music, and teenpics (films made for teenagers) all shared an oppositional stance toward conventions and norms imagined as central to American life. In fact, the very idea of white middle-class adolescent alienation became increasingly powerful because older observers like journalists and white middle-class adolescent fans themselves connected their rebellion to the oppositional positions of other groups: the “plague” of juvenile delinquency among workingclass urban youth, the self-conscious rebellions of bohemians and artists, and, even more importantly, African Americans’ historic position as outsiders in America.

It also helped that the adolescents in those homes lay on their twin beds flipping the radio dial and the pages of magazines looking for something different. No one used mass culture to resist mass culture better than middle-class white teenagers. For the first time, in the postwar period, a critical mass of adolescents had the money and the leisure time to cultivate their own cultural tastes. Their parents saw this prosperity and could not understand how these kids could have any problems. Businesses like radio stations, record companies, and Hollywood saw this prosperity and thought about how to reach these new consumers. Radio and the movies, in particular, needed new markets, as television became the family entertainment of choice in the growing suburbs. As Esquire argued in 1965 in an article entitled “In the Time It Takes You to Read These Lines the American Teenager Will Have Spent $2,378.22,” “this vague no-man’s-land of adolescence” had become “a subculture rather than a transition.”

What many of these teenagers wanted was separation, something, anything to distinguish and distance them from their parents and other adults. With help from the music, movie, and radio industries, they created a new teen culture grounded in a mood of opposition to their parents and their plenty. In contrast to a more respectable emotional repression, white teenagers increasingly valued the expression of passion and desire. In place of their parents’ controlled and polished forms of entertainment, they sought the raw and frenetic. And in defiance of the white norms of middle-class America, they embraced popular black music and fantasies of African American life. For teenagers and college students, mass culture was not just a problem, as many intellectuals argued in the mid-twentieth century. It was a solution. It was not just the space of a conformity that killed American individualism. It was a space of resistance. It was not just the household of the organization man. It was the home of the rebel. Most importantly, it gave white teenagers a window, however smudged, on black cultural expression.

In the 1950s and 1960s, mass culture gave some young white Americans a glimpse of redemption. Rebels and outsiders were out there. Other possibilities existed. A novel or rock and roll song or a fi lm could be a vehicle for expressing feelings of alienation, for thinking about a different kind of life. The fact that many outsider characters were male did not stop young white women from seeking alternatives too, although rebellion was always more dangerous for them. Holden Caulfield may not have had the answers, but he suggested how some white middle-class white kids could start asking the questions.

Grace Elizabeth Hale is Associate Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Virginia.

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Welch, Eileen Watts

(March 28, 1946–),
activist, educator, and business and administrative leader, was born Constance Eileen Watts in Durham, North Carolina, to Constance Merrick and Dr. Charles DeWitt Watts. Dr. Watts was North Carolina’s first black surgeon, and it was his outspoken advocacy that would serve as a catalyst for the merger in 1976 of the all-black Lincoln Hospital and the all-white Watts Hospital into a single, multiracial entity, the Durham Regional Hospital. In addition to being the granddaughter of Dr. Aaron M. Moore, one of the founders of Durham Mutual Insurance Company and Durham’s first black doctor, and John Merrick, a prominent black entrepreneur, Constance Merrick Watts was a public force in her own right, lecturing, speaking, and serving a notable term as the head of Moore’s popular Durham Colored Library. “As an adult,” said Welch in a 2004 speech, “I am much better able to understand and appreciate the accomplishments of my ancestors, of which there are many” (Welch 7). These accomplishments in business, health care, and education, would ultimately be echoed by achievements in her own life in those fields.

In 1964, Eileen Watts graduated from Hillside High School, which was, at the time, still an all-black institution. Four years later, while her father was fighting to make integration and the promise of the 1964 Civil Rights Act a reality in health care, Watts graduated from the historically black Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. She left Spelman, however, with the intention of pursuing a career as an elementary school teacher, rather than choose a careeer in the medical professions like her father. Twenty-two years old, she returned to Durham briefly during the summer of 1968 to marry James “Jim” Welch; they were joined on July 13, 1968 at St. Joseph’s African Methodist Episcopal Church in Durham (New York Times, 69). It was the beginning of a long, happy marriage; in later years, Mrs. Welch affectionately related how her family “adopted” Jim (Welch 1). Shortly after the wedding, the young couple returned to their new home in Atlanta, where Welch began work. Her stint teaching the third grade was cut short, however, by Jim getting drafted into the army to serve in the Vietnam War, which forced the pair to uproot and move to Arlington, Virginia. The couple had two sons, born in 1970 and 1972, and Eileen Welch put her career on hold for a time to raise them.

However, it wasn’t long before Welch refocused on a professional career. A few years after her second son was born, she decided to start her own small business in Virginia’s Fairfax County, a move that kept her schedule flexible and put her communication skills to work. Book Art, Ltd, a for-profit bookstore, quickly grew into a chain, and it was not long before Welch began to reap a tidy profit. From this point on, she permanently altered the trajectory of her work, now focusing on her entrepreneurial talents. She began a second venture a few years later known as Publishers Network, Ltd, which worked closely with individuals and government agencies in its sale of “special-order publications.” Local officials and businessmen took note of her deft aptitude; in 1983, it was her turn to be drafted, in this case as the manager for the Reston (Virginia) Employment Service. She served seven years in this position before being recruited by the INOVA Health System, based in Falls Church. In nearly no time at all, Welch came from being a stranger in town to being a leading and popular administrator. Her employers at INOVA encouraged Welch to work on her M.B.A. in her spare time. In 1995, she received her degree from George Mason University.

Just as Welch’s plans had changed over the course of nearly two decades, so had her hometown. In 1996, she came back with her husband when Duke University offered her a position as a Director of Development for its small, ambitious nursing program. Over the next several years, she flitted through a variety of positions, from Director of Development to Associate Dean for External Affairs to, finally, Assistant Dean for Development, remaining in the same role: fundraiser. Like her great-grandfather Aaron Moore, she was not at all shy about forging partnerships and making connections, growing to be a close friend of Mary T. Champagne, the dean who “resurrected the school of nursing.” (Yee). Together, they worked tirelessly to raise funds for a new building to consolidate the nursing students and provide more training and communication with the nearby Duke University Medical Center. Proposed in 2002, the completion of the building seemed unlikely just over a year later, but like her father, Welch prevailed through iron-clad perseverance. Like her mother, Welch also cleverly utilized community connections, inheriting her mother’s position as head of the Standford L. Warren Public Library (formerly the Durham Colored Library) and involving herself as a member of organizations like the Triangle Community Foundation and the Rotary Club. Mary Champagne retired in early 2004, and the building was dedicated in 2005.

Shortly before the building dedication, in the summer of 2004, Dr. Charles Watts, Welch’s father, passed away. In the wake of his death, Welch increasingly drew inspiration from her memories of him, a fact that echoed in her speeches and activities; since her return to Durham eight years earlier, she had become closer than ever to the man she affectionately dubbed “an old-timey doc” (Cheng E12). In 2005, shortly after the dedication of the new nursing building, Watts joined the North Carolina chapter of the Center for Child and Family Health as an Executive Director of Advancement (NAAHHS). Using her connections at Duke, Welch helped to forge valuable partnerships between Duke, NCCU, and UNC, including the sharing of North Carolina Mutual company archives (Jackson). Increasingly, she turned to the press to advocate for awareness and funds for young victims of mental illness and trauma. She has also worked as an Officer in Duke’s Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Welch’s evolution from teacher to entrepreneur to administrator paralleled, in many ways, the strides and successes of more and more African American women at the turn of the 21st century. Her personal journey, like others, was inspired by the battles fought and won by her ancestors in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her achievements are significant on a national as well as a personal level. “We all have talents,” mused Welch in a 2009 interview, “and we have to use them for the best” (The History Makers).

Alec Lowman
Charles E. Jordan High School
Durham, North Carolina

Brown, Kate

(1840 – Mar. 1883),

retiring room attendant, activist, most renowned for winning the 1873 Supreme Court Case Railroad Company v. Brown, was born Katherine Brown in Virginia. There are many variations of her name; in some documents, she is referred to as “Catherine Brown,” “Katherine Brown,” “Kate Brown,” or “Kate Dodson.” In the New York Times article “Washington, Affairs at the National Capital,” her name appears as “Kate Dostie.” Very few records of Brown’s life survive today; as a result, much of her childhood and personal life remains unknown.

Kate Brown’s recorded personal life begins with her marriage to Jacob Dodson. Jacob Dodson had colorful past. Born in 1825, Dodson was a freeman. He spent most of his early life as a servant for Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, but in 1843, Dodson began to accompany John C. Fremont, son-in-law of Senator Benton and a military officer, on expeditions to the west. In the late 1850s, Dodson was given a job at the Senate and settled down in Washington D.C. Not long after, Dodson met Brown and the two were married. Jacob Dodson brought two children into the family from a previous marriage, but Kate Brown never had children. Although Jacob was quite responsible in the early years of the marriage, the relationship quickly deteriorated. By 1866, Jacob became an alcoholic, had frequent affairs with other women and even went as far as threatening to shoot Kate. In the summer of 1867, Kate filed for divorce and changed her name from Kate Brown Dodson to her maiden name, Kate Brown.

Brown was hired as a Senate laundress in 1861. In regard to her work, Kate Brown was extremely diligent. In Betty Koed’s narrative on the Kate Brown incident, A Dastardly Outrage, several Senators were reported to have expressed their positive impressions of this “educated, intelligent, respectable, and to all appearance refined woman” (Koed, 2008). Perhaps due to such approving praise, the then 21-year-old Kate Brown was quickly promoted to supervise the ladies retiring room less than one year after her hiring. In this new position, Brown attended to white ladies as they took a break during their Senate visits. This contact with white women was especially unusual as most colored employees worked out of public view.

On Saturday, 8 February 1868, Kate Brown was waiting for the train from Alexandria, Virginia en route to Washington D.C. She had just visited a sick relative and was returning to her home for the evening. When the train pulled into the station, it was nearly 3:00 pm. About to step onto the train, Brown turned to see who was shouting at her and there, on the platform, stood a police officer. He motioned for her to step down and use the other car, but as Brown recalled during her testimony in a congressional Report of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia, June 17, 1868 (p. 12) she replied “this car will do.” The officer quickly approached her, explaining that this car was a ladies only car; moreover, it was a car reserved only for white women. Refusing to succumb to this blatant show of discrimination, Brown defied the order and boarded. Just as steadfastly as she stepped aboard, the officer attempted to physically force her off the car. The two continued their fracas which lasted nearly eleven minutes. Not until the intervention of B.H. Hinds, the secretary to Senator Morrill, did the scuffle end; but by then, Brown had already suffered severe injuries, including a bruised face and twisted limbs. Months later, Brown was still confined to the bed, suffering a lung hemorrhage and coughing up blood.

The weekend incident garnered much attention from the national media. The Hartford Daily Courant called it an “outrage,” while many others expressed disbelief for such mistreatment. Alarmed by the offense towards a Senate colleague, Senators Charles Sumner and Justin Morrill called for an investigation into the event. Empowered by such support, Brown sued the railroad company for $20,000. The case was heard by a District of Columbia court which awarded Kate Brown $1,500 in compensation. The Washington, Georgetown, and Alexandria Railroad Company appealed. In 1873, the case was brought before the Supreme Court. In its defense, the company argued that it had provided separate but equal facilities; however, a close scrutiny of the company’s charter revealed that segregation was expressly prohibited in any form on the train in question. In the Court Majority opinion, Justice Davis declared that the condition “no person shall be excluded from the cars on account of color” would be interpreted as all races must be able to use the same car at the same time. Ultimately, the Supreme Court upheld the previous court’s ruling, closing the Railroad Company v. Brown case.

This case was among the first clashes on the segregation issue, an issue that would have a great impact in the coming century. Just 23 years after Railroad Company v. Brown, the landmark 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case officially instated the Supreme Court’s support for segregation. However, the verdict did not pass without opposition. Justice John Harlan, later known as the “Great Dissenter,” provided the single vote against the decision. In his Plessy v. Ferguson dissent he called arbitrary segregation a “badge of servitude” and warned that such state enactments supporting segregation would no doubt “arouse race hate…and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between these races.” Harlan’s prognosis proved correct; the deteriorating race relations inspired a call for reform, catalyzing the African American Civil Rights Movement of the mid-twentieth century. The institution of segregation, brought to the national scene by Kate Brown’s Railroad Company v. Brown, would change with time and soon become the cynosure of domestic politics.

While the incident left Kate Brown permanently debilitated, she was able to develop a close relationship with Senators Sumner and Morrill. Throughout her recovery period, both Senators worked tirelessly to ensure she was properly compensated. Brown returned to her post just months later and continued to work in the Senate until 1881. Two years later, Brown passed away at age 43.

Brian Tong and Theodore Lin
McLean High School
McLean, Virginia

Gilder Lehrman Research Project

In an effort to broaden its outreach to American high schools, the Oxford African American Studies Center, in conjunction with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, initiated a research project competition exclusively for high school students in the Fall of 2010. Participating students researched and wrote biographies on prominent African Americans, with the top articles being selected for publication in the online African American National Biography. Working with their teachers, the students were expected to follow the same guidelines used by professional writers for the site, utilizing primary sources and scholarly publications to highlight the contributions of important African Americans in their respective communities. The winners and honorable mentions are listed below (those not selected for publication received feedback on their papers from our team of scholars). All five will be published on AASC in the coming year.

Special thanks to those schools that participated, and congratulations to the winners. It is our hope that more schools will initiate similar research projects. For more information, we invite you to write to the editors.

Winners

“Brown, Kate.” By Brian Tong and Theodore Lin of McLean High School, McLean, VA.

Kate Brown (1840-1883), a retiring room attendant, became a victim of discrimination when she was forcibly removed from a whites-only train car. Later, with the support of sympathizers in the US Senate, Brown sued for damages, and won her claim before the Supreme Court in Railroad Company v. Brown (1873). See the full text here.

“Welch, Eileen Watts.” By Alec Lowman of Jordan High School, Durham, NC.

The daughter of the first surgeon in the state of North Carolina, Eileen Watts Welch (b. 1946) has used her influence as a respected entrepreneur to raise funds in support of education for medical professionals in the region. See the full text here.

Honorable Mentions

“Glover, Nathaniel.” By Kelsey Schurer and Marina Reasoner of Douglas Anderson High School, Jacksonville, FL.

Coming of age during the difficult days of the Civil Rights Era, Nathaniel Glover (b. 1943) of Jacksonville became the first elected black sheriff in the state of Florida since Reconstruction, and later became the President of Edward Waters College.

“Odrick, Alfred.” Leandi Venter, Hannah Heile and Micaela Ginnerty. McLean High School, McLean, VA.

Alfred Odrick (1812–1894), a former slave, helped establish the first African American school in Virginia, which allowed for the formation of a thriving African American community bearing his name.

“Pearson, William Gaston.” By Connor Killian of Jordan High School, Durham, NC.

A former slave, William Gaston Pearson (1858–1947) helped to found the Royal Knights of King David, a progressive reform group that focused on helping southern African Americans advance socially and economically.

Raymond Arsenault was just 19 years old when he started researching the 1961 Freedom Rides. He became so interested in the topic, he dedicated 10 years of his life to telling the stories of the Riders—brave men and women who fought for equality. Arsenault’s book, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, is tied to the much-anticipated PBS/American Experience documentary “Freedom Riders,” which premiers on May 16th.

In honor of the Freedom Rides 50th anniversary, American Experience has invited 40 college students to join original Freedom Riders in retracing the 1961 Rides from Washington, DC to New Orleans, LA. (Itinerary, Rider bios, videos and more are available here.) Arsenault is along for the ride, and has agreed to provide regular dispatches from the bus. You can also follow on Twitter, #PBSbus.

Day 6–May 13: Nashville, TN, to Birmingham, AL

Day 6 started with a torrential downpour–the first bad weather of the trip–that prevented us from walking around the Fisk campus and touring Jubilee Hall and the chapel. So we headed south for Birmingham, passing through Giles County, the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, and by Decatur, AL, the site of the 1932 Scottsboro trial. We arrived in Birmingham in time for lunch at the Alabama Power Company building, a corporate fortress symbolic of the “new” Birmingham. We spent the afternoon at the magnificent Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, where we were met by Freedom Riders Jim Zwerg and Catherine Burks Brooks, and by Odessa Woolfolk, the guiding force behind the Institute in its early years. Catherine treated the students to a rollicking memoir of her life in Birmingham, and Odessa followed with a moving account of her years as a teacher in Birmingham and a discussion of the role of women in the civil rights movement. Odessa is always wonderful, but she was particularly warm and humane today. We then went across the street for a tour of the 16th Street Baptist Church, the site of the September 1963 bombing that killed the “four little girls.”

The rest of the afternoon was dedicated to a tour of the Institute; there is never enough time to do justice to the Institute’s civil rights timeline, but this visit was much too brief, I am afraid. Seeing the Freedom Rider section with the Riders, especially Jim Zwerg and Charles Person who had searing experiences in Birmingham in 1961, was highly emotional for me, for them, and for the students. As soon as the Institute closed, we retired to the community room for a memorable barbecue feast catered by Dreamland Barbecue, the best in the business. We then went back across the street to 16th Street for a freedom song concert in the sanctuary. The voices of the Unity Memorial Choir, first formed in 1959 to help boost the morale of the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth’s local movement, were beautiful, as always. The students were so enthusiastic, clapping rythmically and sometimes singing along, and the movement stories interspersed among the stanzas filled the church with emotion and more than a few tears. The hour-long concert ended with everyone present linking arms and singing “We Shall Overcome.” This was perhaps the most intense experience of the trip for some. Afterwards we spent a few minutes in nearby Kelly Ingram Park, site of the 1963 confrontation between Bull Connor’s attack dogs and the young marchers of the “children’s crusade.” The park now boasts “freedom sculptures” dedicated to the marchers’ courage. Back at the historic Tutwiler Hotel, the students held a 2-hour-long “teach-in,” during which they made presentations on contemporary social justice issues. This was their idea, organized by them. A fitting end to a long and emotional day on the freedom trail.

Day 7–May 14: Birmingham, AL, to Montgomery, AL

On the fiftieth anniversary of the May 14, 1961, Mother’s Day assaults on the Freedom Riders in Anniston and Birmingham, we began our day on the bus from Birmingham to Montgomery, replicating the ride of the Nashville Riders on May 20. The Nashville Riders did not stop on their journey from Birmingham to Montgomery, but we did. Thirty-five miles north of Montgomery, the back of the bus began to fill with smoke, thanks to an overstressed air conditioner hose. We had to abandon the bus temporarily, to allow the smoke to clear, as one of the logistics staff members patched up the hose with duct tape. We will stop at nothing to give the students an authentic experience reminiscent of the burning bus of 1961. Eeerily, our roadside experience occurred almost exactly 50 years to the minute after the bus was firebombed in Anniston. But the students took all of this in stride, breaking into song once we got back on the bus. As one student put it, in the words of a freedom song,”Ain’t gonna let nobody turn us ’round.”

Once we arrived in Montgomery, we toured the Civil Rights Memorial designed by Maya Lin and we all put our hands in the ceremonial water that rolls over the inscribed names of movement martyrs. Then we entered the Southern Poverty Law Center to visit the exhibits and put our names on the Wall of Tolerance–and to listen to Mark Potok’s lecture on the Center’s efforts to monitor and combat contemporary hate groups. Following an outdoor lunch at the Civil Rights Memorial, I led the students on a walk down Dexter Avenue, retracing in reverse the last stage of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march. We passed by the old slave market site at Court Square on our way to the Rosa Parks Museum, which I helped to design in the 1990s. In the museum, the students visited the holographic bus exhibit that re-creates Rosa Parks’s 1955 arrest. We then walked past the historic Frank Johnson Courthouse, site of several of the most historic civil rights trials of the 1950s and 1960s, on our way to the old Greyhound station, site of the May 20, 1961 Freedom Rider riot. The station now houses a Freedom Rides art exhibit that will open offically next Thursday. The students got a sneak preview of the exhibit before listening to Jim Zwerg’s lecture on nonviolence. Jim was nearly beaten to death during the 1961 riot at the station, so his words had special authority. Hearing him speak in this context–with all the students gathered around, some sitting on the floor–was quite an experience.

Our next stop was the First Baptist Church–Ralph Abernathy’s church and the site of the May 21, 1961, siege, during which a white supremacist mob threatened to burn the church (with the Freedom Riders and more than a thousand supporters inside) to the ground. In 1961 the church’s basement was the scene of the famous phone calls between Dr. King and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and that is where we had dinner before moving upstairs to the sanctuary for a screening of the American Experience film. The film has been shown in a wide variety of venues all over the world, but showing it at First Baptist had special meaning. The Q&A with Jim Zwerg and 5 other Freedom Riders following the screening was quite something, and Jim and Rip Patton closed the evening by leading us in a rendition of “Oh, Freedom.” Amen to an emotion filled day. On to Selma and Jackson on Sunday.

Day 8–May 15: Montgomery, AL, to Jackson, MS

We left Montgomery early in the morning, bound for Selma on Route 80, just as the Freedom Riders did on May 24, 1961. Fortunately, we didn’t have (or need) the protective ring of National Guardsmen with fixed bayonets, FBI agents, police cars, and military helicopters–”the apparatus of protection,” to use Jim Lawson’s words. We passed by several sites related to the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights march, including the roadside monument dedicated to Viola Liuzzo, the Detroit civil rights activist murdered by Klansmen while driving along Route 80. Our first stop was Brown Chapel, the AME Church that served as the staging ground for the 1965 Bloody Sunday march. Inside this beautiful and historic church, one of the deacons talked with the students about her experiences in Selma–she was 17 in 1965–and about recent and current race relations in Selma and Dallas County. After a brief driving tour of Selma, we got off the bus and walked silently, two by two, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, site of the Bloody Sunday police riot. The students spent a few minutes at the memorial park at the eastern end of the bridge before reboarding the freedom bus.

We headed west toward the Mississippi line and on to Meridian, our lunch stop. We paused outside the county courthouse in Meridian, the site of many voting rights struggles during the 1960s. And I told the students about Medgar Evers’s confrontation with white supremacists in Meridian in 1958 when he defied Jim Crow and sat on a front seat of a bus. We spent the night in Jackson, where the students held another teach-in on current social justice issues, and where I and the Freedom Riders attended a screening of the film at the Masonic Temple on Lynch Street, the headquarters for the NAACP, SNCC, and CORE during the Freedom Rides and after. The panel discussion following the screening feaured veterans of the Jackson Non-Violent Movement, including Hezekiah Watkins, who was the youngest Freedom Rider at age 13 in 1961, and MacArthur Cotton, a Freedom Rider in McComb, MS. Jesse Harris, the legendary SNCC actvist, was also on hand. It is somewhat strange visiting Jackson as a quasi-tourist, staying in the old King Edward Hotel just across from the Illinois Central railway station where so many Freedom Riders were arrested in 1961. History, memory, and a whirl of conflicting emotions.

Raymond Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History and and Director of Graduate Studies for the Florida Studies Program at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. You can watch his discussion with director Stanley Nelson on The Oprah Show here.

View more about this book on the

Raymond Arsenault was just 19 years old when he started researching the 1961 Freedom Rides. He became so interested in the topic, he dedicated 10 years of his life to telling the stories of the Riders—brave men and women who fought for equality. Arsenault’s book, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, is tied to the much-anticipated PBS/American Experience documentary “Freedom Riders,” which premiers on May 16th.

In honor of the Freedom Rides 50th anniversary, American Experience has invited 40 college students to join original Freedom Riders in retracing the 1961 Rides from Washington, DC to New Orleans, LA. (Itinerary, Rider bios, videos and more are available here.) Arsenault is along for the ride, and has agreed to provide regular dispatches from the bus. You can also follow on Twitter, #PBSbus.

Day 5–May 12: Anniston, AL, to Nashville, TN

Our fifth day on the road started with the dedication of two murals in Anniston, at the old Greyhound and Trailways stations. I worked with the local committee on the text, and I was pleased with the results. In the past, there was nothing to signify that anything historic had happened at these sites. The turnout of both blacks and whites was gratifying and perhaps a sign that Anniston has begun the healing process of confonting its dark past. The students seemed intrigued by the whole scene, including the media blitz. We then boarded the bus and traveled six miles to the site of the bus burning; we talked with the only local resident who was there in 1961 and with the designer of a proposed Freedom Rider park that will be built on the site, which now boasts only a small historic marker. I have mixed feelings about the park, but perhaps the plan will be refined to a less Disneyesque form. It was quite a scene at the site, but we eventually pulled ourselves away for the long drive to Nashville.

Our first stop in Nashville was the civil rights room of the public library, the holder of one of the nation’s great civil rights collections. Rip Patton gave a moving account of his life as a Nashville student activist. We then traveled across town to the John Seigenthaler First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, where John Seigenthaler talked with the students for a spellbinding hour. He focused on his experiences with the Kennedy brothers and his sense of the evolution of their civil rights consciousness. As always, he was captivating and gracious, and full of truth-telling wit. We gave the students the night off to experience the music scene in Nashville, while I and the Freedom Riders participated in a Q and A session following a screening of the PBS film. The theater was packed, and the response was very enthusiastic. It was great to see this in Nashville, a hallowed site essential to the Freedom Rider saga and the wider freedom struggle. On to Fisk this morning before journeying south to Birmingham and “sweet home Alabama.”

Raymond Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History and and Director of Graduate Studies for the Florida Studies Program at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. You can watch his discussion with director Stanley Nelson on The Oprah Show here.

View more about this book on the

Raymond Arsenault was just 19 years old when he started researching the 1961 Freedom Rides. He became so interested in the topic, he dedicated 10 years of his life to telling the stories of the Riders—brave men and women who fought for equality. Arsenault’s book, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, is tied to the much-anticipated PBS/American Experience documentary “Freedom Riders,” which premiers on May 16th.

In honor of the Freedom Rides 50th anniversary, American Experience has invited 40 college students to join original Freedom Riders in retracing the 1961 Rides from Washington, DC to New Orleans, LA. (Itinerary, Rider bios, videos and more are available here.) Arsenault is along for the ride, and has agreed to provide regular dispatches from the bus. You can also follow on Twitter, #PBSbus.

Day 4–May 11: Augusta, GA, to Anniston, AL

As we left Augusta, I gave a brief lecture on Augusta’s cultural, political, and racial history–emphasizing several of the region’s most colorful and infamous characters, notably Tom Watson and J. B. Stoner. Then we settled in for the long bus ride from Augusta to Atlanta, a journey that the students soon turned into a musical and creative extravaganza featuring new renditions of freedom songs, original rap songs, a poetry slam–all dedicated to the original Freedom Riders. These kids are quite remarkable.

In Atlanta, our first stop was the King Center, where we were met by Freedom Riders Bernard Lafayette and Charles Person. Bernard gave a fascinating impromptu lecture on the history of the Center and his experiences working with Coretta King. We spent a few minutes at the grave sight and reflecting pool before entering the newly restored Ebenezer Baptist Church. The church was hauntingly beautiful, especially so as we listened to a tape of an MLK sermon and a following hymn. The kids were riveted.

Our next stop was Morehouse College, King’s alma mater, where we were greeted by a large crowd organized by the Georgia Humanities Council. After lunch and my brief keynote address, the gathering, which included 10 Freedom Riders, broke into small groups for hour-long discussions relating the Freedom Rides to contemporary issues. Moving testimonials and a long standing ovation for the Riders punctuated the event. Later in the afternoon, we headed for Alabama and Anniston, taking the old highway, Route 78, just as the CORE Freedom Riders had on Mother’s Day morning, May 14, in 1961. However, unlike 1961’s brutal events, our reception in Anniston, orchestrated by a downown redevelopment group known as the Spirit of Anniston, could not have been more cordial. A large interracial group that included the mayor, city council members, and a black state representative joined us for dinner before accompanying us to the Anniston Public Library for a program highlighted by the viewing of a photography exhibit, “Courage Under Fire.” The May 14, 1961 photographs of Joe Postiglione were searing, and their public display marks a new departure in Anniston, a community that until recently seemed determined to bury the uglier aspects of its past. The whole scene at the library was deeply emotional, almost surreal at times. The climax was a confessional speech by Richard Couch, the son of a Klansman who was part of the bus-burning mob in 1961. When Mr. Couch walked over to Hank Thomas, who was savagely attacked in 1961, to embrace him and ask for forgiveness and reconciliation, there were tears all around. The students and everyone else in the room were stunned. I have never seen anything quite like that moment. Later Mr. Couch and Janie Forsyth McKinney, the 12-year old white girlwho braved the mob in 1961 to come to the Freedom Riders’ aid, joined the students at our hotel for a two-hour deiscussion of race and reconciliation. I would wager that those of us who were in that room will remember the depth of feeling and searching questions and comments of the students for the rest of our lives. Words can’t describe what took place in the hearts and minds of the Freedom Riders, young and old, last night.

Raymond Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History and and Director of Graduate Studies for the Florida Studies Program at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. You can watch his discussion with director Stanley Nelson on The Oprah Show here.

View more about this book on the

Raymond Arsenault was just 19 years old when he started researching the 1961 Freedom Rides. He became so interested in the topic, he dedicated 10 years of his life to telling the stories of the Riders—brave men and women who fought for equality. Arsenault’s book, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, is tied to the much-anticipated PBS/American Experience documentary “Freedom Riders,” which premiers on May 16th.

In honor of the Freedom Rides 50th anniversary, American Experience has invited 40 college students to join original Freedom Riders in retracing the 1961 Rides from Washington, DC to New Orleans, LA. (Itinerary, Rider bios, videos and more are available here.) Arsenault is along for the ride, and has agreed to provide regular dispatches from the bus. You can also follow on Twitter, #PBSbus.

Day 3–May 10: Charlotte, NC, to Augusta, GA

We started the day with a breakfast meeting at a black Pentecostal church in West Charlotte. The students had the chance to sit with local civil rights activists such as former Freedom Rider Charles Jones, who gave another inspirational “blessing” that included rousing freedom songs. The next stop, a few blocks away, was West Charlotte High School, an important site in the school desegregation saga in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. Since our freedom bus was temporarily out of commission (the AC was being fixed), we drove up in a red, doubled-decker, London-style “party bus.” Some of the kids rushed out to greet us, perplexing the school security guards, who weren’t expecting a freedom ride on their doorstep. West Charlotte High, once a model of racial integration and educational improvement, has fallen on hard times, the victim of resegregation and neglect since the mid-1990s.

On to Rock Hill, SC, the birthplace of “jail-no bail” in February 1961 and the home of the courageous Friendship Nine, arrested in 1961. Five of the nine joined us for an emotional lunch at a recently refurbished McCrory’s, site of the famous 1961 sit-in. Andrea Barnett, a black special-ed teacher from Charlotte, who recently completed a 3,000 mile Freedom Ride (designed to instill self-confidence in her students) on her motorcycle, accompanied by her white boyfriend, from DC to New Orleans and back to Charlotte, was on hand to sing a beautiful and moving folk song (that she wrote) dedicated to the Freedom Riders. Also on hand was a Catholic priest, Father Boone, who has been in Rock Hill for 52 years, much of the time a lone local white voice preaching racial tolerance and justice. It was quite a scene. As we drove off across South Carolina to Augusta, GA, there were more than a few tear-stained faces on the (mercifully) retooled, air-cooled freedom bus. On to Atlanta and Anniston this morning.

Raymond Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History and and Director of Graduate Studies for the Florida Studies Program at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. You can watch his discussion with director Stanley Nelson on The Oprah Show here.

View more about this book on the

Raymond Arsenault was just 19 years old when he started researching the 1961 Freedom Rides. He became so interested in the topic, he dedicated 10 years of his life to telling the stories of the Riders—brave men and women who fought for equality. Arsenault’s book, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, is tied to the much-anticipated PBS/American Experience documentary “Freedom Riders,” which premiers on May 16th.

In honor of the Freedom Rides 50th anniversary, American Experience has invited 40 college students to join original Freedom Riders in retracing the 1961 Rides from Washington, DC to New Orleans, LA. (Itinerary, Rider bios, videos and more are available here.) Arsenault is along for the ride, and has agreed to provide regular dispatches from the bus. You can also follow on Twitter, #PBSbus.

Day 1-May 8: Washington to Lynchburg,VA

Glorious first day. Student riders are a marvel–bright and engaged. Began with group photo in front of old Greyhound station in DC, where the 1961 Freedom Ride originated. On to Fredericksburg and a warm welcome at the University of Mary Washington, where James Farmer spent his last 14 years. One of the student riders, Charles Lee is a UMW student. Second stop at Virginia Union in Richmond, where the 1961 Riders spent their first night. Greeted by VU Freedom Rider Reginald Green, charming man who as a young man sang doo-wop with his good friend Marvin Gaye. Third stop in Petersburg, where former Freedom Rider Dion Diamond and Petersburg native led a walking tour of a town suffering from urban blight; drove by Bethany Baptist, where the 1961 Riders held their first mass meeting. On to Farmville and the Robert Russa Moton Museum, formerly Moton High School, the site of the famous 1951 black student strike led by Barbara Johns; our student riders were spellbound by a panel discussion featuring 2 of the students involved in the 1951 strike and later in the struggle against Massive Resistance in Farmville and Prince Edward County, where white supremacist leaders closed the public schools from 1959 to 1964. On to Lynchburg, where the 1961 Freedom Riders spent their third night on the road and where we ended a long but fascinating first day. Heade for Danville, Greensboro, High Point, and Charlotte this morning. Buses are a rollin’!!!

Day 2-May 9: Lynchburg, VA, to Charlotte, NC

The second day of the Student Freedom Ride was full of surprises. We left Lynchburg early in the morning bound for Charlotte. We passed through Danville, once a major site of civil rights protests, where the 1961 Freedom Riders encountered their first opposition and experienced their first small victory–convincing a white station manager to relent and let three white Riders eat a “colored only” lunch counter.

Our first stop was in Greensboro, where we toured the new International Civil Rights museum, located in the famous Woolworth’s–site of the February 1, 1960 sit-in. This was my first visit to the museum, even though I was one of the historical consultants involved in planning the museum. We met the first black mayor of Greensboro, and I did a TV interview with the local PBS affiliate. The kids seemed to be deeply moved by the visit.

On to High Point, the scene of the first high school student sit-in in 1960 and the adopted home of Ben Cox, the original CORE Freedom Rider who organized the sit-in on February 11, 1960. Ben is a dear friend and the first Freedom Rider that I interviewed for my book in 2001. He is a local hero in High Point, where they now have a beautiful sculpted plaque marking the site of the Woolworth’s where the sit-in took place. Ben now lives in Jackson, TN, and is in very poor health, but his spirit and legacy lives on in High Point. Two of his sit-in kids from 1960–including a city councilwoman–met us at the Woolwoerth’s site and delivered a moving tribute to Ben. Very emotional moment for me and the student riders.

On to Charlotte, the site of the first arrest in 1961–the shoe-in by Joe Perkins at the Charlotte station that put him in jail for two nights. We had dinner at the Levine New South museum, then went across the street to the historic and beautiful First United Presbyterian Church, where a capacity crowd showed up to view a long clip from the American Experience film and to listen to a Freedom Riders panel discussion that I moderated. The highlight was a round of freedom songs led by Freedom Riders Rip Patton and Charles Jones, a Charlotte native who accompained William Sloane Coffin on the May 24, 1961 Freedom Ride to Montgomery. Meanwhile, the student riders were downstairs for a 2-hour intensive discussion of race in America, facilitated by William Smith, a Race Amity counselor and one of the first African Americans to play division I football at a predominantly white Southern school (Wake Forest) in the early 1960s. An added highlight for me–a reunion with one of my favorite and most talented students from the early 1980s–Shella Hollowell, whom I hadn’t seen in 25 years. She now lives near Charlotte and is a passionate student of civil rights and Southern history.

The only glitch in the day–the air conditioner on our freedom bus broke down between Greensboro and Charlotte, adding authenticity and a lot of sweat to our journey to the Deep South. This morning we are off to Rock Hill and Augusta, GA, where we will try to keep it cool!

Raymond Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History and and Director of Graduate Studies for the Florida Studies Program at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. You can watch his discussion with director Stanley Nelson on The Oprah Show here.

View more about this book on the

This article and audio component was produced by Adam Phillips of Voice of America.

The American South was a segregated society 50 years ago. In 1960, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in restaurants and bus terminals serving interstate travel, but African-Americans who tried to sit in the “whites only” section risked injury or even death at the hands of white mobs. In May of 1961, groups of black and white civil rights activists set out together to change all that.

[See post to listen to audio]

They called themselves “Freedom Riders.” An integrated group of young civil rights activists decided to confront the racist practices in the Deep South, by travelling together by bus from Washington D.C. to New Orleans, Louisiana. Raymond Arsenault documents their trip in “Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice.” He says many elder civil rights leaders denounced their strategy as a dangerous provocation that would set back the cause.

“But the members of the Congress of Racial Equality that came up with this idea, the young activists, were absolutely determined that they were going to force the issue, that they had to fight for ‘freedom now,’ not ‘freedom later,’ [and] that someone had to take the struggle out of the courtroom and into the streets, even if it meant for death for some of them. They were willing to die to make this point,” said Arsenault.

The group boarded a Greyhound bus in Washington on May 4. They planned to stop and organize others along the way until they reached their destination on May 17. Like Martin Luther King, Jr. and other prominent civil rights activists of the day, the Freedom Riders were trained in the techniques of non-violent direct action developed by the Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi. Arsenault says that for some of them, non-violence was a deeply held philosophy. For others, it was a tactic to win public support for their struggle.

“Part of what they did was they dressed very well, almost like they were going to church and they were absolutely committed to not striking back and being polite, and to contrast their behavior with what they saw as the white thugs who might very well attack them, and of course did,” added Arsenault.

The Freedom Riders were taunted – and attacked – throughout the South. John Lewis, now a U.S. Congressman, was badly beaten in South Carolina. Worse trouble awaited the Freedom Riders in Birmingham, Alabama, where white supremacists beat the Riders with clubs and chains while police looked on. In Anniston, Alabama, a mob surrounded the bus, slashed its tires, and firebombed it on a lone stretch of highway outside of town.

In interviews culled from “Freedom Riders“, a new PBS documentary tied to Arsenault’s book, several of the Riders recall how they narrowly escaped death.

“I can’t tell you if I walked off the bus or crawled off, or someone pulled me off,” said one woman.

“When I got off the bus, a man came up to me, and I am coughing and strangling and he said ‘Boy, are you alright?’ And I nodded, and the next thing I knew I was on the ground. He had hit me with a baseball bat,” said one man.

“People were gagging and they were crawling around the ground and they were trying to get the smoke out of their chests It was just an awful, awful, awful, awful scene,” said another Rider.

“It was horrible. It was like a scene from Hell. The worst suffering I had ever heard,” one woman said.

The Freedom Riders, many of them injured, chose to fly the rest of their journey to New Orleans. However, activists in Nashville, Tennessee, immediately organized their own Freedom Ride through Alabama and Mississippi. They felt that failing to continue the effort would hand a victory to the segregationists who wanted to intimidate them.

Like many of her fellow Nashville Freedom Riders, Catherine Burk-Brooks, a black college student, decided to leave school to make the trip.

“This was more important at that time to a number of us at that time in Nashville,” said Burk-Brooks. “We knew that if we lived we would go back to school, and if we died, it wouldn’t make any difference. We didn’t know if we were going to live or die. But we knew that this was something that we had to do.”

The Kennedy administration feared that more violence would embarrass the president at a Cold War summit with Soviet Premier Khrushchev later that month. A deal was struck with the Mississippi authorities. Police officers would protect the Riders from attack, but would be empowered to arrest them for violating state laws.

Joan Mulholland, a white Freedom Rider who was 19 at the time, was thrown into the State Penitentiary, along with other activists.

“So we were charged with breach of peace which was not on the face of it a segregation law, but was used to enforce segregation by saying that our very presence and actions could cause other people to become violent,” Mulholland said. “So we were charged with breaking the peace by upsetting people.”

Such treatment galvanized the national civil rights movement. During the spring and summer of 1961, 60 Freedom Rides headed south from around the country, forcing the issue of segregation into national focus.

The momentum of the civil rights movement increased through sit-ins, voter registration drives, legal advocacy and demonstrations. It led to stronger anti-discrimination laws and their enforcement.

Raymond Arsenault says the Riders are an inspiring example to those who want to change the world, today.

“All of us, wherever we live in the world, have moments when we shrug our shoulders and say ‘what can I do? What can we do?’ We’re overwhelmed by these powerful socio-economic forces that seem to control our lives,” added Arsenault. “I think the Freedom Rides are a classic example that demonstrates the power of individuals to change the course of history. It’s not just so-called ‘people in power’ who are controlling institutions. There is a lot of historical agency that people can grasp. The Freedom Rides reminds us there are people who have stepped up and changed all of our lives and that we can do that too.”

Fiftieth anniversary commemorations of the 1961 Freedom Rides will be held throughout the spring and summer, including the 2011 Student Freedom Ride, in which young people, black and white, will board buses in Washington, D.C., to follow the path of that first ride, spreading the message of civil rights.

Raymond Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History and and Director of Graduate Studies for the Florida Studies Program at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, and author of Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. His book is tied to the new PBS documentary “Freedom Riders,” which premiers on May 16th. You can watch his discussion with director Stanley Nelson on The Oprah Show here.

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By Gregory S. Parks & Matthew W. Hughey

On Tuesday, January 25, 2010, Arab television network Alhurra interviewed Congressman Jim Moran (D-VA).  During the interview, Congressman Moran stated that Republicans made big gains this past November because “a lot of people in this country . . . don’t want to be governed by an African American.”  To some, these statements were not only controversial, but false.  This is because we live in a supposedly post-racial America since the election of our first black President.  For example, the 2008 voting booths had barely cooled before the Wall Street Journal proclaimed that Obama’s victory meant that we could “put to rest the myth of racism as a barrier to achievement in this splendid country.”

There have been sweeping changes in legal equality between blacks and whites since, say, the 1950s.  Moreover, white’s racial attitudes have also shifted during that same period. For example, in 1958 most whites indicated that they would not vote for a well-qualified, black presidential candidate; by 2007, almost ninety-five percent said they would.  Measuring racial progress and determining the degree to which race actually matters in America, however, is not simply—or even best—reflected in people’s expressed racial attitudes as measured through surveys.  Rather, a better measure might be the examination of people’s automatic, if not unconscious, racial attitudes.  This includes how Americans decided whether to vote for, weigh the policies of, and even re-elect the first black President.

For over the past quarter century, psychologists have found that people make automatic associations between black and white racial categories, and negative and positive words, respectively.  Even where individuals appear to harbor explicit, racially egalitarian attitudes, their unconscious racial attitudes may be wholly inconsistent.  Numerous studies find that anywhere from 75-90% of whites, roughly 65% of Asian and Latino/a Americans, and from 35-65% of blacks harbor these automatic, unconscious, pro-white/anti-black biases.  Not only do college first-year students—the typical participants of university-based psychological studies—harbor these biases; studies show that judges, lawyers, physicians, black professionals, and a broad swath of the American public hold these biases as well.  These biases are important because the influence judgment, decision-making, and behavior.

More specifically, the rhetoric against and opposition to candidate Obama can be traced, at least in part, to these unconscious anti-black biases. Undoubtedly, many conservatives probably would not have voted for candidate Obama simply because of his political leanings, party affiliation, and policy positions.  However, this point does not provide an end to the analysis of whether race matters in how Americans are influenced by Obama’s race. With regard to the run-up to the 2008 election, there are some important things to contemplate:

First, liberals and conservatives do not differ much with respect to their unconscious racial biases.  But while there is little difference between conservatives’ explicit and unconscious racial biases (both being relatively high), liberals have relatively high unconscious—but low explicit—anti-black biases.  Comparatively, conservatives’ greater consistency in their unconscious and explicit social evaluations suggests that they may be more inclined than liberals to use their unconscious biases for explicit judgment, including voting.  Second, the rhetoric around whether or not Obama is a “legitimate” American citizen appears to have substantial roots in his race. For example, in one study, participants were shown images of black and white, American Olympic athletes.  Participants found the black athletes to be more recognizable.  Nonetheless, the participants unconsciously associated American symbols with the white, rather than the black, athletes.  In another study, participants unconsciously associated American symbols with Hillary Clinton and Tony Blair (yes, the British Tony Blair) than with Obama.  In a third study, when subliminally primed with American symbols, participants’ attitudes toward Democrats remained unchanged.  Their attitudes toward blacks, generally, and Obama, specifically, became more negative.  Accordingly, whites seem to associate being American—which the POTUS must quintessentially be—with whiteness, something Obama is not.  Concerns about whether Obama is unpatriotic—concerns of the far-Right and the Tea Party movement—seem to have their roots in Obama’s race.  In a recent study, researchers found that participants responded the criticism with a diminished preference for and more negative beliefs about Obama, but only when they were subliminally primed with African–American, as a racial category.  As such there should be no surprise as to the rise of the birther movement and lingering questions as to whether President Obama is actually an American and whether he is committed to American ideals. Third, two studies specifically found that independent of political conservativism and self-reported racial attitudes, unconscious race bias predicted whether or not individuals voted for Obama.

As to Congressman Moran’s contention, there is no research on point that lends itself to support his claim.  Nonetheless, one recent study found that participants with higher levels of implicit pro-white associations took greater issue with a proposed health-care plan when the plan was represented as Obama’s but not when the exact same proposal was represented as Bill Clinton’s plan.  This research suggests that the fall-out over “Obama-care,” at least for some, had less to do with the government taking over health care and more to do with the racial background of the President.  As to reverberations felt by Congress members who supported President Obama’s agenda, theoretical research which imports the legal doctrine of third-party associative discrimination into the political contexts, suggests some Democrats may have indirectly felt backlash from those who held unconscious race biases toward president Obama.

Looking forward, race will likely matter just as much—if not more—during Obama’s re-election campaign than it did during his first run for President.  Moral currency research suggests that when people do good in one instance it may later, in their mind, justify them doing bad.  For example, in one study President Obama’s election lead to both an increased perception among participants that racism is no longer an issue and their decreased support for policies designed to address racial inequality.  In another study, participants who endorsed Obama were more likely to engage in discrimination against blacks and in favor of whites on experimental tasks.  That being said, whites who cast their ’08 vote to get us to a post-racial America may feel as though Obama’s election did just that.  Moreover, they may unconsciously see themselves as having “done their part” in making post-racialism a reality.  Accordingly, they might not be as generous with their vote for Obama the next time around.

Gregory S. Parks, PhD, JD is a lawyer, living and working in Washington, D.C.
Matthew W. Hughey, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Mississippi State University.
They are the editors of The Obamas and a (Post) Racial America?.

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Today is a very important day in American history, the anniversary of when the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was passed by Congress, that which formally abolished slavery in the U.S. in 1865. The Thirteenth provides that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” It was ratified later that year on December 6. In honor of this anniversary, we offer an excerpt from The Oxford Guide to United States Supreme Court Decisions, which provides an overview of the Civil Rights Cases.

Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883), submitted on the briefs 7 November 1882, argued 29 March 1883, decided 15 October 1883 by vote of 8 to 1; Bradley for the Court, Harlan in dissent.

Few decisions better illustrate the Supreme Court’s early inclination to interpret narrowly the Civil War Amendments than the Civil Rights Cases. There the Court declared unconstitutional provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that prohibited racial discrimination in inns, public conveyances, and places of public amusement. The decision curtailed federal efforts to protect African-Americans from private discrimination and cast constitutional doubts on Congress’s ability to legislate in the area of civil rights, doubts that were not completely resolved until enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The Civil Rights Cases presented two conflicting views of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. The conservative view saw the amendments in narrow terms: the Thirteenth Amendment simply abolished slavery; the Fourteenth granted the freed people citizenship and a measure of relief from state discrimination. The more radical view believed the amendments helped secure to the freed people and others all rights of free people in Anglo-American legal culture. Moreover, the amendments gave the national government authority to protect citizens against both state and private deprivations of rights.

Justice Joseph P. Bradley’s majority opinion rejected the more radical interpretation of the new amendments. He held that the Fourteenth Amendment only prohibited state abridgement of individual rights. In Bradley’s view the 1875 Civil Rights Act was an impermissible attempt by Congress to create a municipal code regulating the private conduct of individuals in the area of racial discrimination. He asserted in dicta that even private interference with such rights as voting, jury service, or appearing as witnesses in state court were not within the province of Congress to control. An individual faced with such interference had to look to state government for relief. Bradley also rejected the contention that the Thirteenth Amendment allowed Congress to pass the 1875 legislation, declaring that denial of access to public accommodations did not constitute a badge or incident of slavery. In his view such a broad construction of the Thirteenth Amendment would make the freed person “the special favorite of the laws.”

In his dissent, Southerner and former slaveholder Justice John Marshall Harlan rejected the majority’s narrow construction of the Civil War Amendments. Asserting that the decision rested on grounds that were “narrow and artificial,” Harlan argued that the Thirteenth Amendment gave Congress broad powers to legislate to insure the rights of freed people. He contended that the freedom conferred by the Thirteenth Amendment went beyond the simple absence of bondage. It encompassed freedom from the incidents of slavery, including all “badges of slavery”.

Along with the decision in the Slaughter-house Cases (1873), which effectively stripped the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause of significant meaning, and U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876), which upheld congressional efforts to protect blacks and others against private deprivations of constitutional rights, the Civil Rights Cases fashioned a Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence considerably less protective of individual rights than many of its framers had envisioned. The extent to which the Court’s narrow reading of Fourteenth Amendment protections helped usher in and foster the era of extensive segregation in southern and other states is open to debate. But the Supreme Court’s decision in the Civil Rights Cases largely mandated the withdrawal of the federal government from civil rights enforcement. That withdrawal would not be reversed until after World War II.

In 1964 Congress again passed legislation prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations. Ironically, the Bradley opinion, which expressly did not rule on whether or not the Constitution’s Commerce Clause provided a basis for congressional legislation in this area, played a role in the drafting of the 1964 statute. The 1964 act’s public accommodations provision was based on the Commerce Clause.

How to cite this entry: Robert J. Cottrol “Civil Rights Cases” The Oxford Guide to United States Supreme Court Decisions. Kermit L. Hall. Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Oxford Online OUP-USA. 28 January 2011

It is Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States, a federal holiday celebrating one of our nation’s most influential civil rights leaders. This being the 25th anniversary of MLK Day, the Corporation for National & Community Service has challenged us to pledge “at least 25 actions during 2011 to make a difference for others and strengthen our communities.” Many of us enjoy positions of privilege we do not fully appreciate, and treat this holiday as a day off rather than a “day on,” as my teachers used to say. If today has no other affect, I hope it will at least serve as a reminder to reflect on the importance of civil rights and equal opportunities. Moreover, I hope it will help us recognize our own prejudices – whether demonstrated by our actions or just in our thoughts – so that we can overcome them. In light of recent events, we would also do well to remember that Dr. King made many calls-to-action, but none were calls-to-arms, none were pleas for violence.

Below, we present the chapter “Standing with Lincoln” from All the People: A History of Us by Joy Hakim, which looks back on all the effort (and cheese sandwiches!) that went into the August 1963 march on Washington.

The civil rights leaders were human, and so there were rivalries and jealousies. They disagreed among themselves. Those from older organizations, like the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), were at their best working through the courts and trying to change the laws. That was a slow process; it took skilled leadership. The lawyer Thurgood Marshall and the labor chief A. Philip Randolph were that kind of leader.

Martin Luther King, Jr., had helped organize the SCLC (the Southern Christian Leadership Conference). Its appeal was to the mass of moderate churchgoing blacks; most of its leaders were ministers. But many young people were impatient with both of these approaches, which seemed too slow-moving. They formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), known as SNICK. SNCC and the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) organized many of the sit-ins in college communities. Some black groups wanted to fight with fists, weapons, and anger. Everyone knew that if they got their way, much of the high purpose of the civil rights movement would be lost. Leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., had made civil rights a cause for all Americans. It was about quality. It was about justice and freedom for all. It wasn’t just for blacks—although most of the leadership was black.

For years, A. Philip Randolph had talked of a freedom rally in the nation’s capital. Perhaps it would bring the diverse black leaders together. Perhaps it would bring black and white people together. Perhaps it would influence Congress.

President Kennedy had sent a civil rights bill to Congress. Would it be passed? No one was sure. A march would show Congress and the president the importance of the civil rights movement. Many thought that Kennedy was paying more attention to affairs in Cuba and Vietnam than to the problem of unfairness at home. When President Kennedy gave a speech in West Berlin, Germany, about political freedom, it inspired cheers from people around the world. But some Americans weren’t enthusiastic. They knew there was a kind of freedom that was missing right here in America—it went straight to the soul and spirit of an individual. The black leaders understood that soul freedom.

Exactly 100 years had passed since Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Some white people were still telling black people to be patient. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “We can’t wait any longer. Now is the time.” Philip Randolph was 74. If ever he was to have his march, it had to be soon. And so it was decided: on August 28, 1963, there would be a march for freedom in Washington, D.C. Black leaders hoped that 100,000 people would participate. The marchers were going to demand four things: passage of the civil rights bill; integration of schools by year’s end; an end to job discrimination; and a program of job training. Bayard Rustin, who was a whiz at organizing, was in charge.

Rustin got to work. He had 21 drinking fountains, 24 first-aid stations, and lots of portable toilets set up on Washington’s grassy Mall. Workers made 80,000 cheese sandwiches. Movie stars, singers, high-school bands, preachers, and politicians practiced speeches and songs. The speakers and entertainers were to stand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and look toward the tall, slender Washington Monument and, beyond that, to the nation’s Capitol.

Rustin worried about every detail. He got a big hook and put it on the end of a long stick. Then he gave careful instructions to a helper he called the “hook man.” Anyone who spoke too long was to be pulled from the microphones by the hook man.

Two thousand buses headed for Washington, and 21 chartered trains. A man with a freedom banner roller-skated from Chicago. An 82-year-old man bicycled from Ohio. Another, who was younger, came by bike from South Dakota. Sixty thousand whites came. Television crews, high in the Washington Monument, guessed that there were 250,000 people altogether.

It was a day filled with song, and hope, and good will. Finally, in the late afternoon, the last of the speakers stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It was Martin Luther King, Jr. He began with a prepared speech, which was formal and dignified, as was his nature. Then something happened inside him. Perhaps he responded to the crowd. Perhaps his training as a preacher took over. Whatever it was, he left his written speech and began talking from his heart. “I have a dream,” he said.

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama…little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today!

Then he challenged the whole nation, not just those who were marching.

So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire, let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York, let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania, let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado; let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that. Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia; let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee; let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens and when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”

]]> http://blog.oup.com/2011/01/martin-luther-king/feed/ 3 http://blog.oup.com/2010/12/oxford-comment-5/ http://blog.oup.com/2010/12/oxford-comment-5/#comments Tue, 21 Dec 2010 08:00:33 +0000 Michelle shipton calloway boardwalk jazz giordano empire vince alyn http://blog.oup.com/?p=13024 Tweet

Happy Birthday to jazz icon Cab Calloway, who would be turning 103 this Saturday, December 25th! To celebrate, Michelle explores Cab’s legend and the Jazz Age – alive and well in New York City (and on a new hit HBO show). We promise, even if you’ve never heard of Cab, you won’t want to miss this episode.

Want more of The Oxford Comment? Subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes!

Featured in this podcast:

Alyn Shipton, jazz critic and BBC producer, author of Hi-De-Ho: The Life of Cab Calloway

*     *     *     *     *

Vince Giordano of Boardwalk Empire, live at Sofia’s Restaurant in New York City

*     *     *     *     *

The Ben Daniels Band

Today is the 55th anniversary of Rosa Parks’ infamous stand sit during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Her daring refusal to move to the back of the bus was not a decision made lightly because she was simply “too tired.” “The only tired I was,” Parks wrote in Rosa Parks: My Story (1992), “was tired of giving in.” The following short biography of Parks comes from Darlene Clark Hine, editor of  Black Women in America.

Parks, Rosa (b. 4 February 1913 ; d. 24 October 2005 ), civil rights activist. From the moment her photograph was first published in newspapers across America, Parks, with her quiet dignity, has been a symbol for the civil rights movement in this country. Those who orchestrated the Montgomery bus boycott bypassed several other women to choose Parks as a representative of all the black women and men who were forced to live with Jim Crow laws and customs in the South, and she lived up to their expectations.

Early Life and Activism
Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, the daughter of James McCauley , a carpenter, and Leona Edwards , a teacher. Her father migrated north to find work when Rosa was two years old and did not often communicate with the family after that. Her mother moved Rosa and a younger brother to Pine Level, Alabama, to be nearer her own parents and siblings. In Pine Level, Parks worked as a field hand, in addition to taking care of her grandparents while her mother worked, often as a teacher. Parks’s mother homeschooled her until she was eleven, then sent her to live with her aunt in Montgomery so that she could go to school. While attending the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, she did household chores for her aunt and also went out to do domestic work outside the home. She attended the Booker T. Washington High School but left before graduation to take care of her mother. Her experience in all these situations left her angry about the injustices in the world, and, when she was nineteen, she met Raymond Parks , a barber who was involved in the civil rights movement. On 19 December 1932 they were married.

The couple did not have children. With her husband’s encouragement, Parks completed her high school education, receiving a diploma in 1934 . From the beginning of their marriage, both were social activists. They worked to secure the release of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black youths accused of raping two white girls. Parks joined the Montgomery Voters League and worked to enfranchise African Americans in the community. During the 1940s she joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and served as secretary of the branch from 1943 until 1956 . Edgar Daniel Nixon Jr. , organizer of the Black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Union in Montgomery and head of the Progressive Democrats, was president of the local NAACP chapter.

Particularly good at working with young people, Parks helped train a group of NAACP youths to protest segregation in the Montgomery Public Library, and she participated in voter-registration drives. In 1945 Parks became one of just a few African Americans in the city who were registered to vote. The registrar had failed her the first two times she took the literacy text, but she remained determined, a foreshadowing of her determination in choosing to be arrested rather than to continue to suffer segregation on Montgomery’s buses. She took classes and attended seminars in civil rights tactics. In June 1955 Parks attended a summer workshop at the Highlander Folk School founded by Myles Horton in Monteagle, Tennessee, long a training ground for labor organizers and social activists. In 1959 the state of Tennessee would label the Highlander Folk School a subversive organization. Still, at Highlander, Parks, like her fellow activists Ella Baker and Septima Clark , acquired a deeper appreciation of and skills for community organizing, use of direct-action tactics, and administration of citizenship schools. Their preparation and long involvement in community affairs placed black women at the center of the civil rights movement. Parks’s grounding in the organizational and institutional infrastructure of the Montgomery black community was essential to her ability to inspire the modern civil rights movement.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott
On 1 December 1955 , Parks took the bus home. She had often walked rather than deal with Jim Crow segregation on the buses. The city’s complex segregation laws dictated that African Americans pay their fares, exit the bus, and reenter through the rear door. Whites enjoyed the privilege of sitting in the front of the bus, and blacks occupied reserved seats in the rear. If the white section filled up and more white passengers boarded the bus, the black passengers were required to move. On this day, Parks decided to ride the bus anyway. And on this day, she refused to comply with the bus driver James F. Blake ’s order that she give the bus seat she occupied in the first row of the black section to a white male passenger. Three other African Americans vacated their seats, but Parks refused to move.

Parks had not planned to disobey the law on that fateful day, but her thirty-year commitment to social justice prepared her to do so. For her defiance of the segregation ordinance, the Montgomery police took Parks to jail. Montgomery’s police lieutenant, Drue Lackey (who served as police chief from 1965 to 1970 ), took her fingerprints. Responding to a call from Nixon, the white attorney Clifford Durr took her case, but Nixon posted her bail. The court found Parks guilty of disorderly conduct and fined her ten dollars and another four dollars in court costs.

Parks on her way to jail in Montgomery, Alabama, December 1955. Her attorney Charles D. Langford is at the right; a deputy police officer is at the left. [Library of Congress]

Parks was not the first black woman to have suffered arrest for refusal to countenance bus segregation. In 1941 an angry mob beat Hannah Cofield before she was arrested for refusing to yield her seat to a white passenger. In 1944 Viola White met a similar fate. In March 1955 , a few months before Parks’s arrest, Claudette Colvin , an unmarried, pregnant fifteen-year-old girl, had objected to vacating her seat and was jailed.

The local black leadership had long debated challenging bus segregation, but decided to wait for an incident involving someone who embodied the politics of respectability and whose private life could withstand relentless scrutiny. Thus, although Cofield, White, Colvin, and later, Mary Louise Smith , protested bus segregation, their resistance failed to ignite a larger social protest movement. Propitiously, in July 1955 , the U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, declared in Flemming v. South Carolina Electric and Gas Company that bus segregation, even on buses that operated within one state, was unconstitutional.

When the police arrested Parks, diverse factions within the Montgomery black community swung into nonviolent direct action. On 2 December 1955 the Women’s Political Council (WPC), under the leadership of Jo Ann Robinson , an English professor at Alabama State College, mimeographed and, with two hundred volunteers, distributed more than thirty thousand handbills imploring black citizens to stay off the buses. The flyer declared,

Later Life and Legacy
Parks’s successful challenge to racial segregation attracted threats of violence and harassment and resulted in the loss of her job as a seamstress at Montgomery Fair Department Store. In 1957 Raymond and Rosa Parks and Rosa’s mother joined her younger brother, Sylvester, in Detroit to seek jobs and personal security. For several years, Parks worked as a seamstress. In 1965 she accepted a special assistant position on the staff in the Detroit office of Representative John Conyers Jr . She remained in his employ for nearly twenty years, during which time she assisted Conyers in his efforts to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday. In 1977 Parks’s husband and brother died. Ten years later she and a friend, Elaine Eason Steele , founded a nonprofit organization, the Raymond and Rosa Parks Institute for Self-Development, to honor her husband’s memory and commitment to the struggle for social justice and human rights.

In the last decades of the twentieth century Parks received national recognition for her role in the civil rights movement. The NAACP gave her its highest honor, the Spingarn Award, in 1977 . She also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. On 15 June 1999 , Parks was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. In introducing the bill authorizing the award, Representative Julia Carson of Indiana declared, “Rosa Parks is the Mother of America’s Civil Rights Movement. Her quiet courage that day in Montgomery, Alabama, launched a new American revolution that opened new doors of opportunity and brought equality for all Americans close to a reality.” In 2003 , the home Parks was living in at the time of the bus boycott, 620-28 Cleveland Court, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Parks died of natural causes at her home on 24 October 2005 ; she was ninety-two. After lying in honor in the Capitol Rotunda (the first woman to be so honored), Parks was laid to rest in Detroit, Michigan. Her funeral was attended by more than 4,000 mourners.

Bibliography
-Brinkley, Douglas . Rosa Parks. New York: Viking, 2000 .
-King, Martin Luther, Jr. Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. New York: Harper, 1964 .
-Parks, Rosa , with Jim Haskins . Rosa Parks: My Story. New York: Dial, 1992 .
-Robinson, Jo Ann Gibson . The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987 .
-Thornton, J. Mills, III. Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002 .
-United States House of Representatives Press Release , Carson Calls for Cosponsers for Bill to Award Congressional Gold Medal to Rosa Parks, February 24 , 1999 .

More from OUPblog:
-Rosa Parks, Brown, and Civil Rights
-Rosa Parks and Judicial Review

In my own representative national survey, I found that only 42 percent of black youth 18-25 felt like “a full and equal citizen in this country with all the rights and protections that other people have,” compared to a majority (66%) of young whites. Sadly, young Latinos felt similarly disconnected with only 43 percent believing themselves to be full and equal citizens.

In the video below, Cohen further  discusses the involvement of black youth in American politics.

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Posted with permission. (c) 2010 University of Chicago

By Andrew R. Murphy

There are any number of ways to interpret the [recent] events on the National Mall: the dueling rallies, the competition over the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “dream,” the intertwining of piety, politics, and patriotism. Many of these have already been blogged and commented on ad infinitum. And so first, to the obvious: Glenn Beck is no Martin Luther King. Beck’s movement is not King’s movement. This rally was not that rally. We know that. And the incongruity of it all (white middle-class Christians being comforted about their essential goodness on the very grounds where King had called a nation to account for its grievous moral failings) has been noisily pointed out by Rev. Al Sharpton’s counter-rally, by bloggers and pundits on the left, and by many surviving members of the Civil Rights movements.

What Beck does share with King, however, is that each sought to play prophet to a nation gone astray. That one of them became a national icon, a martyr for the cause of civil rights, and the other hosts a cable television show and has referred to himself as a “rodeo clown” (not to mention that one preached racial justice and reconciliation, while the other denounced the nation’s first African-American president as a “racist… with deep-seated hatred for whites and white culture”) shouldn’t diminish the significance of this observation. Nor should the fact that the diagnoses of the nation’s ills by each of these prophets, the sorts of solutions they offered, and the vision of the future that emerged from each rally could hardly be more different. The two rallies were attempts to bring a prophetic voice to America, and each one was framed by a jeremiad—a prophetic critique of the degenerate present in light of an enduring national mission. The jeremiad as a form of political rhetoric has a long history in the American tradition, and so it is worth taking another look at these two Jeremiahs on the Mall.

Promise of Liberty, Legacy of Injustice

King rose at the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963 to call the nation to account; to insist on the redemption of an American founding promise. The “dream” that he so eloquently voiced that day was actually built on a much more mundane image—that of a bounced check. King reported that he and his fellow marchers “have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check,” written by the nation’s founders, “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” Unfortunately, he continued, “America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned… America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’”

The American past and present, in King’s view, was defined largely by the unwillingness of the nation to honor the check written at the founding. And so the inheritance from the past was a dual one: a founding promise of liberty and equality in theory, and a legacy of slavery and segregation in practice. The change sought by King and the civil rights movement was motivated by a desire to overcome, or to redeem, the latter by finally realizing the potential of the former. This pointed contrast of present with past—of founding covenant with degenerate practice—is central to the power of King’s prophetic political critique.

Contrast all of this with the tenor of the contemporary conservative movement. Central to the traditionalist conservatism espoused by Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, the two featured speakers at Saturday’s “Restoring Honor” rally, is the idea that the values and practices that dominated the nation’s life during previous eras—traditional families, (Christian) religion in the public sphere, celebration of the military, the equation of white America with “real” America—must be those that lead it into the future. This is the “honor” that needs to be restored, and despite the minor brouhaha caused by Beck’s admission earlier this month that he didn’t think gay marriage was a particular threat to the nation (or Palin’s constant attempt to claim the mantle of feminism), the insistently backward-looking nature of the 2010 rally betrayed a rather different valorization of the past than King’s lament over the squandering of founding promise.

Where King’s dream called for deep and radical transformation (the dismantling of Jim Crow, the passage of meaningful civil rights and voting rights legislation, real equality of economic opportunity such as had never before been witnessed in the nation’s history), on Saturday Sarah Palin set herself foursquare against any such questioning of the nation’s current practices:

I must assume that you too know that we must not fundamentally transform America as some would want. We must restore America and restore her honor!

So rather than transformation, we need restoration.

Apolitical? Not by a Long Shot

Beck said before the rally that he saw his role as “to wake America up onto the backsliding of principles and values most importantly of God.” He spoke on Saturday of a nation that has “wandered in the darkness too long,” and called on his listeners to rededicate themselves to faith and country, steering clear of commenting on specific pieces of legislation. Indeed, one of the more interesting claims made by Beck and his fellow organizers was that the rally was not “political.” Even the New York Times’ Ross Douthat claimed that “[Beck] had promised that the rally… would be an explicitly apolitical event. And so it came to pass.” But Douthat goes on to identify what was really at the heart of Saturday’s gathering: “a long festival of affirmation for middle-class, white Christians.” What he seems to mean is that the rally’s speakers did not explicitly endorse a particular legislative agenda. But anyone who thinks that such a “festival of affirmation for middle-class, white Christians,” given the nation’s current religious and political landscape, is “apolitical” needs—to say the least—a more robust and nuanced definition of politics.

Both of these would-be Jeremiahs (King and Beck) sought to call the nation to something, something deeply American as they understood that term. The different registers in which they spoke, the different approaches they took to the past, and the different issues on which they chose to focus their criticisms, though, betray fundamentally different understandings of prophecy and its relation to political critique. Beck’s critique evoked tradition, Christian faith, and the goodness of America, suggesting that his listeners “concentrate on the good things in America, the things we have accomplished and the things we can do tomorrow.” By contrast, King sought to transform the very foundations of an American society shot through with racial prejudice, to bring the past to bear on the present as a form of critique, to transcend past and present practices, to draw on the nation’s founding to envision a new future of racial harmony.

Of course one might object that unlike King, who confronted a governmentally-sanctioned system of American apartheid, we in the twenty-first century face no such organized evil and thus the nation needs no fundamental transformations in the way it clearly did in 1963. But this seems to me precisely the point in distinguishing Beck’s from King’s attempts at prophecy. The kind of celebration of tradition that lies at the heart of the Christian Right’s interpretation of American history and its interpretation of American politics rules out, almost by definition, the kind of searching national self-critique that King insisted on.

With a Gaze Set Boldly Backward

In my most recent book, I explore the history of the American jeremiad—the political preaching of such Jeremiahs—as a form of political rhetoric since the earliest days of colonial settlements. I examine the different ways in which traditionalists and progressives have sought to indict American society and mobilize political coalitions throughout American history, and the religious and political figures who have sought to play prophet to the nation since colonial times. King’s speech in 1963, not surprisingly, was one of the great moments of the progressive tradition in American political rhetoric, and it has achieved the sort of iconic status that so often blunts later generations’ appreciation of King’s edgy calls for reform, and his invocation of the “sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent.” Traditionalists, on the other hand, have long used the eclipse of institutional Christianity in the nation’s public life as a stalking horse for political movements (most recently, the Christian Right), and the Beck-Palin event fits squarely into the larger dynamic of a reaction against 1960s-style progressivism.

And here, it seems, lies the fundamental difference between the two rallies: King called the nation forward into the fuller realization of its founding principles; while Beck and Palin directed the nation’s gaze backward. In Palin’s America, like Beck’s, the future would look much like the past, with an aggressive public Christianity and a federal government weakened in its ability to safeguard the rights of religious or other minorities. King, of course, talked of the past as well, but although his dream was “deeply rooted in the American dream” and (in some way, he insisted) consistent with the nation’s founding principles, realizing that dream would require deep and lasting change. The dream would not become reality until the nation paid the check that it had bounced repeatedly over the course of its history.

When it comes down to it, of course, King’s speech would have remained just words—stirring words, perhaps, but just words—without a successful political movement that braved all sorts of dangers in pursuit of their understanding of American ideals and the meaning of the nation’s founding promises. What will become of Beck remains to be seen. But the rodeo clown who bills his program as “the fusion of entertainment and enlightenment” has certainly ensured that he will not fade from the limelight anytime soon.

Andrew R. Murphy is Associate Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. He is the author of Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9/11. This article originally appeared on Religion Dispatches and is reposted with permission.

Today in 1868, the 14th Amendment was adopted into the U.S. Constitution, granting citizenship to African Americans with all its privileges. This amendment was recently cited in a Supreme Court opinion on Chicago gun control, and in the original post below, LeeAnna Keith looks back at American legal history to show how the Court is looking forward.

By LeeAnna Keith

Associate Justice Clarence Thomas took dead aim at Supreme Court tradition in his recent concurring opinion on gun control in the city of Chicago. McDonald v. Chicago, named for an African American plaintiff, raised the question of whether the 2nd Amendment’s guarantee of the right to bear arms imposed limitations against the states. A plurality of justices insisted that it did, citing the due process clause of the 14th Amendment and its transference of fundamental rights of U.S. citizens to residents of particular states. Thomas went a step further in support of the gun rights challenge, arguing in favor of overturning the legal doctrine established in two key Supreme Court decisions of the Reconstruction Era.

Among the many provisions of the powerhouse 14th Amendment is the clause prohibiting states to “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Dynamic jurisprudence on the basis of this language, known as substantive due process, has a long history in the American courts. Since the 1890s, its beneficiaries have included corporations seeking shelter from state regulation and opponents of Affirmative Action programs. The decision in favor of Otis McDonald, which strikes down Chicago’s comprehensive restrictions on firearms, extends the protections of the 14th to include the gun rights constituency.

Voting with the majority, Justice Thomas acknowledged the effect of the due process clause in support of the gun rights advocates. He objected, however, that the 14th provides a more direct guarantee of the right to bear arms in the “privileges and immunities” language of the amendment’s first section, which forbids states to “make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States.”
Thomas’s concurring opinion – celebrated as his finest hour in both conservative and black-friendly media outlets – takes issue with the body of precedent that narrows the scope of the privileges and immunities clause. Following the logic established in the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) and U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876), he says, the court has operated in defiance of the original intent of the framers of the 14th, who explicitly advocated for the right to bear arms and other privileges and immunities established in the Bill of Rights. Thomas finds that Cruikshank “is not a precedent entitled to any respect,” based on flawed legal reasoning. Moreover, he insists, “the consequences of Cruikshank” in black history provide an illustration of the importance of constitutional guarantees of rights of citizens.

The conservative thrust of substantive due process jurisprudence stands in contrast to the origins of the 14th Amendment in the radical politics of the Civil War and Reconstruction Era. In those days, the scourge of insurrection and war had elevated an avenging faction of Republican Party activists and army officers to the highest levels of government. The Radical Republican agenda took aim at the southern aristocracy, seen as an ongoing threat to the Union in the postwar era, and championed the civil rights and voting rights of African American men. Advocacy for the freedmen’s right to bear arms – articulated repeatedly in the laws and discourse of the Radical Congress and bureaucracy – was one of many anachronistic-seeming expressions of the black power agenda of the 1860s and 1870s.

The Supreme Court of the 1870s and afterward played a key role in the containment of American Radicalism by handing down conservative interpretations of Reconstruction Era laws, including Slaughterhouse and Cruikshank as well as such better-known decisions as Plessy v. Ferguson. Legal limitations, in combination with the resurgence of the Democratic Party and other factors, led to the fundamental miscarriage of the promise of African American rights. Particularly damaging was Cruikshank, as Thomas presents it, which empowered Ku Klux Klan violence by remanding matters of law enforcement and gun control to state and local officials.

Respect for precedent, or stare decisis – to let the decision stand – is a key component of the American legal tradition. In calling U.S. v. Cruikshank bad law, Justice Thomas ventures onto radical ground. Like the flawed decisions in Plessy and Dred Scott v. Sandford (1859), the distortions in Cruikshank reflected the constitutional challenges presented by the institution of slavery and the tradition of black subjugation.

In advocating to effect the privileges and immunities protections of the 14th Amendment, Clarence Thomas ventures into the politics of black radicalism for the first time in his public life. The implications of his interpretation for future considerations of the Bill of Rights and state laws add to the complexity of the evolving court.

LeeAnna Keith is the author of The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction and teaches history at the Collegiate School in New York City.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

The NAACP was doing its job when it accused the Tea Party movement of harboring “racist elements,” but it didn’t necessarily go about it in the most productive way.

All it took was for supporters of the Tea Party movement like Sarah Palin to write, “All decent Americans abhor racism,” and that with the election of Barack Obama we became a “post-racial” society, and the NAACP’s charge was soundly “refudiated.” Or, as Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell put it to Candy Crowley on CNN on Sunday, he’s “got better things to do” than weigh in on the debate. He was elected to deal with real problems, not problems made up in people’s heads. Case closed.

If one has decided not to see something, one won’t see it. (And to be sure, if one has decided to see something, one will always see it. That’s a stalemate.)

I think the NAACP ought to consider the possibility that the residuum of racism that exist today are more thoughts of omission than acts of commission. Racism is a very different beast today than it was on the eve of the Emancipation Proclamation, or on the eve of the Civil Rights Act. Indeed, it is so difficult to detect and even harder to eradicate precisely because it is no longer hidden behind a white conical hood.

Because our standard for what counts as “post-racialism” has gone up with each civil rights milestone, the NAACP should realize that as the old in-your-face racism is gone, so too should the old confrontational techniques of accusation and litigation. Unconscious racism can only be taught and remedied by explanation, not declamation.

To understand unconscious racism, consider the case of Mark Williams of the Tea Party Express, who was expelled by the Tea Party Federation, an organization that seeks to represent the movement as a whole when Williams posted a fictional letter to Abraham Lincoln, saying “We Coloreds have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards.”

The stridently mocking tone of this letter belied a breezy assumption that any and everyone could see that this was a letter written in satire. Sure it was. But if that was William’s subjective excuse, it would also be his objective crime. Williams did not stop to consider that it is so much easier to tell a joke than to be the butt of one. Here’s a bully telling the bullied to get over it.

If we don’t want to call this indifference “unconscious racism,” we can certainly call it bad citizenship because it is a failure to consider the grievances of a group of fellow-Americans. Isn’t this exactly what we were faulting our British cousins for doing in 1776?

Most of us, Tea Partiers or not, care about our taxes, our jobs, and our children. It takes a lot of energy and civic mindedness to worry about someone else’s taxes, job and children. (And that’s why our British cousins failed to summon the energy to care in 1776.) But the least we could do when we fail to enlarge the ambit of our sympathies is to admit that politics is a zero-sum game, and that other people have an equal right to petition for what they care about, even if we lose if they win. But that’s not a courtesy Sarah Palin, Mitch McConnell, or Mark Williams extended to the NAACP for so categorically dismissing its plea.

Even if we lived in a post-racial society, it is not for Sarah Palin to announce it, and it is certainly not Mark Williams’ place to tell African Americans to get over his joke. But the NAACP should also bear in mind that whatever we call this presumptuousness – unconscious racism or indifference – it is bad citizenship precipitated, in part, by the NAACP’s excessive focus on accusation, and not also education. If we want every American to learn to walk around in another person’s shoes, we should invite them to try each other’s shoes, not just order each other to not to step on them.