TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93HT0329> <link 93XV0063> <link 93XP0453> <link 93XP0213> <link 93XP0200> <link 93HT1316> <link 93HT1315> <link 93HT1312> <link 93HT1310> <link 93HT0286> <title> 1960s: Civil Rights </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1960s Highlights </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Civil Rights: 1960s </hdr> <body> [The momentum of the previous decade's civil rights gains, resulting from the 1954 Supreme Court decision on school segregation and the Montgomery bus boycott led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., carried over into the 1960s. But tangible results for most black people had been minimal; only a minuscule percentage of black children actually attended integrated schools, and in the South, "Jim Crow" practices barred blacks from jobs and public places. New groups and goals were formed, new tactics devised, to push forward for full equality. White resistance resulted, as often as not, in violence--violence that spilled across TV screens nationwide, assaulting America's conscience and turning previously in different onlookers into ardent civil rights supporters.] (February 22, 1960) The egalitarian revolution in the South sometimes moves like a spring flood, seeping over and around the barriers, running ahead of the sluggish channels dredged by the law. One afternoon last fortnight, such a spring freshet bubbled up in the textile city of Greensboro, N.C. (pop. 125,000) when four young college students--freshmen from the Negro Agricultural and Technical College--walked into the F.W. Woolworth store on South Elm Street and quietly sat down at the lunch counter. The white patrons eyed them warily, and the white waitress ignored their studiously polite requests for service. The students continued to sit until closing time. Next morning they reappeared, reinforced by 25 fellow students. By last week their unique sitdown had spread through 14 cities in five Southern states in a far-ranging attach on the Jim Crow custom that Negroes may be served while standing at downtown lunch counters but not if they sit down. (March 14, 1960) As quickly as the white South stamped out one spark, the brushfire caught in dozens of faraway communities. In five weeks, Negro "sit-in" demonstrations at segregated lunch counters had raced from North Carolina to South Carolina to Virginia to Florida to Tennessee and into Deep South Alabama. A unique protest against Jim Crow kindled by four college freshmen in Greensboro, N.C., the Gandhi-like Negro civil disobedience campaign, without any apparent central organized direction, continued to spread: In Montgomery, Ala., after a white man beat a Negro woman with a baseball bat in a sidewalk incident, 1,000 Negroes silently marched to the white-columned first capitol of the Confederate states to pray and sing the Star-Spangled Banner. In Orangeburg, S.C., 600 students from two Negro colleges paraded in the streets with placards that proclaimed "We Want Liberty" and "Segregation Is Dead." Arrested after a scuffle were a white man and a Negro girl. As it crackled across the South, the lunch counter protest burned most vividly in tinder-dry Tennessee, where fortnight ago Chattanooga firemen were forced to turn hoses on several thousand rioting whites and Negroes. Last week the flames leaped to Nashville, as 500 Negroes surged through downtown variety, drug and department stores, left a wake of closed counters and pushed on to the Greyhound and Trailways bus terminals. Sixty-four Negro students were arrested, most of them for refusing to leave the Greyhound lunch counter while police searched for a reported bomb. (May 17, 1963) Aboard two buses, 13 men and women, some Negro and some white, set out from Washington, D.C., in early May. They called themselves "Freedom Riders." They meant to demonstrate that segregated travel on interstate buses, even though banned by an I.C.C. ruling, is still enforced throughout much of the South. They were, in fact, hunting for trouble--and last week they found more of it than they wanted. "I could tell the difference when we teen-agers in this protest platoon were herded into a paddy wagon. In squads of 20, 30, and 40, more youngsters left the church, were shoved into paddy wagons and taken to jail. That night, to shouts of "Amen, brother, amen" a King aide cried: "War has been declared in Birmingham. War has been declared on segregation." The Negro leaders intended it to be a particular, pacific kind of war. King had preached Gandhi's nonviolent protest gospel ever since he arrived in Birmingham. But not every Negro remained so placid before Bull Connor's ferocity. So there was violence. It began shortly after noon the next day. Connor's cops were relaxed, eating sandwiches and sipping soft drinks. They were caught by surprise when the doors of the 16th Street church were flung open and 2,500 Negroes swarmed out. The Negroes surged across Kelly Ingram Park, burst through the police line, and descended on Birmingham. Yelling and singing, they charged in and out of department stores, jostled whites on the streets, paralyzed traffic. The riot ebbed--and then, an hour later, exploded again. In Kelly Ingram Park, hundreds of Negroes began lobbing bricks and bottles at the lawmen. A deputy sheriff fell to the pavement, shouting. "Those black apes!" For two hours, the battle raged, but slowly, inexorably, in trucks and cars, the police closed in on the park. That night, Alabama's ultra-segregationist Governor George Wallace sent 600 men to reinforce Connor's weary cops. And Martin Luther King appeared before his followers to say: "We will turn America upside down in order that it turn right side up." (June 21, 1963) Successful revolutions typically originate less from a sense of hopelessness than from aroused hope. What began as a legal evolution with the Supreme Court's May 1954 school-desegregation decision has now burst into a feverish, fragmented, spasmodic, almost uncontrollable revolution. In the last three weeks alone, by a Justice Department count, some sort of facility was desegregated in 143 different cities or towns. Last week Atlanta desegregated its public swimming pools and in Nashville, Tenn., all the major hotels and motels and most of the restaurants agreed to integrate their facilities promptly. In a single recent week, Bobby Kennedy counted 60 separate demonstrations by Negroes in various U.S. cities. In the pattern of revolutions, the recent Negro victories have only whetted their hunger for full equality. Cries the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Southern Negroes' most outstanding leader, "We're through with tokenism and gradualism and see-how- far-you've comeism. We're through with we've-done-more-for-your- people-than-anyone-elseism. We can't wait any longer. Now is the time." * * * Medgar Evers had premonitions of martyrdom. "I'm not afraid of dying," he recently said. "It might do some good." As the N.A.A.C.P.'s only fulltime worker in Mississippi, he was a constant target for threats, but he pursued his course nevertheless. He directed a big civil rights rally in Jackson recently that brought in such big-name Negroes as Lena Horne. Only a few weeks before his death, somebody tossed a gasoline- filled bottle into his carport (it did not explode). "If I die," he said the next day, "it will be in a good cause. I've been fighting for America just as much as the soldiers in Viet Nam." It was just past midnight, less than seven hours after President Kennedy's "moral crisis" speech to the nation, when Evers drove up to his Jackson home. He got out of his car with a bundle of T-shirts, to be handed out next morning to civil rights demonstrators. Across the front of the T-shirts was stamped: JIM CROW MUST GO. Evers took only a few steps. Then, from honeysuckle thicket about 150 ft. away, came a shot. The bullet tore into Evers' back, plowed through his body, pierced a window and a wall in the house, and came to rest beneath a watermelon on a kitchen counter. Evers' wife Myrile cried to her three small children to fall to the floor. She ran outside. "Medgar was lying there on the doorstep in a pool of blood," she said. "I tried to get the children away. But they saw it all--the blood and the bullet hole that went right through him. [Black unity and white support continued to grow, culminating in late summer with the first large-scale public protest against racial discrimination, the march on Washington.] September 6, 1963) Constitution and Independence Avenues were transformed into oceans of bobbing placards. Some marchers wept as they walked; the faces of many more gleamed with happiness. There were no brass bands. There was little shouting or singing. Instead, for over an hour and a half, there was the sound of thousands of feet shuffling toward the temple erected in the name of Abraham Lincoln. Finally, the formal program began. Speaker followed speaker to the platform. Singer Mahalia Jackson sang a slow, sorrowful Gospel song titled I've Been Buked and I've Been Scorned. Mahalia was hard to follow--and there probably was only one person in the civil rights world who could have done it quite so successfully. He was Atlanta's Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader who holds the heart of most American Negroes in his hand. "The Negro," he said, "lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity and finds himself an exile in his own land." King continued stolidly: "It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment and to underestimate the determination of the Negro. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality." But then, King came to the end of his prepared text--and he swept right on in an exhibition of impromptu oratory that was catching, dramatic, inspirational. "I have a dream," King cried. The crowd began cheering, but King, never pausing, brought silence as he continued. "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood." "I have a dream," he went on, relentlessly shouting down the thunderous swell of applause, "that even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with people's injustices, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice." Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. "I have a dream," cried King again, "that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." The march on Washington was a triumph. But after everybody agreed on that, the question was: Why? Hardly in terms of immediate results, since there were none. The battle cry of the march was "Now!" Seas of placards demanded Negro equality--Now! Speakers demanded action--Now! But Now! remained a long way off. It would not come today, tomorrow, next month or next year. It was in the probable effects on the conscience of millions of previously indifferent Americans that the march might find its true meaning. The possibility of riot and bloodshed had always been there; and in the U.S.'s "open society" they would have been plainly visible for the whole world to see. But the marchers took that chance, and the U.S. took it with them. No one who saw the proceedings could come to any other conclusion than that those scores of thousands of marching Negroes were able to accept the responsibilities of first-class citizenship. [Kennedy was never able to mobilize sufficient support to pass a civil rights bill with teeth over the opposition of segregationist Southern members of Congress. But after his assassination, Johnson, drawing on the Kennedy legacy and on the nationwide support generated by press coverage of civil rights marches and protests, succeeded where Kennedy failed.] (June 19, 1964) At last the clerk read the tally. It stood at 71 for cloture, 19 against. With four more votes than were required, the U.S. Senate for the first time in its history had invoked cloture against a civil rights filibuster. On the issue, all 100 Senators had taken their stand. And in so doing, they cleared the way for certain passage of the bill. For two years congressional Republicans chided Kennedy for his failure to present a civil rights legislative program. Finally, President Kennedy sent his first major civil rights message to the Hill. It was terribly thin, asking for federal court-appointed voting referees to determine applicants' qualifications while their voting suits were pending, an extension of the Civil Rights commission and little else. The ink was scarcely dry on Kennedy's bill when the city of Birmingham exploded in a tangle of firehoses, snarling police dogs and writhing Negroes. The violence was ugly, and so were the political implications. Soon afterward Kennedy announced that he was sending to Congress a much tougher version of his bill. But even that package was not nearly strong enough for civil rights advocates in the House of Representatives. Brooklyn's Democratic Representative Emanuel Celler and his ten-man Judiciary subcommittee produced a bill that fairly bristled with teeth. Both President Kennedy and Brother Bobby believed that this bill was too drastic to have a chance of legislative approval. In testimony before the full Judiciary Committee, also chaired by Celler, the Attorney General protested: "What I want is a bill, not an issue." That was last fall, just before the assassination. Lyndon Johnson took up where Kennedy had left off and urged the House to pass the bill as a memorial to Kennedy. In February the House approved the measure by a vote of 290 to 130. For the bill were 152 Democrats and 38 Republicans: against it were 96 Democrats and only 34 Republicans. [By 1964, the black revolution had created its own crisis of disappointed expectations. Rioting by urban blacks was to be a feature of every "long, hot summer" of the mid-1960s.] (July 31, 1964) By Saturday night, the most restless elements of Harlem, the broken- or no-home kids and the seething out-of-job adults, were bristling for a fight. It was hot and humid. Scores of people gathered for an outdoor protest rally called by three local chapters of Congress of Racial Equality. After harangues by CORE leaders, the Rev. Nelson C. Dukes, paster of Harlem's Fountain Spring Baptist Church, and a veteran agitator, launched into a 20-minute call for action, exhorting everyone to march on the local police precinct station to present their "demands." "Let's go! Let's do it now!" cried his listeners, and the mob, swollen by now into a howling tide, headed for the station house. Police squads tried to hold them back, but the screaming mob swarmed through the streets. From tenement rooftops came a hail of bricks, bottles and garbage-can covers. The police, firing their guns into the air, moved the rioters back. Reinforcements poured into the neighborhood, and still came the storm of bricks and bottles. Whaling away with their night sticks, the helmeted cops waded into the mob. Pastor Dukes, watching it all with growing horror, muttered, "If I knew this was going to happen, I wouldn't have said anything." Then he walked away. Roving bands of rioters--most of them kids--surged through the districts, aimlessly, desperately pursuing their urge for violence. They attacked a passing car driven by a white man and roughed up a woman passenger. They broke doors and windows in shops owned mostly by Jewish merchants, tearing down protective iron gates and screens. They ran off with TV sets, appliances, canned goods, clothing. The nights shook with gunfire. Police exhausted their ammunition, and had to send out emergency calls for more. False fire alarms rang through the area. Mounted police heaved back against the mobs with their horses. Again and again came the cries of "Police brutality!" "Kill 'em!" "Murderers!" [Violence against civil rights workers, white and black, was also a feature of every year. A particularly gruesome incident marred the summer of 1964.] (August 14, 1964) In 101 degree heat, FBI agents swarmed over an earthen dam on Olen Burrage's Old Jolly Farm, six miles southwest of Philadelphia, Miss. Through the scrub pines and bitterweed, they bulldozed a path to the dam, then brought up a lumbering dragline whose huge bucket shovel began chewing a V-shaped wedge out of the 25 ft.-high levee. Twenty feet down, the shovel uncovered the fully clothed, badly decomposed bodies of three young men, lying side by side in a pocket of red clay. A team of pathologists, using dental and fingerprint charts, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt what everybody had already suspected. These were the bodies of missing Civil Rights Workers Michael Schwerner, 24, Andrew Goodman, 20, both white, and James Chaney, 21 a Negro. Thus ended a six-week search that began after the three men disappeared on June 21, just one day after they had arrived in Mississippi. Schwerner, son of a Pelham, N.Y. wigmaker and a graduate of Cornell, had been working for the Congress of Racial Equality in Meridian, Miss., since January, had volunteered to go up to Oxford to instruct Northern students in voter- registration techniques. Chaney, a slender young man from Meridian, had accompanied him. Goodman was the son of a New York City building contractor and a student a Queens College. All were working with the 400 volunteers sent into Mississippi by COFO to help register Negroes. [There was an ironic juxtaposition in the fates of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.] (October 23, 1964) Of all the leaders of the U.S.'s Negro revolution, none has become more respected by his own people or more reviled by segregationists than the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Last week King, 35 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1964. He is the twelfth American, and the youngest person ever, to be so honored. (March 5, 1965) Malcolm X had been a pimp, a cocaine addict and a thief. He was an unashamed demagogue. His gospel was hatred: "Your little babies will get polio!" he cried to the "white devils." His creed was violence: "If ballots won't work, bullets will." Yet even before his bullet-ripped body went to its grave, Malcolm X was being sanctified. Negro leaders called him "brilliant," said he had recently "moderated" his views, blamed his assassination on "the white power structure." In fact, Malcolm X--in life and in death--was a disaster to the civil rights movement. Malcolm's murder, almost certainly at the hands of the Black Muslims from whom he had defected, came on a bright Sunday afternoon in full view of 400 Negroes in the Audubon Ballroom, a seedy two-story building on Manhattan's upper Broadway. Three men rushed down the aisle toward him. Eight feet away, they opened fire. One Negro with a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun blasted Malcolm at point-blank range. "There was what sounded like an explosion," said a dazed woman. "I looked at Malcolm, and there was blood running out of his goatee." Men and women threw themselves to the floor as the gunmen squeezed off at least a score of shots. A woman screamed: "Oh, black folks, black folks, why you got to kill each other?" [In 1965, King and other black leaders wanted to push beyond social integration, now guaranteed under the previous year's civil rights law, to political rights, mainly Southern blacks' rights to register and vote. King picked another tough Alabama town to tackle--Selma, where only 1% of eligible black voters were registered (vs. 20% in the state as a whole). The violence, the march, the hoopla all contributed to the passage of the second landmark civil rights act of the decade.] (March 19, 1965) On U.S. Highway 80, 400 yards beyond the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which crosses the Alabama River, was a phalanx of 60 state cops, headed by Colonel Al Lingo, an old crony of George Wallace's and a segregationist of the Governor's own stripe. The troopers stood three-deep across all four lanes of the highway. When the Negro columns came within 100 yards, a state police officer ordered the troopers to put on their gas masks. At 25 yards, the Negroes halted. State Police Major John Cloud barked through a bullhorn: "Turn around and go back to your church! You will not be allowed to march any further! You've got two minutes to disperse!" The Negroes stared at them somberly. Then Major Cloud gave the order: "Troopers--forward!" The patrolmen moved in a solid wall, pushing back the Negroes. The marchers in front began to stumble and fall, and a few troopers tripped. Suddenly the clubs started swinging. From the sidelines, white townspeople raised their voices in cheers and whoops. Joined now by the possemen and deputies, the patrolmen waded into the screaming mob. The marchers retreated for 75 yards, stopped to catch their breath. Still the troopers advanced. Now came the sound of canisters being fired. A Negro screamed: "Tear gas!" Within seconds the highway was swirling with white and yellow clouds of smoke, raging with the cries of men. Choking, bleeding, the Negroes fled in all directions while the whites pursued them. The mounted men uncoiled bull whips and lashed out viciously as the horses' hoofs trampled the fallen. "O.K., nigger!" snarled a posseman, flailing away at a running Negro woman. "You wanted to march--now march!" Rarely in history has public opinion reacted so spontaneously and with such fury. In Detroit, Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh and Michigan's Governor George Romney led a protest parade of 10,000 people. In Chicago, demonstrators blocked rush-hour traffic in the Loop. Nearly 2,000 people marched in Toronto, 1,000 in Union, N.J., 1,000 in Washington. In California and Wisconsin, in Connecticut and New York, citizens streamed onto the streets to express their rage. President Johnson publicly declared that he "deplored the brutality" in Selma--and urged Selma's opposing sides to cool down. And in Atlanta, Martin Luther King announced that as a "matter of conscience and in an attempt to arouse the deepest concern of the nation," he was "compelled" to lead another march from Selma to Montgomery. (April 2, 1965) The four-day 54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery had itself been an experience, not an excitement. It started on the afternoon of Sunday, March 21, with some 3,400 marchers led by two Nobel Peace prizewinners--the Rev. Martin Luther King and Ralph Bunche, now U.N. Under Secretary for Special Political Affairs. In the procession, whites and Negroes, clergymen and beatniks, old and young, walked side by side. The marchers had plenty of protection--from some 1,000 military police sent by President Johnson, from 1,900 federalized Alabama National Guardsmen, from platoons of U.S. marshals and FBI men. The big show came on Thursday, outside the state capitol. There, blue-helmeted state troopers and green-helmeted Alabama conservation and liquor-enforcement officers were strung out in glum lines, blocking entry to the building. Inside, Governor George Wallace peeked warily through Venetian blinds, occasionally stared through binoculars, and muttered, "That's quite a crowd." The ostensible purpose of the whole march had been to present to Governor Wallace a petition protesting voting discrimination. The Governor had promised to see "any citizens of Alabama"--and a committee of 20 petitioners, all Alabamians, had been appointed. But now George Wallace reneged. An aide met the petitioners, blandly told them, "The capitol is closed today." [The black revolution developed new complexities and complications, as the unity of the early years fractured into Southern and Northern, democratic and radical, peaceful and violence-prone factions. Continued gains--black political leaders elected in Southern towns and Northern cities, bigger and better percentages of schools integrated, voters registered, facilities integrated--were offset of the mindless violence of ghetto riots. The decade culminated in the assassination of Martin Luther King by a mysterious loner, James Earl Ray, whose motive--and paymasters--remain unknown to this day.] (August 20, 1965) The atmosphere reminded soldiers of embattled Saigon. Yet this, last week, was Los Angeles--the City of Angels, the "safe city," as its boosters like to call it, the city that has always taken pride in its history of harmonious racial relations. Savagery replaced harmony with nightmarish suddenness. One evening white Angelenos had nothing to worry about but the humidity. The next--and for four nights after that--marauding mobs in the Negro suburb of Watts pillaged, burned and killed, while 500 policemen and 5,000 National Guardsmen struggled vainly to contain their fury. Hour after hour, the toll mounted: 27 dead at week's end, nearly 600 injured, 1,700 arrested, property damage well over $100 million. What caused the disorders? There were as many explanations as there were points of view. In Los Angeles, "the long, hot summer" was blamed--as it was in Harlem last year--and not without reason: the rioting broke out on the fourth day of an unusual heat wave in which the Angelenos sweltered in humid 90-to-100 degree temperatures night and day. A deeper source of irritation for urban Negroes is their isolation and poverty in a land of conspicuous plenty. * * * [In the dusty courthouse squares and drowsy side streets of the Deep South, a continent away from the roiling slums of Los Angeles, other Negroes last week played out a quiet drama that rated few headlines. It will loom large in U.S. history, nonetheless. For in the Old Confederacy, under protection of the newly adopted Voting Rights Act, black Americans were finally claiming freedom's fundamental right. They were registering to vote. Thousands of Negroes were flocking to register in the nine counties in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi where the Government has posted federal examiners to implement the voting law. They came last week in battered autos and chartered buses and on foot. They stood in the shimmering heat of midsummer, and they waited. Even when registrars assured them, "We'll be here past today--we'll be here a long time," they still waited. They had, after all, waited a long while for this moment. Their patience was rewarded. In four days, 41 federal registrars added 6,998 Negro voters to the rolls in counties where there had previously been only 3,857. Beamed U.S. Attorney General Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach, 43, who played a central role in drafting the Voting Rights Act and was now directing the effort to make it work: "We're doing very well."] (July 1, 1966) The Supreme Court in 1954 changed many of the underlying conditions of life in the U.S. by decreeing that the old "separate but equal" doctrine was antithetical to American democracy. Today, a dozen years later, many militant ideologues are impatient with what they consider the glacial pace of progress in civil rights. They espouse instead a racist philosophy that could ultimately perpetuate the very separatism against which Negroes have fought so successfully. Oddly they are not white men but black, and their slogan is "Black Power!" On the face of it, "black power," a slogan probably used first by Negro Novelist Richard Wright (Native Son) after a 1953 visit to Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana, seems nothing more than an appeal to the long-submerged racial pride of Negroes. "It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with black supremacy or hating whites," says John McDermott of Chicago's Catholic Interracial Council, "but I can go sour in that way." Indeed, as applied by the young demagogues of SNCC and CORE, the notion of black power is inching dangerously toward a philosophy of black separatism and perhaps ultimately of black Jacobinism, almost indistinguishable from the wild-eyed doctrines of the Black Muslims and heavy with intimations of racial hatred. Martin Luther King specifically sought to rebut the evangelists of black power. "It is absolutely necessary for the Negro to gain power," he said, "but the term black power is unfortunate because it tends to give the impression of black nationalism. We must never seek power exclusively for the Negro but the sharing of power with the white people." (October 7, 1966) In the classic pattern, revolution leads to hope, hope to frustration, frustration to fury. Thus it is that so many revolutions end by devouring their own children and destroying the goals for which they were fought. This, it was increasingly apparent last week, may prove to be the fate of the civil rights revolution in America. During a summer of insensate riots and black-power demagoguery, the Negro's legitimate struggle for full citizenship sadly lost momentum, while white reaction against Negro excesses continued to mount. The commonly accepted--if ill-defined--name for this reversal of sentiment is, of course, "white backlash," a catchall term that accommodates every shade of reaction from out-and-out bigotry through unexpected fear to sorrowful inaction. In whatever guise, backlash now threatens not only to overshadow most other issues in many parts of the nation at the polls next month but also to negate some of the signal achievements for which the U.S. Negro has striven so hard. After the 1966 civil rights bill's ignominious demise last month, it was plain that the overriding cause was white resentment over Negro rioting in the cities. (December 16, 1966) The Federal Government gives no signs of relenting in its drive to desegregate Southern schools and hospitals. Last week, in a show of strength that can only worsen Lyndon Johnson's already battered popularity in the South, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare decided to cut off all federal funds from six segregated school districts in Arkansas, Mississippi and South Carolina, bringing to 37 the number deprived of financial assistance in Old Confederacy states. The need for action was demonstrated by a new federal survey that showed that during the present school term, only 12.5% of the 2,900,000 Negro children in the eleven states of the Old Confederacy are attending school with whites. Though that is a marked improvement over last year's 6% figure, the rates remain appallingly low. A dozen years after the U.S. Supreme Court urged "all deliberate speed" in school integration, only one of every 28 Negro children attends classes with whites in Louisiana, one of 31 in Mississippi, one of 42 in Alabama. (June 23, 1967) "I believe it is the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place," declared Lyndon Johnson, blinking in the bright sunlight of the White House Rose Garden. Thus, in a move that had been freely forecast but still represented a historic appointment, the President named Thurgood Marshall, 58, great-grandson of a Maryland slave, to be the first Negro Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. (July 21, 1967) The Los Angeles ghetto of Watts went berserk in 1965 after an unemployed high school dropout named Marquette Frye was arrested for drunken driving. In six days of rioting, 35 died, 900 were injured. In 1966, the Cleveland ghetto of Hough erupted when a white bartender denied a glass of ice water to a Negro patron. And in Newark, N.J., a trumpet-playing Negro cab driver by the name of John Smith (and the rumor that white policemen had killed him) last week became the random spark that ignited the latest--and one of the most violent--of U.S. race riots. Four nights running, and even during the heat of the day, snipers' bullets spanged off sidewalks, night sticks crunched on skulls, and looters made off with the entire inventory of scores of stores (one small Negro boy was seen carrying table lamps his own size). New Jersey's Governor Richard Hughes proclaimed Newark a "city in open rebellion," declared a state of emergency, and called out the National Guard. More than 4,000 city police, state troopers and Guardsmen patrolled the city's debris-littered streets. The toll in human suffering mounted hourly. Before the week was out, at least 21 people were dead, more than 1,000 injured, another 1,600 arrested. Property damage soared into the millions. The very triviality of the riot's immediate cause made the Newark outburst particularly terrifying. It seemed to say that a dozen or so people could be killed in almost any city, any night, by the purest chance. (August 4, 1967) "We have endured a week such as no nation should live through: a time of violence and tragedy." So said the President of the U.S. last week, as flames flickered above two score American communities. From Albany, N.Y., and Albion, Mich., to Waterbury, Conn., and Waukegan, Ill., the nation's black ghettos shuddered in paroxysms of rock-throwing, fire-bombing and looting. With more than 45 dead in rioting across the nation last week, thousands injured, and upwards of $1 billion in cash and property losses, Americans groped for words to fit the failure. At midnight, Hubert G. Locke, a Negro who is administrative assistant to the police commissioner, left his desk at headquarters and climbed to the roof for a look at Detroit. When he saw it, he wept. Beneath him, whole sections of the nation's fifth largest city lay in charred, smoking ruins. From Grand River Avenue to Gratiot Avenue six miles to the east, tongues of flame licked at the night sky, illuminating the angular skeletons of gutted homes, shops, supermarkets. Looters and arsonists danced in the eerie shadows, stripping a store clean, then setting it to the torch. Mourned Mayor Jerome Cavanagh: "It looks like Berlin in 1945." In the violent summer of 1967, Detroit became the scene of the bloodiest uprising in half a century and the costliest in terms of property damage in U.S. history. At week's end, there were 41 known dead, 347 injured, 3,800 arrested. Some 5,000 people were homeless (the vast majority Negro), while 1,300 buildings had been reduced to mounds of ashes and bricks and 2,700 businesses sacked. Damage estimates reached $500 million. The grim accounting surpassed that the Watts riot in Los Angels where 34 dies two years ago and property losses ran to $40 million. More noteworthy, the riot surpassed those that had preceded it in the summers of 1964 and 1965 and 1966 in a more fundamental way. For here was the most sensational expression of an ugly mood of nihilism and anarchy that has ever gripped a small but significant segment of America's Negro minority. * * * (November 17, 1967) "Hey! We got ourselves a Mayor!" cried a white college student from New York. "We did it! We did it!" exulted a middle-aged Negro man. "Amen, amen," murmured an elderly Negro woman, tears starting from her eyes. It was 3:02 a.m. at a downtown hotel, and Cleveland, the nation's tenth biggest city, had just chosen as its mayor Carl Burton Stokes, great-grandson of a slave, over Seth Taft, grandson of a President. Cleveland was not alone in making last week's voting a historic off-year election. Gary, Ind., a northern bastion of the Ku Klux Klan 40 years ago, also elected a Negro, Richard Hatcher, 34, as its mayor. As in Cleveland, white voters supplied the crucial margin. In Boston, a coalition of white and Negro voters chose moderate Mayoral Candidate Kevin Hagan White over Louise Day Hicks, who had become a totem of opposition to school integration. Martin Luther King called the three elections a "one-two-three punch against backlash and bigotry." (April 12, 1968) Across Mulberry Street from the Lorraine, on a slight rise, stands a nameless rooming house adorned only with a metal awning whose red, green and yellow stripes shade an equally nameless clientele. Into that dwelling walked a young, dark-haired white man in a neat business suit. "He had a silly little smile that I'll never forget," says Mrs. Bessie Brewer, who manages the rooming house. The man, who called himself John Willard, carefully chose Room 5, with a view of the Lorraine, and paid his $8.50 for the week with a crisp $20 bill--a rarity that stuck in Mrs. Brewer's mind. Back at the Lorraine, King and his aides were finishing a long, hot day of tactical planning for the next week's march--one that would be carried out in defiance of a federal district court injunction. In the course of the conference, King had assured his colleagues that, despite death threats, he was not afraid. "Maybe I've got the advantage over most people," he mused. "I've conquered the fear of death." King was well aware of his vulnerability. After the strategy session, King washed and dressed for dinner. Then he walked out of Room 306 onto the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine to take the evening air. Leaning casually on the green iron railing he chatted with his co-workers readying his Cadillac sedan in the dusk below. Then, from a window of the rooming house across the way, came a single shot. "It was like a stick of dynamite," recalled one aide. "It sounded like a firecracker, and I thought it was a pretty poor joke," said another. All of the aides hit the deck. The heavy-caliber bullet smashed through King's neck, exploded against his lower right jaw, severing his spinal cord and slamming him away from the rail, up against the wall, with hands drawn tautly toward his head. "Oh Lord!" moaned one of his lieutenants as he saw the blood flowing over King's white, button-down shirt. His aides tenderly laid towels over the gaping wound: some 30 hard-hatted Memphis police swiftly converged on the motel in response to the shot. In doing so, they missed the assassin, whose weapon (a scope-sighted 30.06 cal. Remington pump rifle), binoculars and suitcase were found near the rooming house. A spent cartridge casing was left in the grimy lavatory. The range from window to balcony: an easy 205 ft. In the aftermath of King's murder, rioting and looting broke out in 62 cities from coast to coast. In manic reaction, the plunderers went about their business in an almost carnival atmosphere. Looting--"early Easter shopping," as one Harlem resident called it--was the predominant activity, though some ghettos were burned as well. Great streamers of acrid smoke, drifting from blazing shops in Washington's commercial center, twisted among the cherry blossoms near the Lincoln Memorial, where five years earlier Martin Luther King had proclaimed his vision of black and white harmony. Fires crackled three blocks from the White House, and from the air the capital looked like a bombed city. A three-mile reach of Chicago's Negro West Side erupted in a pillage and cataclysmic flames that left an eight-block area in a state of devastation as severe as that of Detroit's ghetto last summer. Swift action by civil authorities, as in Michigan, where Governor George Romney called up 9,000 National Guardsmen and Detroit's Mayor Jerome Cavanagh clamped down a dusk to dawn curfew, and restraint by police in direct confrontations, kept the lid on most communities. Into Washington and Chicago poured 25,000 troops. Baltimore seemed building toward a blowup. "I ask every citizen to reject the blind violence that has struck Dr. King," said the President. In the climate of sorrow and guilt that engulfed most Americans, there was an opening for an accommodation between the races that might otherwise never have presented itself. Lyndon Johnson called at week's end for an extraordinary joint session of Congress to hear "the President's recommendations for actions--constructive action instead of destructive action--in this hour of national need." It is not enough, Johnson implied, to mourn Martin Luther King. His death demands expiation, as did that of John F. Kennedy. Now, as in November 1963, President Johnson seems determined to strike forcefully at the consciences of all Americans in order to wrest from tragedy and trauma the will to make a better society. </body> </article> </text>