Brown v. Board of Education

The Warren Court. photo: Wikipedia

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Ruling unanimously, in an opinion written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Court declared that racial segregation in public schools was a violation of the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution.

Freedom Rides

Beginning in May 1961 and continuing through the summer, the Freedom Rides, initiated by the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee spread through the South.

The Freedom Rides were designed to test and encourage enforcement of a Supreme Court decision declaring segregation in interstate transportation illegal -- a direct challenge to the decades old Jim Crow laws and practices that segregated transportation throughout the South.

On May 14, 1961, a Greyhound bus was attacked outside Anniston, Alabama. With the collusion of local and state police and the local KKK, the bus was firebombed with the driver and passengers held inside, with the intention of killing them all. When that failed, the mob attempted to lynch the passengers, who had fled the bus, but they were prevented by warning shots by the police. The passengers were badly beaten, arrested, and jailed.

See:

PBS documentary, Freedom Riders, in the American Experience series.

Wikipedia, Freedom Riders.

Operation Abolition

On May 12-14, 1960, the House Committee on Un-American Activities held hearings at City Hall in San Francisco.

Hundreds of students from nearby universities, and other concerned citizens, both supporters of the Committee (many of whom had been sent tickets to the hearings) and opponents, who claimed that the Committee was a notorious abuser of civil liberties, converged on City Hall.

Students attempting to enter the hearing room were forcibly removed from the building by police. Film of the events made by local TV stations was commandeered by the Committee, which then commissioned the production of a film, OPERATION ABOLITION, to tell the story from the Committee's point of view.

There was a strong reaction against the Committee and the film on many campuses across the country. In fact, the copy of the film now available on YouTube is deposited there by the American Civil Liberties Union - ACLU.



These hearings, and the reaction that followed, when added to the new activism on Civil Rights generated by the sit-ins spreading through the South and the rest of the country, gave enormous energy to what was to become the student movement.

These events took place ten years before the events of May 1970, which saw  the invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State, Jackson State, and Augusta, Georgia.

Stills from Operation Abolition. These frames show students and others being dragged down the City Hall steps, which had been flooded by fire hoses. 

The film prompted a backlash among students who saw the film and were offended by its simple minded appeal and by the apparent brutality of the police.

The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era

David W. Blight, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

from the publisher:

Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, a century after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, Martin Luther King, Jr., declared, “One hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.” He delivered this speech just three years after the Virginia Civil War Commission published a guide proclaiming that “the Centennial is no time for finding fault or placing blame or fighting the issues all over again.”

David Blight takes his readers back to the centennial celebration to determine how Americans then made sense of the suffering, loss, and liberation that had wracked the United States a century earlier. Amid cold war politics and civil rights protest, four of America’s most incisive writers explored the gulf between remembrance and reality. Robert Penn Warren, the southern-reared poet-novelist who recanted his support of segregation; Bruce Catton, the journalist and U.S. Navy officer who became a popular Civil War historian; Edmund Wilson, the century’s preeminent literary critic; and James Baldwin, the searing African-American essayist and activist—each exposed America’s triumphalist memory of the war. And each, in his own way, demanded a reckoning with the tragic consequences it spawned.

Blight illuminates not only mid-twentieth-century America’s sense of itself but also the dynamic, ever-changing nature of Civil War memory. On the eve of the 150th anniversary of the war, we have an invaluable perspective on how this conflict continues to shape the country’s political debates, national identity, and sense of purpose.

Political Poster Collection

A collection of political posters -- most of them from Berkeley in May 1970 -- is now online at the Penn State Libraries. I collected the posters at the time, and donated them to Penn State a couple of years ago, where they have been under development as a special collection, thanks to James Quigel, Head of Historical Collections and Labor Archives in the Special Collections Library, and the staff of the Libraries. Ellysa Cahoy at the Libraries has also been important to its development, and tells me the collection will soon be mounted on Flickr, as the Library's first-ever interactive on-line exhibit.

Thomas W. Benson Political Protest collection

Hubert Humphrey at 100

Hubert Humphrey at the Democratic National Convention, 1948:

“To those who say this civil rights program is an infringement on states’ rights,” he thundered from the convention podium, “I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”

qtd in Rick Perlstein, "America's Forgotten Liberal," New York Times, 27 May 2011.

Jim Crow Trailer

"For the Sunny South. An Airship with a Jim Crow Trailer" Library of Congress. Original from Puck, 1913.

Some Man Who Would Take Responsibility and Act

Drew Gilpin Faust reviews James McPherson's new book, Trial by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (Penguin Press, 2008). Faust describes Ulysses S. Grant's first meeting with Lincoln, as recalled by Grant in his memoirs:

Grant's memories of their encounter on that day provide a telling glimpse into Lincoln's conception of his role as commander-in-chief, as well as into the frustrations that had plagued him as he searched for the kind of leader that Grant became. Lincoln explained "that he had never professed to be a military man," but had been "forced" by the shortcomings of commanders to take on a far more extensive military role than he either intended or desired. "All he wanted or had ever wanted," Grant reported, "was some one who would take the responsibility and act." Grant would prove to be just that man.

Here at Penn State, we have just had a visit from Kirt Wilson of the University of Minnesota, who on Friday gave a wonderful talk on Lincoln in public memory. Some of the themes of that meeting with Grant echo in Wilson's very different analysis of Lincoln's invention of shared rhetorical agency in the Emancipation crisis.

Drew Gilpin Faust, "The Progress of Our Arms," The New Republic, 18 March 2009.