Richard Claxton Gregory was an American comedian, civil rights leader, business owner and entrepreneur, vegetarian activist, and conspiracy theorist. His writings were best sellers.
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Richard Claxton Gregory (October 12, 1932 – August 19, 2017) was an American comedian, civil rights leader, business owner and entrepreneur, vegetarian activist, and conspiracy theorist.[1][2] His writings were best sellers. Gregory became popular among the African-American communities in the southern United States with his "no-holds-barred" sets, poking fun at the bigotry and racism in the United States. In 1961 he became a staple in the comedy clubs, appeared on television, and released comedy record albums.[3]
Gregory was at the forefront of political activism in the 1960s, when he protested the Vietnam War and racial injustice. He was arrested multiple times and went on many hunger strikes.[4] He later became a speaker and author, primarily promoting spirituality.[3] Gregory died of heart failure, aged 84, at a Washington, D.C., hospital in August 2017.[3]
Early life
Gregory was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Lucille, a housemaid, and Presley Gregory.[5] At Sumner High School, he was aided by teachers, among them Warren St. James; he also excelled at running, winning the state cross country championship in 1950.[6] Gregory earned a track scholarship to Southern Illinois University (SIU),[7] where he set school records as a half-miler and miler.[8] He was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. In 1954, his college career was interrupted for two years when he was drafted into the United States Army. At the urging of his commanding officer, who had taken notice of his penchant for joking, Gregory got his start in comedy in the Army, where he entered and won several talent shows. In 1956, Gregory briefly returned to SIU after his discharge, but dropped out because he felt that the university "didn't want me to study, they wanted me to run."[9]
In the hopes of becoming a professional comedian, Gregory moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he became part of a new generation of black comedians that included Nipsey Russell, Bill Cosby, and Godfrey Cambridge, all of whom broke with the minstrel tradition that presented stereotypical black characters. Gregory drew on current events, especially racial issues, for much of his material: "Segregation is not all bad. Have you ever heard of a collision where the people in the back of the bus got hurt?"[10]
Comedy career
Gregory started helping his family with the gigs he started to get at a young age. He was always involved in sports and in social groups in high school. He enrolled in Southern Illinois University in 1951. He was named the university's outstanding student athlete of the year in 1953. The same year he left college when he was drafted into the United States Army, where he performed comedy shows hosted by the Army after encouragement by his Commanding Officer. In 1961, Gregory made his New York debut at The Blue Angel nightclub, also recording a live set there, "Dick Gregory at the Blue Angel" for his album East & West.[11][12] He soon came back to Chicago and finally got his big break at the Playboy Club in Chicago, also in 1961, that was supposed to be one night and ended up being six weeks and earned him a spot in Time and a guest appearance on Jack Paar’s show and other night clubs shows, etc.
External video
2014 Ferguson and Beyond Rally 31.jpg
video icon Dick Gregory: Advice to Young African Americans, National Visionary Leadership Project
video icon Dick Gregory: The Civil Rights Movement – Part 1, National Visionary Leadership Project
video icon Booknotes interview with Gregory on Callus on My Soul: A Memoir, March 4, 2001, C-SPAN
Gregory began his career as a comedian while serving in the military in the mid-1950s. He served in the Army for a year and a half at Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Lee in Virginia, and Fort Smith in Arkansas. He was drafted in 1954 while attending Southern Illinois University. After being discharged in 1956, he returned to the university but did not receive a degree. He moved to Chicago with a desire to perform comedy professionally.[10]
In 1958, Gregory opened the Apex Club nightclub in Illinois. The club failed and landed Gregory in financial hardship. In 1959, Gregory landed a job as master of ceremonies at the Roberts Show Club.[13]
While working for the United States Postal Service during the daytime, Gregory performed as a comedian in small, primarily black-patronized nightclubs. In an interview with The Huffington Post, Gregory described the history of black comics as limited: "Blacks could sing and dance in the white night clubs but weren't allowed to stand flat-footed and talk to white folks, which is what a comic does."[14]
In 1961, Gregory was working at the black-owned Roberts Show Bar in Chicago when he was spotted by Hugh Hefner.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I understand there are a good many Southerners in the room tonight. I know the South very well. I spent twenty years there one night.
Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant and this white waitress came up to me and said, "We don't serve colored people here." I said, "That's all right. I don't eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken."
Then these three white boys came up to me and said, "Boy, we're giving you fair warning. Anything you do to that chicken, we're gonna do to you." So I put down my knife and fork, I picked up that chicken and I kissed it. Then I said, "Line up, boys!"
Gregory attributed the launch of his career to Hefner. Based on his performance at Roberts Show Bar, Hefner hired Gregory to work at the Chicago Playboy Club as a replacement for comedian "Professor" Irwin Corey.[15]
Gregory's comedy occasioned controversy in some conservative white circles. The administration of the University of Tennessee, for instance, branded Gregory an "extreme racist"[16] whose "appearance would be an outrage and an insult to many citizens of this state",[17] and revoked his invitation by students to speak on campus. The students sued, with noted litigator William Kunstler as their counsel, and in Smith v. University of Tennessee, 300 F. Supp. 777 (E.D. Tenn. 1969), won an order from the court that the university's policy was "too broad and vague". The University of Tennessee then implemented an "open speaker" system, and Gregory subsequently performed in April 1970.[16]
In 1964, Gregory's book, Nigger, was published. Since then, the book has never been out of print. In 2019 a trade paperback was published as well as an audio version.[18]
Post-standup career
Gregory was number 82 on Comedy Central's list of the 100 Greatest Stand-ups of all time and had his own star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.[19]
He was a co-host with radio personality Cathy Hughes, and was a frequent morning guest, on WOL 1450 AM talk radio's The Power, the flagship station of Hughes' Radio One.[20] He also appeared regularly on the nationally syndicated Imus in the Morning program.[21]
Gregory appeared as "Mr. Sun" on the television show Wonder Showzen (the third episode, entitled "Ocean", aired in 2005). As Chauncey, a puppet character, imbibes a hallucinogenic substance, Mr. Sun warns: "Don't get hooked on imagination, Chauncey. It can lead to terrible, horrible things." Gregory also provided guest commentary on the Wonder Showzen Season One DVD.[22] Large segments of his commentary were intentionally bleeped out, including the names of several dairy companies, as he made potentially defamatory remarks concerning ill effects that the consumption of cow milk has on human beings.
Gregory attended and spoke at the funeral of James Brown on December 30, 2006, in Augusta, Georgia.[23]
Gregory was an occasional guest on the Mark Thompson's Make It Plain Sirius Channel 146 Radio Show from 3pm to 6pm PST.[24]
Gregory appeared on The Alex Jones Show on September 14, 2010, March 19, 2012, and April 1, 2014.[25][26][27]
Gregory gave the keynote address for Black History Month at Bryn Mawr College on February 28, 2013.[28] His take-away message to the students was to never accept injustice.
Once I accept injustice, I become injustice. For example, paper mills give off a terrible stench. But the people who work there don't smell it. Remember, Dr. King was assassinated when he went to work for garbage collectors. To help them as workers to enforce their rights. They couldn't smell the stench of the garbage all around them anymore. They were used to it. They would eat their lunch out of a brown bag sitting on the garbage truck. One day, a worker was sitting inside the back of the truck on top of the garbage, and got crushed to death because no one knew he was there.[28]
Towards the end of his life, he was featured in a Fantagraphics book by Pat Thomas entitled Listen, Whitey: The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965–1975, which uses the political recordings of the Civil Rights era to highlight sociopolitical meanings throughout the movement.[29] Gregory is known for comedic performances that not only made people laugh, but mocked the establishment. According to Thomas, Gregory's monologues reflect a time when entertainment needed to be political to be relevant, which is why he included his standup in the collection. Gregory is featured along with the likes of Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr., Langston Hughes and Bill Cosby.[30]
Political career
Gregory began his political career by running against Richard J. Daley for Mayor of Chicago in 1967. Though he did not win, this would not prove to be the end of his participation in electoral politics.[31]
Gregory ran for presidency in the 1968 United States presidential election as a write-in candidate of the Freedom and Peace Party, which had broken off from the Peace and Freedom Party. He garnered 47,097 votes, including one from Hunter S. Thompson,[32] with fellow activist Mark Lane as his running mate in some states. His running mate in New Jersey was Dr. David Frost of Plainfield, a biologist, Rutgers professor, and Chairman of NJ SANE (Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy). Famed pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock was the running mate in Virginia[33] and Pennsylvania[34] garnering more than the party he had left.[35] The Freedom and Peace Party also ran other candidates, including Beulah Sanders for New York State Senate and Flora Brown for New York State Assembly.[36] His efforts landed him on the master list of Nixon's political opponents.
Gregory then wrote the book Write Me In about his presidential campaign. One anecdote in the book relates the story of a publicity stunt that came out of Operation Breadbasket in Chicago. The campaign had printed one-dollar bills with Gregory's image on them, some of which made it into circulation. The majority of these bills were quickly seized by the federal government,[8] much in part to the bills resembling authentic US currency enough to work in many dollar-cashing machines of the day.[37] Gregory avoided being charged with a federal crime, later joking that the bills could not really be considered United States currency, because "everyone knows a black man will never be on a U.S. bill."[38] On October 15, 1969, Gregory spoke at the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam demonstration in Washington, D.C., where he joked to the crowd: "The President says nothing you kids do will have any effect on him. Well, I suggest he make one long-distance call to the LBJ ranch".[39]
Political activism
Anti-Apartheid
On July 21, 1979, Gregory appeared at the Amandla Festival where Bob Marley, Patti LaBelle, and Eddie Palmieri, among others, performed.[40] Gregory gave a speech before Marley's performance, blaming President Jimmy Carter, and showing his support for the international Anti-Apartheid Movement.
Civil rights movement
Gregory in 1969 in Tallahassee, Florida during a civil rights speech
Gregory was active in the civil rights movement. On October 7, 1963, he came to Selma, Alabama, and spoke for two hours on a public platform two days before the voter registration drive known as "Freedom Day" (October 7, 1963).[41]
In 1964, Gregory became more involved in civil rights activities, activism against the Vietnam War, economic reform, and anti-drug issues. As a part of his activism, he went on several hunger strikes and campaigns in America and overseas. In the early 1970s, he was banned from Australia, where government officials feared he would "...stir up demonstrations against the Vietnam war."[42]
In 1964, Gregory played a role in the search for three missing civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, who vanished in Philadelphia, Mississippi. After Gregory and members of CORE met with Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence A. Rainey, Gregory became convinced that the Sheriff's office was complicit. With cash provided by Hugh Hefner, Gregory announced a $25,000 reward for information. The FBI, which had been criticized for inaction, eventually followed suit with its own reward, and the rewards worked. The bodies of the three men were found by the FBI 44 days after they disappeared.[43]
At a civil rights rally marking the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Gregory criticized the United States, calling it "the most dishonest, ungodly, unspiritual nation that ever existed in the history of the planet. As we talk now, America is 5 percent of the world's population and consumes 96 percent of the world's hard drugs".[44]
Feminism
Gregory was an outspoken feminist, and in 1978 joined Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Margaret Heckler, Barbara Mikulski, and others to lead the National ERA March for Ratification and Extension, a march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the United States Capitol. Gregory was invited to join the march by actress and activist Susan Blakely.[citation needed] There were over 100,000 on Women's Equality Day (August 26), 1978, to demonstrate for a ratification deadline extension for the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution, and for the ratification of the ERA.[45][citation needed] The march was ultimately successful in extending the deadline to June 30, 1982, and Gregory joined other activists to the Senate for celebration and victory speeches by pro-ERA Senators, members of Congress, and activists. The ERA narrowly failed to be ratified by the extended ratification date.
Gregory at the Million Woman March in 1997
JFK assassination and the Warren Commission
Gregory became an outspoken critic of the findings of the Warren Commission concerning the assassination of John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald. On February 3, 1975, in Washington, D.C., Gregory introduced photographic forensic investigator Stephen Jaffe and assassination researchers Robert J. Groden and Ralph Schoenman to the members and lawyers for the presidential commission known as the Rockefeller Commission who gave testimony and presented evidence. A month later, on March 6, 1975, Gregory and researcher Robert J. Groden appeared on Geraldo Rivera's late night ABC talk show Goodnight America. An important historical event happened that night when the famous Zapruder film of JFK's assassination was shown to the public on TV for the first time.[46] The public's response and outrage to its showing led to the forming of the Hart-Schweiker investigation, which contributed to the Church Committee Investigation on Intelligence Activities by the United States, which resulted in the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations investigation.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Gregory and Mark Lane conducted landmark research into the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., helping move the U.S. House Select Assassinations Committee to investigate the murder, along with that of John F. Kennedy. Lane was the author of conspiracy theory books such as Rush to Judgment. The pair wrote the King conspiracy book Code Name Zorro, which postulated that convicted assassin James Earl Ray did not act alone. Gregory also argued that the moon landing was faked and the commonly accepted account of the 9/11 attacks is incorrect, among other conspiracy theories.[1][47]
In 1998, Gregory spoke at the celebration of the birthday of Dr Martin Luther King Jr., with President Bill Clinton in attendance. Not long after, the President told Gregory's long-time friend and public relations consultant Steve Jaffe, "I love Dick Gregory; he is one of the funniest people on the planet." They spoke of how Gregory had made a comment on Dr. King's birthday that broke everyone into laughter when he noted that the President made Speaker Newt Gingrich ride "in the back of the plane," on an Air Force One trip overseas.[48]
Native American rights
In 1966, Gregory and his wife were arrested for illegal net fishing alongside of the Nisqually people in Washington state in a protest fish-in. The tribe was protesting against the state laws that ban forms of fishing other than hook-and-line because it barred their rights guaranteed to them through a federal treaty that allowed them to fish in their traditional ways.[49] He was later released from jail in Olympia, Washington after six weeks of fasting to call attention to the violation of Native American treaties by the United States government.[49]
US Embassy hostage crisis in Iran
Gregory was an outspoken activist during the US Embassy hostage crisis in Iran. In 1980, he traveled to Tehran to attempt to negotiate the hostages' release and engaged in a public hunger strike there, weighing less than 100 pounds (45 kg) when he returned to the United States.[50]
Vegetarianism and animal rights
Gregory became a vegetarian and fasting activist in 1965 "based on the philosophy of nonviolence practiced during the Civil Rights Movement."[51] His 1973 book, Dick Gregory's Natural Diet For Folks Who Eat: Cookin' With Mother Nature, outlined how fasting and going vegetarian led to dramatic weight loss.[51] He developed a diet drink called Bahamian Diet Nutritional Drink and went on TV shows to advocate his diet to help the morbidly obese. He wrote the introduction to Viktoras Kulvinskas' book Survival into the 21st Century.[31] A talk he gave at Amherst College in 1986 inspired Tracye McQuirter to become a vegan activist.[51]
In 1984, he founded Health Enterprises, Inc., a company that distributed weight-loss products. With this company, Gregory made efforts to improve the life expectancy of African Americans, which he believed was being hindered by poor nutrition and drug and alcohol abuse.[52] In 1985, Gregory introduced the Slim-Safe Bahamian Diet, a powdered diet mix.[53] He launched the weight-loss powder at the Whole Life Expo in Boston under the slogan "It's cool to be healthy." The diet mix, if drunk three times a day, was said to provide rapid weight loss. Gregory received a multimillion-dollar distribution contract to retail the diet.[54]
In 1985, the Ethiopian government adopted, to reported success, Gregory's formula to combat malnutrition during a period of famine in the country.[55] Gregory's clients included Muhammad Ali.[56]
In 2003, Gregory and Cornel West wrote letters on behalf of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) to Kentucky Fried Chicken's CEO, asking that the company improve its animal-handling procedures.[57]
Gregory saw civil rights and animal rights as intrinsically linked, once stating, "Because I'm a civil rights activist, I am also an animal rights activist. Animals and humans suffer and die alike. Violence causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of death, the same arrogant, cruel and vicious taking of life. We shouldn't be a part of it."[58]
Gregory in 2015
Personal life
Gregory met his future wife Lillian Gregory[59] at an African-American club; they married in 1959. They had 11 children (including one son, Richard Jr., who died two months after birth): Michele, Lynne, Pamela, Paula, Xenobia (Stephanie), Gregory, Christian, Miss, Ayanna, and Yohance.[10] In a 2000 interview with The Boston Globe, Gregory was quoted as saying, "People ask me about being a father and not being there. I say, 'Jack the Ripper had a father. Hitler had a father. Don't talk to me about family.'"[20]
Health and death
Gregory was diagnosed with lymphoma in late 1999. He said he was treating the cancer with herbs, vitamins, and exercise, which he believed kept the cancer in remission.[60]
Gregory died from heart failure[61] at a hospital in Washington, D.C., on August 19, 2017, at the age of 84.[50] A week prior to his death, he was hospitalized with a bacterial infection.[62]
Discography
In Living Black and White (1961)[63]
East & West (1961)[63]
Dick Gregory Talks Turkey (1962)[63]
The Two Sides of Dick Gregory (1963)[63]
My Brother's Keeper (1963)
Dick Gregory Running for President (1964)[63]
So You See... We All Have Problems (1964)
Dick Gregory On: (1969)[63]
The Light Side: The Dark Side (1969)[63]
Dick Gregory's Frankenstein (1970)[63]
Live at the Village Gate (1970)[63]
At Kent State (1971)[63]
Caught in the Act (1974)[63]
The Best of Dick Gregory (1997)[64]
21st Century "State of the Union" (2001)
You Don't Know Dick (2016)
Bibliography
Nigger: An Autobiography by Dick Gregory, an autobiography written with Robert Lipsyte, E. P. Dutton, September 1964 (reprinted, Pocket Books, 1965–present)
Write me in!, Bantam, 1968.
From the Back of the Bus
What's Happening?
The Shadow that Scares Me
Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, with Commentary, a book of Bible-based humor. ISBN 0-8128-6194-9
Dick Gregory's Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat: Cookin' With Mother Nature!. ISBN 0-06-080315-0
(with Shelia P. Moses), Callus on My Soul: A Memoir. ISBN 0-7582-0202-4
Up from Nigger
No More Lies; The Myth and the Reality of American History
Dick Gregory's Political Primer
(with Mark Lane), Murder in Memphis: The FBI and the Assassination of Martin Luther King
(with Mel Watkins), African American Humor: The Best Black Comedy from Slavery to Today (Library of Black America)
Robert Lee Green, Dick Gregory, daring Black leader
African American Humor: The Best Black Comedy from Slavery to Today (editor). ISBN 1-55652-430-7
"Not Poor, Just Broke", short story
"Defining Moments in Black History: Reading Between the Lies", 2017.
Filmography
The One and Only Dick Gregory (2021)
The Leisure Seeker (2017)
The History of Comedy (2017)
Ir/Reconcilable (2014)
Steppin: The Movie (2009)
One Bright Shining Moment (2006)
Wonder Showzen (2005)
Reno 911! (2004)
The Hot Chick (2002), as Bathroom Attendant
Children of the Struggle (1999), as Vernon Lee
Panther (1995), as Rev. Slocum
The Glass Shield (1994)
ABC Stage 67 (TV Series) (1967), as Civil Rights Marcher
Sweet Love, Bitter (1967), as Richie 'Eagle' Stokes
Cultural references
Joe Morton played Dick Gregory in 2016 in the play Turn Me Loose at the Westside Theatre in Manhattan.[65]
The American hip-hop duo Run the Jewels included a reference to Gregory's theories in the song "Walking in the Snow" on their album RTJ4, released in 2020. The song was first performed live in an event by Adult Swim coinciding with the lead-up to the 2020 United States Presidential election, broadcast on October 17, 2020. The excerpted lyrics are:
"Dick Gregory told me a couple of secrets before he laid down in his grave
All of us serve the same masters, All of us nothin' but slaves
Never forget in the story of Jesus, the hero was killed by the state."[66]
A documentary film about the life of Dick Gregory entitled The One and Only Dick Gregory written and directed by Andre Gaines made its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 19, 2021, and was released on Showtime television on July 4, 2021. The film was heralded by critics and rated Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes with a 100% critics' score.[67][68]
See also
flag United States portal
Timeline of the civil rights movement
Gregory v. City of Chicago
List of peace activists
List of civil rights leaders
The civil rights movement[b] was a nonviolent social movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement throughout the United States. The movement had its origins in the Reconstruction era during the late 19th century, although it made its largest legislative gains in the 1960s after years of direct actions and grassroots protests. The social movement's major nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience campaigns eventually secured new protections in federal law for the civil rights of all Americans.
After the American Civil War and the subsequent abolition of slavery in the 1860s, the Reconstruction Amendments to the United States Constitution granted emancipation and constitutional rights of citizenship to all African Americans, most of whom had recently been enslaved. For a short period of time, African-American men voted and held political office, but as time went on they were increasingly deprived of civil rights, often under the racist Jim Crow laws, and African Americans were subjected to discrimination and sustained violence by white supremacists in the South. Over the following century, various efforts were made by African Americans to secure their legal and civil rights, such as the civil rights movement (1865–1896) and the civil rights movement (1896–1954). The movement was characterized by nonviolent mass protests and civil disobedience following highly publicized events such as the lynching of Emmett Till. These included boycotts such as the Montgomery bus boycott, "sit-ins" in Greensboro and Nashville, a series of protests during the Birmingham campaign, and a march from Selma to Montgomery.[1][2]
At the culmination of a legal strategy pursued by African Americans, in 1954 the Supreme Court struck down many of the laws that had allowed racial segregation and discrimination to be legal in the United States as unconstitutional.[3][4][5][6] The Warren Court made a series of landmark rulings against racist discrimination, including the separate but equal doctrine, such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States (1964), and Loving v. Virginia (1967) which banned segregation in public schools and public accommodations, and struck down all state laws banning interracial marriage.[7][8][9] The rulings played a crucial role in bringing an end to the segregationist Jim Crow laws prevalent in the Southern states.[10] In the 1960s, moderates in the movement worked with the United States Congress to achieve the passage of several significant pieces of federal legislation that authorized oversight and enforcement of civil rights laws. The Civil Rights Act of 1964[11] explicitly banned all discrimination based on race, including racial segregation in schools, businesses, and in public accommodations.[12] The Voting Rights Act of 1965 restored and protected voting rights by authorizing federal oversight of registration and elections in areas with historic under-representation of minority voters. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.
African Americans re-entered politics in the South, and young people across the country began to take action. From 1964 through 1970, a wave of riots and protests in black communities dampened support from the white middle class, but increased support from private foundations.[13][clarification needed] The emergence of the Black Power movement, which lasted from 1965 to 1975, challenged Black leaders of the movement for its cooperative attitude and its adherence to legalism and nonviolence. Its leaders demanded not only legal equality, but also economic self-sufficiency for the community. Support for the Black Power movement came from African Americans who had seen little material improvement since the civil rights movement's peak in the mid-1960s, and still faced discrimination in jobs, housing, education and politics. Martin Luther King Jr. was the most visible leader of the movement. However, some scholars note that the movement was too diverse to be credited to any particular person, organization, or strategy.[14]
Background
Main articles: African-American history and Timeline of African-American history
American Civil War and Reconstruction era
Further information: Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
Before the American Civil War, eight serving presidents had owned slaves, almost four million black people remained enslaved in the South, generally only white men with property could vote, and the Naturalization Act of 1790 limited U.S. citizenship to whites.[15][16][17] Following the Civil War, three constitutional amendments were passed, including the 13th Amendment (1865) that ended slavery; the 14th Amendment (1869) that gave black people citizenship, adding their total for Congressional apportionment; and the 15th Amendment (1870) that gave black males the right to vote (only males could vote in the U.S. at the time).[18] From 1865 to 1877, the United States underwent a turbulent Reconstruction era during which the federal government tried to establish free labor and the civil rights of freedmen in the South after the end of slavery. Many whites resisted the social changes, leading to the formation of insurgent movements such as the Ku Klux Klan, whose members attacked black and white Republicans in order to maintain white supremacy. In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant, the U.S. Army, and U.S. Attorney General Amos T. Akerman, initiated a campaign to repress the KKK under the Enforcement Acts.[19] Some states were reluctant to enforce the federal measures of the act. In addition, by the early 1870s, other white supremacist and insurgent paramilitary groups arose that violently opposed African-American legal equality and suffrage, intimidating and suppressing black voters, and assassinating Republican officeholders.[20][21] However, if the states failed to implement the acts, the laws allowed the Federal Government to get involved.[21] Many Republican governors were afraid of sending black militia troops to fight the Klan for fear of war.[21]
Disenfranchisement after Reconstruction
Main article: Disenfranchisement after the Reconstruction Era
Further information: Jim Crow laws, Civil rights movement (1865–1896), and Civil rights movement (1896–1954)
After the disputed election of 1876, which resulted in the end of Reconstruction and the withdrawal of federal troops, whites in the South regained political control of the region's state legislatures. They continued to intimidate and violently attack blacks before and during elections to suppress their voting, but the last African Americans were elected to Congress from the South before disenfranchisement of blacks by states throughout the region, as described below.
The mob-style lynching of Will James, Cairo, Illinois, 1909
From 1890 to 1908, southern states passed new constitutions and laws to disenfranchise African Americans and many Poor Whites by creating barriers to voter registration; voting rolls were dramatically reduced as blacks and poor whites were forced out of electoral politics. After the landmark Supreme Court case of Smith v. Allwright (1944), which prohibited white primaries, progress was made in increasing black political participation in the Rim South and Acadiana – although almost entirely in urban areas[22] and a few rural localities where most blacks worked outside plantations.[23] The status quo ante of excluding African Americans from the political system lasted in the remainder of the South, especially North Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, until national civil rights legislation was passed in the mid-1960s to provide federal enforcement of constitutional voting rights. For more than sixty years, blacks in the South were essentially excluded from politics, unable to elect anyone to represent their interests in Congress or local government.[21] Since they could not vote, they could not serve on local juries.
During this period, the white-dominated Democratic Party maintained political control of the South. With whites controlling all the seats representing the total population of the South, they had a powerful voting bloc in Congress. The Republican Party—the "party of Lincoln" and the party to which most blacks had belonged—shrank to insignificance except in remote Unionist areas of Appalachia and the Ozarks as black voter registration was suppressed. The Republican lily-white movement also gained strength by excluding blacks. Until 1965, the "Solid South" was a one-party system under the white Democrats. Excepting the previously noted historic Unionist strongholds the Democratic Party nomination was tantamount to election for state and local office.[24] In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington, president of the Tuskegee Institute, to dine at the White House, making him the first African American to attend an official dinner there. "The invitation was roundly criticized by southern politicians and newspapers."[25] Washington persuaded the president to appoint more blacks to federal posts in the South and to try to boost African-American leadership in state Republican organizations. However, these actions were resisted by both white Democrats and white Republicans as an unwanted federal intrusion into state politics.[25]
Lynching victim Will Brown, who was mutilated and burned during the Omaha, Nebraska race riot of 1919. Postcards and photographs of lynchings were popular souvenirs in the U.S.[26]
During the same time as African Americans were being disenfranchised, white southerners imposed racial segregation by law. Violence against blacks increased, with numerous lynchings through the turn of the century. The system of de jure state-sanctioned racial discrimination and oppression that emerged from the post-Reconstruction South became known as the "Jim Crow" system. The United States Supreme Court made up almost entirely of Northerners, upheld the constitutionality of those state laws that required racial segregation in public facilities in its 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, legitimizing them through the "separate but equal" doctrine.[27] Segregation, which began with slavery, continued with Jim Crow laws, with signs used to show blacks where they could legally walk, talk, drink, rest, or eat.[28] For those places that were racially mixed, non-whites had to wait until all white customers were served first.[28] Elected in 1912, President Woodrow Wilson gave in to demands by Southern members of his cabinet and ordered segregation of workplaces throughout the federal government.[29]
The early 20th century is a period often referred to as the "nadir of American race relations", when the number of lynchings was highest. While tensions and civil rights violations were most intense in the South, social discrimination affected African Americans in other regions as well.[30] At the national level, the Southern bloc controlled important committees in Congress, defeated passage of federal laws against lynching, and exercised considerable power beyond the number of whites in the South.
Characteristics of the post-Reconstruction period:
Racial segregation. By law, public facilities and government services such as education were divided into separate "white" and "colored" domains.[31] Characteristically, those for colored were underfunded and of inferior quality.
Disenfranchisement. When white Democrats regained power, they passed laws that made voter registration more restrictive, essentially forcing black voters off the voting rolls. The number of African-American voters dropped dramatically, and they were no longer able to elect representatives. From 1890 to 1908, Southern states of the former Confederacy created constitutions with provisions that disfranchised tens of thousands of African Americans, and U.S. states such as Alabama disenfranchised poor whites as well.
Exploitation. Increased economic oppression of blacks through the convict lease system, Latinos, and Asians,[clarification needed] denial of economic opportunities, and widespread employment discrimination.
Violence. Individual, police, paramilitary, organizational, and mob racial violence against blacks (and Latinos in the Southwest, and Asians in the West Coast).
KKK night rally near Chicago, in the 1920s
African Americans and other ethnic minorities rejected this regime. They resisted it in numerous ways and sought better opportunities through lawsuits, new organizations, political redress, and labor organizing (see the Civil rights movement (1896–1954)). The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded in 1909. It fought to end race discrimination through litigation, education, and lobbying efforts. Its crowning achievement was its legal victory in the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education (1954), when the Warren Court ruled that segregation of public schools in the US was unconstitutional and, by implication, overturned the "separate but equal" doctrine established in Plessy v. Ferguson of 1896.[7][32] Following the unanimous Supreme Court ruling, many states began to gradually integrate their schools, but some areas of the South resisted by closing public schools altogether.[7][32]
The integration of Southern public libraries followed demonstrations and protests that used techniques seen in other elements of the larger civil rights movement.[33] This included sit-ins, beatings, and white resistance.[33] For example, in 1963 in the city of Anniston, Alabama, two black ministers were brutally beaten for attempting to integrate the public library.[33] Though there was resistance and violence, the integration of libraries was generally quicker than the integration of other public institutions.[33]
National issues
Colored Sailors room in World War I
The situation for blacks outside the South was somewhat better (in most states they could vote and have their children educated, though they still faced discrimination in housing and jobs). In 1900 Reverend Matthew Anderson, speaking at the annual Hampton Negro Conference in Virginia, said that "...the lines along most of the avenues of wage-earning are more rigidly drawn in the North than in the South. There seems to be an apparent effort throughout the North, especially in the cities to debar the colored worker from all the avenues of higher remunerative labor, which makes it more difficult to improve his economic condition even than in the South."[34] From 1910 to 1970, blacks sought better lives by migrating north and west out of the South. A total of nearly seven million blacks left the South in what was known as the Great Migration, most during and after World War II. So many people migrated that the demographics of some previously black-majority states changed to a white majority (in combination with other developments). The rapid influx of blacks altered the demographics of Northern and Western cities; happening at a period of expanded European, Hispanic, and Asian immigration, it added to social competition and tensions, with the new migrants and immigrants battling for a place in jobs and housing.
A white gang looking for blacks during the Chicago race riot of 1919
Reflecting social tensions after World War I, as veterans struggled to return to the workforce and labor unions were organizing, the Red Summer of 1919 was marked by hundreds of deaths and higher casualties across the U.S. as a result of white race riots against blacks that took place in more than three dozen cities, such as the Chicago race riot of 1919 and the Omaha race riot of 1919. Urban problems such as crime and disease were blamed on the large influx of Southern blacks to cities in the north and west, based on stereotypes of rural southern African-Americans. Overall, blacks in Northern and Western cities experienced systemic discrimination in a plethora of aspects of life. Within employment, economic opportunities for blacks were routed to the lowest status and restrictive in potential mobility. Within the housing market, stronger discriminatory measures were used in correlation to the influx, resulting in a mix of "targeted violence, restrictive covenants, redlining and racial steering".[35] The Great Migration resulted in many African Americans becoming urbanized, and they began to realign from the Republican to the Democratic Party, especially because of opportunities under the New Deal of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration during the Great Depression in the 1930s.[36] Substantially under pressure from African-American supporters who began the March on Washington Movement, President Roosevelt issued the first federal order banning discrimination and created the Fair Employment Practice Committee. After both World Wars, black veterans of the military pressed for full civil rights and often led activist movements. In 1948, President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which ended segregation in the military.[37]
White tenants seeking to prevent blacks from moving into the housing project erected this sign, Detroit, 1942.
Housing segregation became a nationwide problem following the Great Migration of black people out of the South. Racial covenants were employed by many real estate developers to "protect" entire subdivisions, with the primary intent to keep "white" neighborhoods "white". Ninety percent of the housing projects built in the years following World War II were racially restricted by such covenants.[38] Cities known for their widespread use of racial covenants include Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, Milwaukee,[39] Los Angeles, Seattle, and St. Louis.[40]
Said premises shall not be rented, leased, or conveyed to, or occupied by, any person other than of the white or Caucasian race.
— Racial covenant for a home in Beverly Hills, California.[41]
While many whites defended their space with violence, intimidation, or legal tactics toward black people, many other whites migrated to more racially homogeneous suburban or exurban regions, a process known as white flight.[42] From the 1930s to the 1960s, the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) issued guidelines that specified that a realtor "should never be instrumental in introducing to a neighborhood a character or property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individual whose presence will be clearly detrimental to property values in a neighborhood." The result was the development of all-black ghettos in the North and West, where much housing was older, as well as South.[43]
The first anti-miscegenation law was passed by the Maryland General Assembly in 1691, criminalizing interracial marriage.[44] In a speech in Charleston, Illinois in 1858, Abraham Lincoln stated, "I am not, nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people".[45] By the late 1800s, 38 US states had anti-miscegenation statutes.[44] By 1924, the ban on interracial marriage was still in force in 29 states.[44] While interracial marriage had been legal in California since 1948, in 1957 actor Sammy Davis Jr. faced a backlash for his involvement with white actress Kim Novak.[46] Davis briefly married a black dancer in 1958 to protect himself from mob violence.[46] In 1958, officers in Virginia entered the home of Mildred and Richard Loving and dragged them out of bed for living together as an interracial couple, on the basis that "any white person intermarry with a colored person"— or vice versa—each party "shall be guilty of a felony" and face prison terms of five years.[44]
Invigorated by the victory of Brown and frustrated by the lack of immediate practical effect, private citizens increasingly rejected gradualist, legalistic approaches as the primary tool to bring about desegregation. They were faced with "massive resistance" in the South by proponents of racial segregation and voter suppression. In defiance, African-American activists adopted a combined strategy of direct action, nonviolence, nonviolent resistance, and many events described as civil disobedience, giving rise to the civil rights movement of 1954 to 1968.
A. Philip Randolph had planned a march on Washington, D.C., in 1941 to support demands for elimination of employment discrimination in the defense industry; he called off the march when the Roosevelt administration met the demand by issuing Executive Order 8802, which barred racial discrimination and created an agency to oversee compliance with the order.[47]
Protests begin
The strategy of public education, legislative lobbying, and litigation that had typified the civil rights movement during the first half of the 20th century broadened after Brown to a strategy that emphasized "direct action": boycotts, sit-ins, Freedom Rides, marches or walks, and similar tactics that relied on mass mobilization, nonviolent resistance, standing in line, and, at times, civil disobedience.[48]
Churches, local grassroots organizations, fraternal societies, and black-owned businesses mobilized volunteers to participate in broad-based actions. This was a more direct and potentially more rapid means of creating change than the traditional approach of mounting court challenges used by the NAACP and others.
In 1952, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), led by T. R. M. Howard, a black surgeon, entrepreneur, and planter organized a successful boycott of gas stations in Mississippi that refused to provide restrooms for blacks. Through the RCNL, Howard led campaigns to expose brutality by the Mississippi state highway patrol and to encourage blacks to make deposits in the black-owned Tri-State Bank of Nashville which, in turn, gave loans to civil rights activists who were victims of a "credit squeeze" by the White Citizens' Councils.[49]
After Claudette Colvin was arrested for not giving up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in March 1955, a bus boycott was considered and rejected. But when Rosa Parks was arrested in December, Jo Ann Gibson Robinson of the Montgomery Women's Political Council put the bus boycott protest in motion. Late that night, she, John Cannon (chairman of the Business Department at Alabama State University) and others mimeographed and distributed thousands of leaflets calling for a boycott.[50][51] The eventual success of the boycott made its spokesman Martin Luther King Jr., a nationally known figure. It also inspired other bus boycotts, such as the successful Tallahassee, Florida boycott of 1956–57.[52] This movement also sparked the 1956 Sugar Bowl riots in Atlanta which later became a major organizing center of the civil rights movement, with Martin Luther King Jr.[53][54]
In 1957, King and Ralph Abernathy, the leaders of the Montgomery Improvement Association, joined with other church leaders who had led similar boycott efforts, such as C. K. Steele of Tallahassee and T. J. Jemison of Baton Rouge, and other activists such as Fred Shuttlesworth, Ella Baker, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levison, to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The SCLC, with its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, did not attempt to create a network of chapters as the NAACP did. It offered training and leadership assistance for local efforts to fight segregation. The headquarters organization raised funds, mostly from Northern sources, to support such campaigns. It made nonviolence both its central tenet and its primary method of confronting racism.
In 1959, Septima Clarke, Bernice Robinson, and Esau Jenkins, with the help of Myles Horton's Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, began the first Citizenship Schools in South Carolina's Sea Islands. They taught literacy to enable blacks to pass voting tests. The program was an enormous success and tripled the number of black voters on Johns Island. SCLC took over the program and duplicated its results elsewhere.
History
Main article: History of civil rights in the United States
For a chronological guide, see Timeline of the civil rights movement.
Further information: Civil rights movement (1865–1896) and Civil rights movement (1896–1954)
Brown v. Board of Education, 1954
Main article: Brown v. Board of Education
In the spring of 1951, black students in Virginia protested their unequal status in the state's segregated educational system. Students at Moton High School protested the overcrowded conditions and failing facility.[55] Some local leaders of the NAACP had tried to persuade the students to back down from their protest against the Jim Crow laws of school segregation. When the students did not budge, the NAACP joined their battle against school segregation. The NAACP proceeded with five cases challenging the school systems; these were later combined under what is known today as Brown v. Board of Education.[55] Under the leadership of Walter Reuther, the United Auto Workers donated $75,000 to help pay for the NAACP's efforts at the Supreme Court.[56]
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren ruled unanimously that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.
On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren ruled unanimously in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that mandating, or even permitting, public schools to be segregated by race was unconstitutional.[7] Chief Justice Warren wrote in the court majority opinion that[7][32]
Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law; for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group.[57]
The lawyers from the NAACP had to gather plausible evidence in order to win the case of Brown vs. Board of Education. Their method of addressing the issue of school segregation was to enumerate several arguments. One pertained to having exposure to interracial contact in a school environment. It was argued that interracial contact would, in turn, help prepare children to live with the pressures that society exerts in regards to race and thereby afford them a better chance of living in a democracy. In addition, another argument emphasized how "'education' comprehends the entire process of developing and training the mental, physical and moral powers and capabilities of human beings".[58]
Risa Goluboff wrote that the NAACP's intention was to show the Courts that African American children were the victims of school segregation and their futures were at risk. The Court ruled that both Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which had established the "separate but equal" standard in general, and Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education (1899), which had applied that standard to schools, was unconstitutional.
The federal government filed a friend of the court brief in the case urging the justices to consider the effect that segregation had on America's image in the Cold War. Secretary of State Dean Acheson was quoted in the brief stating that "The United States is under constant attack in the foreign press, over the foreign radio, and in such international bodies as the United Nations because of various practices of discrimination in this country."[59][60]
The following year, in the case known as Brown II, the Court ordered segregation to be phased out over time, "with all deliberate speed".[61] Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) did not overturn Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Plessy v. Ferguson was segregation in transportation modes. Brown v. Board of Education dealt with segregation in education. Brown v. Board of Education did set in motion the future overturning of 'separate but equal'.
School integration, Barnard School, Washington, D.C., 1955
On May 18, 1954, Greensboro, North Carolina, became the first city in the South to publicly announce that it would abide by the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling. "It is unthinkable,' remarked School Board Superintendent Benjamin Smith, 'that we will try to [override] the laws of the United States."[62] This positive reception for Brown, together with the appointment of African American David Jones to the school board in 1953, convinced numerous white and black citizens that Greensboro was heading in a progressive direction. Integration in Greensboro occurred rather peacefully compared to the process in Southern states such as Alabama, Arkansas, and Virginia where "massive resistance" was practiced by top officials and throughout the states. In Virginia, some counties closed their public schools rather than integrate, and many white Christian private schools were founded to accommodate students who used to go to public schools. Even in Greensboro, much local resistance to desegregation continued, and in 1969, the federal government found the city was not in compliance with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Transition to a fully integrated school system did not begin until 1971.[62]
Many Northern cities also had de facto segregation policies, which resulted in a vast gulf in educational resources between black and white communities. In Harlem, New York, for example, neither a single new school was built since the turn of the century, nor did a single nursery school exist – even as the Second Great Migration was causing overcrowding. Existing schools tended to be dilapidated and staffed with inexperienced teachers. Brown helped stimulate activism among New York City parents like Mae Mallory who, with the support of the NAACP, initiated a successful lawsuit against the city and state on Brown's principles. Mallory and thousands of other parents bolstered the pressure of the lawsuit with a school boycott in 1959. During the boycott, some of the first freedom schools of the period were established. The city responded to the campaign by permitting more open transfers to high-quality, historically-white schools. (New York's African-American community, and Northern desegregation activists generally, now found themselves contending with the problem of white flight, however.)[63][64]
Emmett Till's murder, 1955
Main article: Emmett Till
Emmett Till's mother Mamie (middle) at her son's funeral in 1955. He was killed by white men after a white woman accused him of offending her in her family's grocery store.
Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American from Chicago, visited his relatives in Money, Mississippi, for the summer. He allegedly had an interaction with a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in a small grocery store that violated the norms of Mississippi culture, and Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam brutally murdered young Emmett Till. They beat and mutilated him before shooting him in the head and sinking his body in the Tallahatchie River. Three days later, Till's body was discovered and retrieved from the river. After Emmett's mother, Mamie Till,[65] came to identify the remains of her son, she decided she wanted to "le