Congress of Racial Equality

1 Key excerpts on "Congress of Racial Equality"

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  eBook - ePub

  Shocking the Conscience

  A Reporter's Account of the Civil Rights Movement

  • Simeon Booker, Carol McCabe Booker(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • University Press of Mississippi

    (Publisher)

  15THE FREEDOM RIDES

  Driving the politics behind the nation’s race revolution were the streams of Negroes moving from South to North, and from rural to urban communities, bringing with them the potential to build powerful voting blocs. In 1960, the census bureau reported more than fifteen cities with “exploding Negro populations,” and experts pinpointed such centers as Atlanta, Detroit, and Philadelphia as places to watch—meaning to watch Negroes take over.

  Yet there were federal laws on the books that Southern states were still ignoring, while continuing enforcement of their own Jim Crow codes. Black “patience” with this system had evaporated during the Eisenhower administration. Sit-ins at lunch counters had exploded all over the South, particularly in college towns. Bus boycotts modeled after the successful Montgomery bus boycott were breaking down the humiliating segregation of local transportation systems in city after city. The next target was interstate travel.

  While most of the civil rights groups were concentrating on Southern voting rights drives, CORE’s James Farmer, having developed expertise at promoting sit-ins, conceived a Freedom Ride from the nation’s capital to New Orleans to test interstate bus transportation policies in the context of federal law prohibiting discrimination on such routes. The Congress of Racial Equality, known as CORE, had been founded in Chicago in 1942 by a group of students interested in the passive resistance tactics of Mahatma Gandhi. Its first sit-in was to get service for Negroes at Chicago’s Jack Spratt Restaurant.

  Each of CORE’s projects was preceded by training, and the 1961 Freedom Ride followed this rubric. Farmer brought to Washington an integrated group of about fifteen volunteers, selected from a field of more than 300 throughout the country, for intensive training over three or four days. Plans called for blacks and whites to sit together and to use facilities interchangeably. Whites were to use Negro restrooms and stand at their lunch counters, while blacks were to use the main bus terminal facilities. CORE sent out press releases announcing the ride, describing it as the first major bus trip to challenge racial segregation since the Journey of Reconciliation, fourteen years earlier, which was also sponsored by CORE, following the first Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in interstate travel. Riders at that time had been challenged by drivers and law enforcement as they tried to make bus desegregation a reality rather than merely a legal principle, but there had been no violence. Several had been arrested and served time (thirty-day sentences on North Carolina road gangs) on technical grounds while charges against the others were either dropped or successfully appealed. Fourteen years later, the buses and the terminals were still segregated.

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