Back in my high-school days I already was curious about everything pertaining to the United States and took in eagerly whatever sparse information I could obtain. Unfortunately, the text-books I was supposed to learn by were not good at American history; they were good only at promoting myths. One of them asserted that the American Civil War was fought over the abolition of slavery and that Abraham Lincoln was to be credited with having freed the slaves singlehandedly. Neither of those assertions is correct. The Civil War was not fought over the issue of slavery, and that Lincoln freed the slaves is downright wrong. Slavery was abolished by a constitutional amendment that was passed in December 1865, when Lincoln was already dead for nine months.

For a meaningful discussion of the development of civil rights in the United States, and the position of African Americans in particular, it is crucial that such matters are set straight. Yet before I begin my account, another preliminary note is in order. This survey will combine two distinct issues—the question of civil rights and the question of race. I call attention to this matter because it is often overlooked that the two issues are not necessarily related to each other; but in U.S. history, civil rights have been linked inextricably to the question of race. This was already done, indirectly at least, by the author of the document which helped establish the country back in 1776. According to the Declaration of Independence, it is a self-evident truth "that all men are created equal"; however, when Thomas Jefferson wrote "men," he only meant white, upper middle-class males. A century later, Mark Twain with his usual common sense was more outspoken. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn contains a scene where Huck tells a woman about a boat accident on the river. And when asked if anybody was hurt, Huck replies, "No’m. Killed a nigger." Twain’s boy narrator testifies that the vile theories of race developed during that most race-conscious of centuries, the nineteenth, had a lasting impact. Huck addresses yet another dilemma—that of terminology. "Nigger" is precisely the word a boy with a poor-white Southern background would have used in 1850—remember that the novel is set before the Civil War, and one of the central themes of the novel concerns Huck’s attitude towards his companion, the runaway slave Jim. At first, Huck is not even aware of the nasty racist connotations of the word "nigger"; only very slowly does he learn the implications. What term, then, are we to use? "Negro" is hardly better than "nigger," for the history of the word is equally freighted with prejudice; and "black" smacks of stereotype. It is perhaps best to keep to the word that the people we are seeking to designate use when referring to themselves, and that word currently is African American—without a hyphen, for the hyphen is thought to be degrading; "hyphenated Americans" is a word one often finds in criticism these days, and there it is understood to be pejorative, to carry negative overtones of forced assimilation. In the presentation to come, I will speak of African Americans, and when I resort to other terms, I use them for reasons of variety, and I do not want to advance those overtones.

Popular conception has it that the United States is founded on solid Plymouth rock; in other words, the U.S. originate in the settlement founded in Massachusetts by the Pilgrim Fathers who came on the Mayflower in 1620. But Plymouth Plantation was an accident. The Mayflower had sailed for Virginia, where English settlers had been already struggling for a dozen years, surviving only with the help of Indians. And at Jamestown, Virginia, a Dutch ship had unloaded the first cargo of slaves in 1619—that is to say, the first Africans had arrived in North America a year before the Puritans ventured to cross the Atlantic. The colony in Virginia only grew profitable with the introduction of slaves. The economic system set up by the Virginia cavaliers was essentially feudal. It depended on cheap labor to work the large plantations—so much so, indeed, that in the first decades, the colonists took as slave whoever was to be had, whether white, red, or black. Whites were either recruited in English prisons or taken on as indentured servants—people who agreed to work for a plantation owner for a number of years in return for their transatlantic fare.

The system of black slavery developed only gradually. The words "black" and "slave" became synonyomous by the 1750s. The harshness and brutality that our time associates with black slavery date from the nineteenth century; they are the result of a change in the plantation system. Near the end of the 18th century, it seemed as if that economic system had outlived itself. The first aim of the old planters had been self-sufficiency; cash crops for exportation had been cultivated only in addition. But the plantation economy was suffering; tobacco, the most profitable crop, had depleted the soil. Ironically enough, it was an invention made by a Connecticut Yankee that allowed the plantation system not only to survive but to come to a second, full bloom. The invention was Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, which introduced a new crop, cotton, and cotton was to become king, as Southerners would eventually say.

In the early colonial days, slavery and the system of indentured servants were not confined to the South, but could be found north of the Mason-Dixon line as well—in Delaware, New Jersey, New York, even in New England. But the Northern economy grew more diversified and less dependent on slave labor, whereas the Southern economy remained predominantly agricultural and feudal. The increasing importance of merchants, artisans, and professional men in the North became apparent in the American Revolution—which, as the Declaration of Independence testifies, was really a most paradoxical event, a revolution of the middle class.

When the United States had won its independence, the debate over the future course of the country showed that North and South were heading in different directions, and the gap was widening. One of the issues most hotly debated was slavery; it was at the bottom of nearly every question at stake. One in five inhabitants of the country was black, with a heavy preponderance of those living in the South. Southern whites refused to grant citizenship to those people and wanted them to be ignored in matters of taxation, yet wanted them to be counted for representation in government. But what about safeguards to ensure the balance between North and South? And who was to decide over questions involving slavery? It was an insoluble tangle of contradictory positions.

The Constitution, as signed in 1786, was no more than a minimal compromise that the two sides could agree on. A document that established a precarious balance, it said nothing about slavery or who was to decide on it; only that the importation of new slaves was to be disallowed after 1806. For representation in Congress, blacks were to be counted as three-fifths of a white man. A similar compromise was adopted for taxation. In all other matters pertaining to slavery, Southerners insisted that the central government had no right to interfere; they even demanded that only they were to decide when and if an issue actually involved the question of slavery. People in the North were a little angry about such peculiarities of Southern opinion, but generally, they did not care about the plight of African Americans on Southern plantations. White supremacy over blacks was taken for granted, and more and more arguments in support of this belief were published on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line and the Ohio River. In the North, slavery was gradually abolished, although that did not mean that blacks were automatically granted equal rights; many a Northern State, in fact, imposed restrictions on blacks willing to settle within its confines.

It is surprising that the shaky compromise arrived at in 1786 held out for three quarters of a century. Only in 1860, with Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency, were the possibilities of compromise exhausted. Why, now, was reconciliation no longer possible in 1860?

Keeping the balance of political power between North and South during the rapid course of westward expansion had made it necessary that whenever a state was admitted on the one side, another had to be admitted on the other. But by the 1850s, slavery had become nearly synonymous with cotton plantations, for cotton could only be planted profitably where there was an abundance of cheap labor. Apart from the plant’s choosiness, there were natural limits as to where cotton could be raised—the cotton plant requires a long growing season, plenty of sunshine and water during the period of growth, and dry weather for harvest—such conditions are met within tropical and warm subtropical latitudes, but not in North Dakota or Michigan.

The balance itself also became increasingly artificial. In 1786, North and South each had a population of about 2 million. In 1860, the North had 22 million inhabitants; of the 9 million people living in the South, nearly 4 million were blacks held in bondage; only 250,000 Southern negroes were at least technically free. Between 1846 and 1855 alone, 3 million immigrants had poured into the country, but only one of ten newcomers had chosen to go to the South. While in the North development was dynamic, tending towards urbanization and industrialization, the South remained static, even hostile toward progress, and specialized more and more in growing cotton. The preponderance of cotton in the Southern economy was reflected in the rigid class system and the uneven distribution of social and political power. Only one in four Southern families owned slaves; hardly 8000 Southerners owned more than 50, and of those, less than 2000 had more than 100; but power was concentrated in the hands of that small minority of large plantation owners. Cotton was king in the feudal South, the size of plantations grew, and more and more slaves were needed. In some states of the Deep South (South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana) a majority of the population were black—in South Carolina, well over 60%—a fact which nourished white fears of slave rebellions and led to strict legal measures seeking to prevent insurrections. White intellectuals of nearly all fields of knowledge wrote long treatises arguing that blacks were racially inferior; George Fitzhugh’s Sociology of the South (1854) is most often cited, claiming that the negro was but a grown-up child incapable of providing for himself. In addition, the growing size of the plantations led to a further dehumanization of the slave system. The old Virginia planters rarely had more than a handful of slaves. The owner, had personal relations with his black hands, usually treated them them fairly, and rarely sold them. The vast plantations in Mississippi and South Carolina, however, needed more overseers than the old plantations had slaves; those overseers were usually recruited from the large segment of poor whites, and they were often a vicious and brutal lot. To supply those large plantations with field hands, mass auctions were necessary, and nobody cared whether a slave to be sold off had family connections he had to leave behind. One result of that system was that the number of runaway slaves increased, which in turn led to increasing pressure for measures to make sure that refugees would be returned to their owners.

Southern efforts to pass effective fugitive slave acts were one reason why slavery came to be regarded as a moral problem. Though not many people in the North cared about slavery in the South as long as it remained there, a few were actively engaged in the Underground Railroad, a network of support that helped runaway slaves on their way from the South to the North and often also on to Canada. Then, a new fugitive slave act was instituted to cut the system of the Underground Railroad. It not only permitted but demanded the apprehension of runaway slaves by federal marshalls even in Northern states, and authorities in the North had to provide assistance in capturing runaway slaves and returning them to their owners. That law caused an outcry of indignation, and abolitionists gained a following. The movement for abolition, which began in the 1830s, slowly gained momentum. Literary works were instrumental in raising white consciousness; significant, for instance, was Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an autobiographical account in which a former slave related his escape from slavery to freedom. The most popular was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852. The book is a good illustration of abolitionist literature and thinking, and its influence on the popular regard for slavery can hardly by exaggerated. While millions of readers have wept over it, its success has puzzled literary critics ever since. Uncle Tom’s Cabin contains some memorable scenes, but is not well written; a good many passages are cliché-ridden beyond relief. The plot is really too loose to call the book a novel. And the attack on slavery is in no way outspoken when it comes to acknowledging the civil rights of blacks, or their humanity. There is compassion for Uncle Tom’s suffering, but no complicity; he is condemned to inferiority by his race. The limitations imposed on the book by the author’s racialist beliefs exemplify the limitations conspicuous in Northern abolitionism in general. Many prominent abolitionists believed in Anglo-Saxon racial superiority; they were willing to grant freedom to the slaves, but usually that did not mean that blacks should be admitted as citizens with equal rights.

For Southerners abolitionist literature was sufficiently threatening, and they took rigid legal measures to prevent those subversive books and pamphlets from being brought to the South—in crass contradiction of the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of the press. In the late 1850s, a whole series of conflicts led to a hardening of positions—incidents such as the fighting that took place in Kansas in 1858, the controversy over the case of Dread Scott, or John Brown’s raid and subsequent hanging. Southerners began to discuss openly whether it was not best for them to leave the union. This was controversial because the Constitution contained no clause about secession. Southerners adhered to the doctrine of states’ rights—that is, any right that the Constituiton did not specifically assign to the federal government rested with the states—and they concluded that any state could leave the union if it wished to do so. The issue became pressing with the threat of Abraham Lincoln’s becoming president.

Lincoln was the candidate of a relatively new party. The Republican Party was founded in 1852 as a coalition uniting radical and moderate abolitionists as well as people who wanted to have a more active promotion of Northern economic interests, and less of giving in to Southern demands. For over thirty years the presidency had been occupied by Southerners or Northerners inclined to giving in to Southern interests, Congress had been bound by the gag rule, and the Supreme Court had been a Southern domain. The Republicans claimed with a good deal of justification that, contrary to Southern assertions that the country came to be run increasingly by the North, a minority of Southerners had in effect determined the course of the United States for the last decades.

Lincoln in his election campaign insisted that Northern interests ought to be given more weight and the South ought to respect the justified claims of the majority of the people. Specifically, he called for more unity and less Southern sectionalism, saying that "a house divided against itself will not stand ... I believe this government cannot endure permanently cannot remain half-slave and half-free ... It will become all one thing or all the other." Southerners took these statements to be direct appeals for the abolition of slavery, and their resistance against the Republican candidate became obstinate. Ironically, growing Southern radicalism made Lincoln’s election possible. Southern extremists insisted that the Democratic Party nominate a candidate with a clear pro-Southern platform, and thus drove Northern Democrats into nominating their own candidate. With the Democrat vote split, Lincoln could become president, though receiving less than 40% of the popular vote. And when it was clear that Lincoln had won, Southern firebrands at once clamored for secession on the ground that, so they claimed, Lincoln would surely work hard towards the abolition of slavery.

The South was wrong about Abraham Lincoln. Honest Abe was by no means a fervent abolitionist; had he been one, he would never have been nominated, for only a small minority in the North actually favored such radical measures. He was neither a popular candidate, nor ever popular as president; his popularity was only posthumous. To make up for his lack of appeal, he resorted to populist ideas. All his speeches prior to his election proclaimed that he knew the feelings of "the great mass of white people" on Negroes. "A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded. We cannot, then, make them equals." In a debate in 1858, he elaborated on his opinion.

Between Christmas Eve 1860 and May 1861, eleven Southern States declared their secession from the Union and set up the Confederate States of America, with Jefferson Davis as President. Lincoln maintained that secession was unconstitutional and asserted that, if need be, he was willing to use arms to defend the Union. Even then, on the eve of the Civil War, he still said that he did not want to interfere with the system of slavery, but only wanted to prevent its expansion.

As the shots fired at Ft. Sumter in Charleston harbor triggered the Civil War, both sides were unprepared for war, and both dreamed that it would be short and glorious. The South, though apparently weaker, had advantages. First of all, it did not have to win. Also, Confederate soldiers were better trained (about three-fourths of all West Point graduates were Southerners) and highly motivated. They knew what they were fighting for, while few people in the North were willing to risk their lives for something so vague as "the preservation of the Union"—indeed, many doubted whether the Union that had always favored the South over the North was actually worth preserving. The difference in motivation showed: the first battle at Bull Run was a disastrous defeat for the Union Army, and similar routs followed.

Soon, members of Lincoln’s staff were convinced that better arguments were needed to persuade the average Northerner that he had a cause that was worth risking his life for. Persuasive effort was necessary, not only to change popular opinion, but also to win over the president into joining the issue of preservation of the Union with the cause of liberating the slaves. Lincoln was reluctant to follow the advice because he wanted to win the war before he would tackle the issue of slavery. He did not want to have his motive for carrying on the war—which was the restoration of the Union—mixed up with the abolition of slavery. But the way the war went left him little choice but to follow the suggestions of his advisors. The document he finally brought himself to publish showed his hesitation; dull and legalistic in tone, it certainly was not a clarion call for freedom. The Emancipation Proclamation, written in September 1862 but not formally announced until January 1, 1863, declared "forever free" the slaves in those areas of the Confederate states still in rebellion. That is to say, Lincoln agreed to freeing all slaves in those areas where he had no say, but did not wish to abolish slavery in areas that were under Union control. The presidential pen did not formally strike the shackles from a single slave. Where Lincoln could presumably free the slaves, he refused to do so; and where he could not, he claimed to. In short, where he could he would not, and where he would he could not.

Though the Emancipation Proclamation was stronger on proclamation than emancipation, it achieved one aim: it contributed to the disruption of the Southern way of life. Slaves fled from plantations and joined the Union army as volunteers; in all, some 200.000 blacks fought in blue uniforms—though that was not much, considering that the Union had over 2 million men under arms. More important for the Northern cause was that in 1864 Lincoln finally found a supreme commander for the Union armies who proved to be a match for Robert E. Lee’s leadership of the Confederate forces. Ulysses S. Grant’s ruthless tenacity in exploiting Northern advantages of manpower and resources secured victory for the North. He decided on a strategy of attrition, of bleeding the South to death, and for a year his armies hammered relentlessly at the Confederacy, without regard to losses either side. In fact, when after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in April 1865 the roll call of casualties was completed, figures showed that in the carnage of the war the North had suffered more than the South—on the Northern side, some 360.000 men had died, while Southern casualties were estimated at 260.000.

Despite those figures, Grant’s victory over Lee was crushing. It took the South one hundred years to overcome the defeat. As the war had been fought almost exclusively on Southern soil, large parts of the land were laid waste. Railroads were torn up, factories smashed, plantations looted and in ruins. Cities like Richmond and Atlanta were gutted by fire. Sherman’s raid had cut a swath sixty miles wide across Georgia and the Carolinas, leaving scorched earth behind. The Shenandoah Valley, the breadbasket of Virginia, was ravaged from end to end—so that on completion of his mission to disrupt Confederate supplies, General Sheridan proudly reported that "a crow flying over it would have to carry its own rations." Not only the economy, the social structure of the Old South was also uprooted as the defeated South was placed under military rule and all Confederate leaders—that included many plantation owners—were stripped of their civil rights.

The War left a hatred between North and South that lasted for decades. Republican demagogues in the North kept waving the bloody shirt to catch votes but left the South to itself in all other matters. The defeated section became a solid South that kept raising its grievances while it romanticized its past, the glorious days and ways of the Antebellum. The nostalgia was blinding: it completely obscured the fact that the Southern economy had been fundamentally unhealthy already before the war, when the wealth plantation owners boasted of existed largely on paper—60% of it was slaves, 30% was land, and less than 5% were liquid assets. After the war, most of that wealth was gone—not only because the slaves were no longer there, but because the value of land had also decreased significantly. The abolition of slavery in effect meant the loss of billions of dollars—a loss without compensation. The nostalgic glorification of the Antebellum, long a characteristic of Southern culture, is still discernible in the film based on Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, made more than 70 years after Lee’s surrender; and even the greatest American writer of the twentieth-century, the Mississippian William Faulkner, was not entirely free of it, though no other white artist was as aware of the consequences of what Faulkner termed the South’s "original sin" and "fall from grace."

The war decided one issue once and for all—the issue which had triggered the armed contest. Supreme power rested with the Union, not with the individual states, as Southerners had contended. With the help of Ulysses S. Grant, Lincoln had restored that Union and given it an "indestructible" character. But the war did not decide the question regarding the role of the Negro in Southern society. One reason for that was, perhaps, that Lincoln did not live to tackle the issue, which he had wanted to solve after the war was over. For less than a week after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Lincoln was shot by a disappointed Southerner.

There is no way of knowing how Lincoln would have gone about the abolition of slavery. He never specified his plans; from what little he said, it can be surmised that he wanted to steer a conciliatory course. That can also be inferred from the fact that for his re-election campaign in 1864 he chose Andrew Johnson, a Copperhead (that is, a Southerner who opted for the North), as his running-mate for the vice-presidency. But Johnson was met with suspicion, and when he became president, that suspicion became overwhelming. The Republican Party came under increasing influence of radicals, whose mind was set, not on reconciliation, but on revenge; and Congress moved to follow the course prescribed by those radical Republicans. The constitutional amendment to abolish slavery was soon adopted; but hardly any measures were taken to help the Black freedmen. They were allowed to leave the slave quarters of the plantations, but had nowhere to go since the land still remained in the hands of the former owners. The Freedmen’s Bureau, a government agency set up in 1865, was to assist the former slaves, but its officials, though idealists, were largely ineffective. Other Congressional efforts brought about two more amendments promising that the former slaves were now citizens with all constitutional rights. Thus, Blacks were given the right to vote, but their votes were often misused to support local governments composed of scalawags and carpet-baggers—scalawags were corrupt and/or incompetent Southern turncoats, and carpet-baggers were Northerners who had come South, but whose motives did not always bear close examination. Even if for a brief period after the war a few Southern legislative assemblies had more blacks than whites, on the whole it is no exaggeration to say that during the decade in which the Republican Congress was in charge of the reorganization and restoration of the South, hardly anything went right. The constitutional amendments technically freed the slaves, but their freedom was nominal, limited, and short-lived. The abolitionists, who had so noisily demanded the end of slavery before the Civil War, fell silent; they were no longer interested in the plight of Southern blacks, and Northern politicians were interested only in the Negro’s vote, but not in the Negro himself.

All measures of congressional Reconstruction served to drive white Southerners toward resistance, and little by little, they won back home rule, in part by violence and intimidation. In some areas, the first black codes were passed as early as 1865—codes that outlawed interracial marriages, forbade blacks to carry arms, and prohibited them from testifying in court against a white man. In Texas alone, at least 1,500 negroes were murdered between 1865 and 1870. Significant was the foundation, in 1866, of the Ku Klux Klan, a secret organization led at first by former Confederate officers and aiming at the restoration of the social and political order of the ante-bellum days. When the period of Restoration came to an end in 1876, the North left the South to look after its own affairs; now, Northerners no longer even pretended to care about what went on in the former Confederacy. The result was that the South quickly reverted to the old order, and one of the first concerns was to strip Southern blacks of what little rights they had gained after the war. Measures were taken, as Southerners said, "to put the Negro in his place." The Constitution forbade slavery and granted blacks citizenship and the right to vote; but in order to be allowed to go to the ballot, an American citizen must be registered as a voter. Southern states and communities soon devised methods to prevent blacks from registering. Poll taxes and literacy tests were imposed, which were applied only against blacks, not against the large number of poor whites, who usually were also illiterate. Many a local authority also passed stiff vagrancy laws, which would allow the sheriff to jail and fine blacks almost as he wished; and if the detained person wished to file an appeal to a court, he could be held in custody for contempt of authorities.

In combination with stiff vagrancy laws, the most oppressive element of life for blacks in the post-bellum South was the new system by which the plantations were run—the system of sharecropping, by which more than 50% of all farms in the Deep South were run. Sharecropping affected both blacks and poor whites, but was harder on blacks than on whites because of the selective laws that accompanied it. The sharecropper was a tenant farmer who rented land from the landowner and usually also obtained the seeds he was to plant from his landlord. He worked the farm and harvested the crop; from his crop, the landowner received a certain share, usually about 50%, as rent and pay for the seed. What made the system so repressive was that the tenant usually also had to sell his own part of the harvest to the landowner and was paid not in dollars, but in coupons which were redeemable only in the local store—also owned by the landlord. Thus, the sharecropper was at the complete mercy of the landlord; shackled to the land, he ran a heavy risk of incurring debts which he could never pay off. A peculiarity of the Southern legal system permitted the landlord to have a debtor imprisoned for failing to repay debts incurred, and local authorities had the right to rent out such debtors so that they might work off whatever amount they owed. It goes without saying that the plantation owner, who usually was the local authority, was not averse to taking advantage of the possibilities offered by the law; convict leases were frequent in the South until well into the twentieth century. (A similarly closed system existed in the cotton mills of the South, where workers also were paid in coupons redeemed only in facilities provided by the company that owned the factory. Thus, workers ate food which they bought in the company store, wore company clothes, and lived in company houses; their children were brought into the world by company doctors, and when they died, they were buried by company preachers in the company cemetery. This kind of life is described in Merle Travis’ song "Sixteen Tons," the last lines of which plead, "St. Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go / I owe my soul to the company store.")

W. E. B. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk, which came out in 1903, already contained a penetrating analysis of the plight of Southern blacks. Sharecropping was in some ways even worse than the old system of slavery. The slave owner had had at least some responsibility for his slaves; it was to his own benefit if he kept his slaves well fed, healthy, and properly housed. The employer of sharecroppers had no such obligations if the sheriff and the county judge were on his side, to be at hand in case an unruly or unobliging tenant was to be subjugated. And if the sheriff could not be counted upon, there was always the Ku Klux Klan. In the 1890s alone, at least 1000 blacks were lynched in the South.

As the all-white Southern Courts of Appeal were an integral part of the system, white control over blacks was assured. In 1883, the Supreme Court declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to be unconstitutional, thus invalidating the last timid act to assure equal rights for all, regardless of race. Since everything worked so smoothly, further steps were taken "to put the Negro in his place." Some Southern states—particularly in the Deep South, where the percentage of the black population was highest—began to impose legal measures aiming at the segregation of races. Railroads were among the first to deny blacks access to regular passenger cars; if a black man wanted to travel on a railroad, he had to make do with the so-called Jim Crow car, named after an old Negro balad and set aside exclusively for blacks. Other public institutions soon followed the lead. Appeals to Southern Courts were useless, and Federal Courts refused to hear those cases for a long time.

Then, in 1896, The Supreme Court agreed to take up the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, which involved the segregationalist practices of railroads. The court ruling, usually highlighted as the "separate but equal" clause, decreed that segregation was legal as long as facilities were provided for both races. While this decision was hardly noticed in the North, it opened the floodgates toward complete segregation in the South. Most of the measures were instituted by way of city ordinances or local regulations and rules enforced without the formality of laws. Up and down the avenues and sideways of Southern life appeared with increasing profusion the little signs: "Whites Only" or "Colored." Sometimes the law prescribed their dimensions in inches, and in one case even the kind and color of paint. Many of those signs appeared without requirement by law—over entrances and exits, at theaters and boarding houses, toilets and water fountains, waiting rooms and ticket windows.

A large body of law grew up concerned with the segregation of employees and their working conditions. The South Carolina code of 1915, with subsequent elaborations, prohibited textile factories from permitting laborers of different races from working together in the same room, or using the same entrances, pay windows, exits, doorways, stairways, "or windows" at the same time, or the same "lavatories, toilets, drinking water buckets, pails, cups, dippers or glasses" at any time. Exceptions were made of firemen, floor scrubbers, and repair men, who were permitted association with the white proletarian elite on an emergency basis. In most instances segregation in employment was established without the aid of statute, and trade unions, never really strong in the South, complied by voluntarily exluding blacks from membership.

Institutions for the care of the dependent or incapacitated—homes for the aged, the indigent, the orphans, the blind, the deaf, and the dumb—also became the subject of detailed segregationalist legislation. The fact that Mississippi and South Carolina specifically provided by law for general segregation in hospitals does not indicate that non-segregation was the rule in the hospitals of other states. The two states named also required Negro nurses for Negro patients, and Alabama prohibited white female nurses from attending Negro male patients. Thirteen Southern and border states required the separation of patients by races in mental hospitals, and ten states specified segregation of inmates in penal institutions. Some of the latter went into detail regarding the chaining, transportation, feeding, and working of the prisoners on a segregated basis. Voting rights of blacks were further curtailed by means of the grandfather clause—in some states only those black men were eligible as voters, who could prove that their forefathers had been eligible before 1866, and proof of his eligibility had to be provided by the black man wanting to register.

By the end of World War I, the South was in a state of nearly complete apartheit, having separate churches, schools, restaurants, public offices, parks and transportation, toilets and water fountains, even separate cemeteries—as if the mouldering of a white man’s corpse could in any way be affected by a black man’s being too close. What segregation meant for blacks is perhaps best explained by taking a look at the system of schools. The "separate but equal" clause allowed that black children were kept out of white schools, as long as there was a school for blacks which they could attend. In the U.S., the maintenance of schools is delegated to the local school district. In most cases—in the predominantly rural South at least—the school district was identical with the local county. That meant that the county provided the money for schools and teachers. White children attended classes in a regular brick building and were taught by qualified teachers. The schoolhouse set aside for black children usually did not deserve to be called by that word; it was a wooden shack, and the person teaching the children often lacked the proper training and qualification for the position, but was hired because he or she could read and write, and was known not to cause any trouble by putting certain ideas into the minds of the children. Qualified black teachers were rare since normal colleges and universities in the South were closed to blacks; the handful of all-black colleges existing in all Southern states—only 2000 blacks attended a college or university in 1917—could not provide the personnel needed for the education of black children. The first and best-known of those institutions of higher education for blacks was Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, founded by Booker T. Washington in 1881; there, so as not anger his white sponsors, he urged young negroes to accept their inferior social position for the present and strive to raise themselves through vocational training and economic self-reliance. His compromise view made Booker T. Washington a darling of whites and a target of severe criticism of black intellectuals like DuBois.

Here, it seems in order to pause for a moment. Having said so much about the continuous infringement of blacks’ rights by Southern whites, the question why that happened becomes overbearing. What compelled Southern whites to implement that system of complete repression? An answer that satisfies and encompasses all aspects is impossible. Only a few points can be touched upon here. A complex set of reasons emerges from the socio-economic situation of the post-bellum South. In the last third of the nineteenth century the North became almost completely industrialized and urbanized; it prospered, and this prosperity was not limited to a few robber barons—though they certainly profited most—but included the middle classes as well. The South, however, remained agricultural and continued to fall behind the prospering North because it clung to its traditional cotton economy. Recent studies by economists point out that the South would have fared better had it not adhered so stubbornly to its feudal system. They find that the South damaged itself by condemning large parts of its population to permanent poverty. Also, the cotton economy suffered setbacks. After the Civil War, the South no longer enjoyed the privileges of having a monopoly on growing cotton, but had to compete with India and Egypt for the English market; that meant, of course, that the hold on the market was lost. Cotton prices fell by 50% between 1874 and 1890, because the market was glutted. Besides, there were increasing problems with depleted soil and erosion. Worst of all was an enemy of cotton that suddenly appeared—the boll weevil, a beetle which spread from Mexico in the 1890s and hit the cotton belt in the early 1900s, destroying large parts of the harvest. All those facts contributed to the economic slump into which the agricultural South fell in the 1890s, and it never recovered from that depression. And it is a commonplace that the poor—that is, in the case of the South, African Americans and poor whites—suffer most from the prolonged depression.

Apart from those economic problems and the pervasive influence racist theories exerted on white Southerners’ thinking, there was the Southerners’ adherence to the old hierarchic structure, an adherence that worked in curious ways. The majority of Southern whites was poor; contemptuously called "white trash" or "dirt eaters" by the upper-class, their hopes of social rise were hardly better than those of blacks. At the same time, many of the staunchest supporters of the repressive system, its most vicious bulldogs and henchmen, originated precisely from that large segment of poor whites. That was one way open to poor whites who wanted to climb the social ladder. It seemed that many could bear their own miserable lot only because they knew there were others who were even worse off than they, and on whom they could tread to work off their own deep frustration.

While I am at psychological explanations, another curious phenomenon combining various types of fear needs to be mentioned because it shows how vicious the insistence on white supremacy over blacks could be. In many works of Southern artists there recurs the shadow figure of the black rapist, whose alleged sexual prowess threatens the ideal of white Southern womanhood. This mythical creature must be understood as a projection of various central problems of racial relationships in the South; it was not just an invention of writers and filmmakers. At the core, there is the question of miscegenation, the mixing of the races, and the Southerners’ contradictory attitude towards interracial relationships. On the one hand, there was the promiscuity white males were allowed—many a Southern landowner had more "colored" children than white ones. But a sexual relationship between a white woman and black male was a taboo, perhaps the strictest taboo there was in Southern society. For a black male to be accused of merely having entertained notions in that direction—the accusation itself was enough, and it did not matter how well-founded it was—it spelled trouble: he had every reason to fear that he would soon be visited by a delegation of the Ku Klux Klan. But historians who studied the question have come to the conclusion that while this taboo was upheld with great zeal, there is no indication that the violence with which it was upheld was at all justified; indeed, it hardly ever was broken.

The repression which had African Americans in the South "stand in fear" worked so well that flight was the only way out. But at first, escape to the North was no solution; the all-white society of Northern cities was not inviting to Blacks. That changed with the outbreak of World War I, when the steady stream of European immigrants, from which the large factories had recruited their laborers, suddenly dried up. (Keep in mind that the absolute peak of European immigration was between 1903 and 1914; in that period over 12 million came to the U.S.) The war in Europe stopped emigration, but it provided a large market for American products, and job openings in the factories became even more numerous when the U.S. entered the war—openings which were filled with blacks moving in from the South. (At that time also, farm owners in California began to recruit Mexicans to harvest their crops because no other hands were available.)

The fact that during World War I blacks were needed to replace immigrants in the factories of the North created what experts on migration call a pull factor. There had been numerous strong push factors in the South—reasons why blacks wanted to leave the cotton belt—but they were not so decisive as the pull factor—the incentive to come to the North. Though in the factories blacks generally were paid less than whites for the same job, they at least had a chance to earn money, a living—a chance they never had down South. This new option triggered what historians call the Great Northern Migration, the movement of blacks from the rural South to the urban North—a movement that continued from World War I until the early 70s and was interrupted only by the Depression years of the 30s. That movement had tremendous consequences: half a million left before 1920, nearly a million during the 1920s, and well over a million during the 1940s. Its impact on the demographic characteristics of the U.S. was momentous, for by 1970 the majority of African Americans no longer lived in the rural South but in the urban North. Northern cities also were transformed. Large sections of Northern cities became all-black neighborhoods—in many cases, that affected the quarters where formerly first-generation European immigrants had lived. (This is true of cities like Chicago or Buffalo, but it is only in part true of New York: Harlem, originally a middle-class neighborhood, had lost its attraction to the middle class by the time the first Southern blacks arrived, and some 175,000 were living there by 1920. One city was a very special case—Washington DC. It was always regarded as a Southern city, but since it was under the control of the federal government, it was beyond the reach of Southern state authorities, and from early on it became a haven for blacks leaving the plantations. Washington was special also because its particular population needed large numbers of butlers, servants and maids, jobs coveted by blacks. Today, Washington has the highest percentage of blacks of all major American cities.)

The general migratory pattern was not that the population of whole villages from the rural South packed their belongings and moved straight to Detroit. Usually, young single males or young couples with no or very few children moved away from their village, to a town or city in the vicinity; from there, they would move on to the nearest major city in the South, like New Orleans, Memphis, or Atlanta, and only then would they move to a city in the North. Once they had settled down and earned some money, they would send it home, so relaives could follow. The Great Northern Migration was part of a larger movement that began in the last decade of the nineteenth century and affected all of the U.S.—the movement from rural to urban areas. Like the general movement from the country to the cities, the routes taken in the Northern Migration tended towards keeping distances short. Very few blacks moved, say, from Louisiana to New York, or from Georgia to Kansas City. Blacks from the states on the Atlantic seabord tended to move to Northeastern cities like Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, or New York; and blacks from states in the region of the lower Mississippi moved to St. Louis, Kansas City, or Chicago. The most compelling story of a black migrant I know of—telling of his many moves from rural Mississippi to a village in Arkansas, then to Memphis and on to Chicago—is Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy.

For blacks arriving from the South, life in the Northern cities at first must have seemed a blessing; in fact, it was not. Blacks were also disadvantaged in the North, though repression was more selective, arbitrary and random, varying from state to state, even from town to town. The African American writer James Baldwin, for instance, recorded that he felt little overt racial discrimination in New York City where he grew up at first; but when he moved across the Hudson River to New Jersey, he went to a state where segregation was near-complete. Though not law, it was the will of the white majority; there were no signs in restaurants that they were for whites only; blacks just were not served. Similarly, blacks could not rent a house in an all-white neighborhood, but had to move to black neighborhoods, and there they had to pay rents that were up to 60 % more than what whites would have had to pay for comparable housing. If blacks and whites were employed in similar jobs, the black man would receive only two-thirds of the wages of a white man; and since blacks were also largely excluded from labor unions, in case of economic difficulties they were the first to lose their jobs—"last hired and first fired" was an experience they became acutely aware of not only during the years of the Great Depression.

By World War II, nearly every Northern City had its black ghetto—Harlem in New York City, Roxbury in Boston, the East Side of Buffalo, the South Side of Chicago, East St. Louis, Watts in Los Angeles. Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Newark NJ also had large black neighborhoods. The pressure of race worked even within the African American community. Quadroons and octoroons enjoyed social advantages, and kinking one’s hair—straightening it to make it look like a white man’s—was a fashion even young Malcolm X followed.

In retrospect, World War II marks a turning point in the history of civil-rights in the U.S. The consequences of the First War had been small—true, a disproportionately large number of blacks were drafted, but the armed forces were strictly segregated; and if military service increased the black soldier’s self-estimate, this was potentially harmful, as in 1919 several blacks on their return to the South were lynched with their uniforms on. A consequence of Word War I was what the philosopher and educator John Dewey termed "the cult of the irrational." By contrast, World War II brought changes and led to an increasing awareness of the circumstances under which blacks lived. Many of the things that became important as a consequence of the war had actually been noticeable before, as weak trends and minor movements gaining momentum with the increasing urbanization of the African American population. The first that has to be mentioned in this context is the growing self-awareness among blacks, manifest in the thinking of new political leaders like Marcus Garvey—who urged American blacks to be proud of their race and preached their return to Africa—and in the emergence of an independent black culture during the twenties. In this context, Jazz and Blues are exemplary because both became vital forms of black self-expression after their practitioners moved from the rural South to New Orleans, and from there to cities like St. Louis and Chicago. Another manifestation of the growing self-confidence among blacks was literary. It began with a parade of black veterans through Harlem in 1919 and led to the publication of a collection of essays entitled The New Negro in 1925. This movement was supported by the first black writers that actually found a large readership among both black and white; the names associated with this so-called Harlem Renaissance—Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston—today are subject to considerable attention in English departments. The growing self-awareness of blacks is also mirrored in the rise of civil-rights organizations, of which the most important, the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, had already been founded in 1909, and had been very active, though it was still weak, in the 1930s. Its aim was to work within the system, within the frame provided by the Constitution, to do away with racial discrimination with the help of courts.

The changes came slowly, against enormous resistance, but they came, and they began where they were least expected to happen—in the military. About half a million blacks served during World War II, while the armed forces were still strictly segregated; only in the last stages of the war, in some units serving in Germany, was segregation no longer enforced. Why this was so, I will explain in a moment.

In the U.S., the war effort helped overcome finally the economic depression of the thirties. At the hight of the depression, some 15 million people, more than 20% of the workforce, were without a job; and the promise of Roosevelt’s New Deal did not extend to those groups of the population in which blacks were overrepresented: farmhands, sharecroppers, unskilled workers, and house servants. By 1943, there was a shortage of labor, and blacks from the South suddenly were needed to fill the gaps in the defense industries. A civil rights organization named CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) organized sit-ins in Detroit—a center of the arms industry during World War II—to advance their aim of providing equal employment opportunities for all Americans regardless of race. 1943 saw violent race riots in the North—also in Detroit—ostensibly because blacks would no longer accept that they should be privileged when it came to the right to die in uniform, but that they should remain disadvantaged in all other matters. The Roosevelt administration understood the lesson it was taught, passing a law which forbade racial discrimination in companies fulfilling government contracts. And though the law was not accompanied by any regulations to enforce it, it had an effect; it was a signal that change was necessary.

Besides, one reason why the U.S. supposedly fought the war was, as Roosevelt declared, to guarantee for all the "four freedoms"—the freedom of expression and worship, the freedom from want and fear. After the war, it became a little embarrassing when African diplomats who were accredited at the headquarters of the newly established United Nations complained that when they traveled from New York City to Washington, they were not served in restaurants in New Jersey and Maryland because they were mistaken as African Americans; they found it odd that they were served when they wore their national costume, but not when they wore a business suit. Also, Black GIs could claim that they were not really motivated to fight for the freedoms of others while they themselves were denied those freedoms. And if the U.S. posed as the standard bearer of democracy and the champion of civil rights in the reorganization of the world after the war, the role was hardly convincing as long as the U.S. army insisted on segregation among its own rank and file. Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, realized the dilemma and in 1948 signed the bill which forbade segregation in the armed forces altogether.

For the cause of equal rights, however, this was no more than a minor victory as integration in the army was slow—even during the Korean War, many units were segregated—and the large number of blacks living as second-class citizens in the South or in the Northern cities remained unaffected. At best, the victory suggested a change in climate in the country, for in 1950 the Democratic Party adopted a strong pro-civil-rights platform, despite furious protests of Southerners (it is well to remember that the white South was a Democratic stronghold). All those developments were signals that the cause of black civil-rights organizations was not hopeless; the boost in morale showed in the eagerness with which civil-rights organizations multiplied their activities, though the zeitgeist was hardly with them as in 1952 Eisenhower became president. Ike, the former commander-in-chief of the allied forces in Europe, was a Republican who had grown up in Texas and avowed that he wanted to be a strict constitutionalist—which is to say, he intended to do nothing. Also, the cultural climate of the 50s—the suffocating middle-brow homogeneity of suburbia—was not conducive to change. Even the new musicians who were the cause of most parental anxiety and alarm, Elvis Presley or Bill Haley, were really conformists who profited from the segregationalist tendencies. They imitated black musicians, who were not allowed on television, and produced pasteurized and homogenized, clean and decent versions of the aggressive songs their black idols taught them.

Analysts of the American scene had warned repeatedly that if the American government did not take an active position in the question of civil rights, the situation would soon get out of hand. Observers recalled that the urban North had a history of racial unrest going back beyond the riots of Detroit in 1943, to the race riots shaking Chicago in 1919 and those which cost more than a thousand lives in New York during the Civil War. In particular, they called attention to the increasing self-awareness of urban African Americans, which would sooner or later nourish the desire to tear down the ghetto walls. Those observers warned that the potential for violence accumulating in the ghetto posed a much greater danger than the efforts of the NAACP. But the American government chose to ignore the warnings. Eisenhower was reluctant to make use of his extensive executive powers, and Congressmen knew that their constituents back home harbored racist resentments and did not want any actions to be taken. John F. Kennedy—a turncoat himself—later declared that the eight years of Eisenhower’s presidency were "Rip Van Winkle years during which the country had fallen into a deep sleep."

The observers were right in pointing out the danger and the potential for leadership provided by the NAACP. But their prognostications were wrong; though the NAACP was instrumental in triggering the open struggle for civil rights, that struggle did not begin in the North. Not only did it start in the South, but for the first phase, nearly a decade, it was confined to that region. Foremost on the agenda of the NAACP was the desire to have the Supreme Court reconsider the infamous verdict passed in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson. Finally, the Court took up, in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, the issue of segregation in schools and in 1955 declared that "separate but equal facilities are inherently unequal." This reversal of the verdict of Plessy vs. Ferguson was applauded by blacks and liberal Northerners, but was met with fury by Southern whites, who vowed that they would put up all resistance available to resist those changes. White Citizens’ Councils sprang up all across the South; called "Uptown Ku Klux Klans" by a white Southern newspaper editor, those councils, numbering 250.000 members at their peak and uniting most of the old upper class, in effect took over local government in the South, and almost unanimously called for massive resistance to the Supreme Court order.

The court ruling came to a first test six months after it was made public. On Dec. 1, 1955, in Montgomery AL, a black woman, Rosa Parks—a forty-year-old seamstress who was a one-time NAACP activist—refused to give up her seat on a bus, just because a white man had told her to do so that he might sit down. After Rosa Parks was arrested, the black community answered with what came to be known as the Montgomery bus boycott, which, organized by the NAACP, lasted for over a year and proved to be an effective weapon because media coverage made the situation of African Americans public throughout the world—especially after the Supreme Court declared the segregetation ordinance of Montgomery’s public transport facilities to be unconstitutional. As a consequence, another civil-rights group was organized—SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an association of Southern ministers headed by Martin Luther King, who had become prominent during the Montgomery bus boycott. Among the civil-rights groups active in the South, it was the one that was most outspoken about choosing a course of direct non-violent action modeled on Gandhi’s teachings and on an essay written by Henry D. Thoreau back in 1849, "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience."

The civil-rights act of 1957—the first in over 80 years—was designed to allow the federal government to step in actively in cases of overt segregation; Congress, however, struck out those passages which were to provide effective tools for federal measures. How necessary they were was proven in the fall of that year. In Little Rock AR, local school authorities chose to ignore a federal court order demanding desegregation of the school system. Soon a white mob took the field, battling off demonstrators and civil-rights activists. Gov. Orval Faubus of Arkansas personally interfered, declaring that he understood the feelings of his fellow white citizens, their anger at the court order. He claimed it was for the safety and benefit of the black children that they were not admitted, and called in the National Guard to bar the black students from the school. When President Eisenhower reluctantly signed an order that placed the National Guard under federal control, Faubus withdrew the Guard, and Eisenhower sent in units of a division of paratroopers to maintain order. In fall 1958, the city of Little Rock, rather than desegrating its four high-schools, closed them for a year; the city leaders would rather forsake educating the children than allowing integrated schooling. Governor Faubus supported the act; and how the people of Arkansas thought of the matter, is demonstrated by the fact that Faubus in November 1958 won re-election by a record margin.

The goings-on at Little Rock were characteristic of the attitude white Southerners adopted in similar incidents which sprang up all over the South. White Southerners chose all-out resistance against federal court orders; they opted to disregard the Constitution rather than to accept what they called "the mingling of the races." The frequency with which incidents similar to that of Little Rock occurred makes it impossible to give more than a perfunctory list: many a school between Virginia to Texas was closed, and one in Tennessee was even bombed. With slight modifications, the pattern also applied to universities. In 1956 a black woman obtained a court ruling that the University of Alabama had to admit her as a student. The university officials grudgingly complied and accepted her; but when prolonged actions by a white mob made her withdraw, the board of admissions of the University quickly drew up a statement proclaiming that she had been evicted.

It was no accident that the struggle for the desegregation of a university turned into one of the crucial clashes of the struggle for civil rights. In fall 1962, James Meredith, an army veteran and a black, wanted to register as a student at the University of Mississippi at Oxford. The riots that followed became known as the battle of Oxford, in which county and state authorities, sheriffs and the state troopers, stood up to fight with a white mob against federal officers. On all accounts, the battle of Oxford was really a civil war. (It is certainly a nice ironic twist that Oxford had been William Faulkner’s home town, where he had written practically all of his great books.)

It would be misleading to reduce the Southern struggle for equal rights to the question of desegregated education; the aim was the complete abolition of segregation in public life and the full integration of Southern blacks in the process of making political decisions. To fight segregation, sit-ins were organized in restaurants of owners known to be set against serving blacks; freedom rides were conducted on Southern busses and railroads, and freedom riders hoped to get arrested so that they might bring their case to court. The struggle for political integration was even more difficult than the one for the integration of schools, because it aimed at uprooting the very foundations of the Southern system. It had to be carried out on many levels and in many different places, simply because segregation in the South was regulated by thousands of local or regional laws, ordinances, and injunctions, and every single one had to be tackled. A crucial issue was to get blacks to register as voters, though that meant that efforts had to be made in all regions and towns of the South. At the same time, the struggle became intensely personal, because Southern blacks had to go to their town halls or county houses to register with the authorities, and that, in turn, exposed individuals to direct attacks by rabid white racists. The often difficult task of convincing intimidated people to get registered needed a good deal of persuasion, and for that, black activists received assistance from liberal Northerners, mostly members of the SNCC, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee. That Northerners came for help—who summarily were Jewish liberals in the contemptuous eyes of Southern whites—caused all the more indignation. And so, not only black civil-rights activists but their Northern helpers as well became targets of vicious attacks. A nasty example of how aggressive the fight was is dealt with in the movie Mississippi Burning. The incident related in that film is based on fact—though clad in blatant inverted stereotyping that almost spoils the movie. (Inverted stereotyping means that the traditional black-and-white characterization of Hollywood films is turned around: all blacks in Mississippi Burning are too good to be true, and all whites too vicious to be bearable.) One aspect of the film and the story behind it is worth mentioning. A common saying has it that justice is blind, but Southern justice was blind only in one eye. While it was excessively aggressive against blacks, it took no action against white perpetrators of the worst kind, especially if their victims were black. The film also points out that the Klan and Southern law enforcement often were close allies—in the movie, the local Klan leader is a deputy sheriff—an alliance that was not conducive to the persecution of lynchings and murders. Perhaps the most outrageous case of injustice Southern-white style happened in the case of Emmett Till. Till, a black boy from Chicago, was tortured and killed by a band of the Klan. Two white men, brothers confessed the murder and were put on trial. On the all-white jury, then, sat a few other members of the Klan also involved in the murder. The two brothers were acquitted and then went on to sell off their story to the highest-bidding magazine.

The years 1960 and 1961 marked other changes in the struggle of securing the civil-rights of Southern blacks. For one, in 1960, a new civil-rights bill was passed, which regulated the process of registering as a voter and made difficult the Southern practice of discarding black votes. For another, in 1961, John F. Kennedy’s succession to the presidency meant that the federal administration—which before had at best been lackluster in assisting blacks—began to side with civil-rights campaigners. For whatever this new ally was worth, in 1961 the campaign for black integration was an uphill battle that suffered many setbacks.

How difficult the struggle was can only be suggested by taking a look at the example of Birmingham AL. What happened in Birmingham was not singular, but took on similar forms in Montgomery and Selma, or other cities and towns of the Deep South. At the time, Birmingham was a city with steel works, an important industrial center of the South, and had a reputation as being a city in which harsh laws were viciously enforced—thanks to its Chief of Police, Eugene Connor, who prided himself on his nickname, "Bull." Also, the state of Alabama was governed by George Wallace, a leading spokesman of segregationalism and in full support of "Bull" Connor’s methods. It was clear to civil-rights organizations that if they could win in Birmingham, it would go a long way towards an overall victory; thus, they singled out the city in Alabama and deliberately provoked an all-out contest. Significantly, a reason why Birmingham was targeted was that black leaders could be sure that there would be massive resistance by authorities and militant whites—and they were right. The events taking place in spring 1963 were the peak of what the black historian John Hope Franklin has called the "black revolution." There had been frequent peaceful demonstrations by blacks and white activist supporters, despite the fact that hundreds of demonstrators, including many schoolchildren, had been arrested on orders of Sheriff Connor. On May 3, the contest became violent; the police began to use dogs and high-pressure water hoses, and the marchers defended themselves with rocks and bottles. During the following days, 4.000 people were arrested, and violence escalated—and as in all the civil-rights campaigns of the South, most of the violence was committed by Whites. A bomb destroyed the house of Martin Luther King’s brother; another devastaded King’s motel room while he was out; a third exploded in a black church during Sunday school, killing four girls. Two blacks not associated with the movement were killed by Alabama highway police. When Gov. Wallace planned to call out the National Guard, the government in Washington interfered—the Department of Justice under Robert Kennedy had already given assistance to the civil rights groups before the President took action. Kennedy placed the National Guard under federal command, thus preventing Wallace from sending them in. That officials from Washington sided against the local authorities, served to attract the attention of the media—television in particular (one has to remember that the flare-up in Birmingham took place when American television networks had only just begun with national newscasts). The media coverage and pressure exerted by government officials and northern economic leaders on leading citizens of Birmingham eventually brought about a loosening of tensions in that city.

In his first two years of office, John F. Kennedy had been very cautious in internal affairs—a good deal more so than in foreign affairs, considering his recklessness in the Cuba crisis. In the civil-rights question he was at first passive; only after the battle of Oxford did circumstances force him to more energetic measures. The goings-on at Birmingham brought about further changes—both in the president’s thinking and in the mind of the public at large. Protests sprang up in cities all across the South, and Martin Luther King vowed that he would organize a march to bring the case to Washington. Kennedy moved to have a civil rights bill drafted. But on the very day the bill was sent to Congress, NAACP leader Medgar Evers was shot in the back as he left his house in Jackson, Mississippi, and waved good-bye to his children. The public outcry over the deed was loud—Bob Dylan wrote his song "Only a Pawn in Their Game"—but authorities in Jackson proved only their unwillingness to solve the murder case (a Ku Klux Klan activist, who was tried for the deed, was set free on rather dubious grounds). King went on organizing his march on Washington, where, on August 28, 1963, in front of a crowd of several hundred thousand people he would proclaim, "I have a dream ..., I have a dream ... free at last."

The march on Washington was a sentimental climax of the movement, but the sentimentality was ill-founded. Nothing had really been achieved, and the backlash followed immediately. The F.B.I. under J. Edgar Hoover, a hardheaded conservative of the worst kind, took sides against King, declaring him to be "the most dangerous negro of the U.S." In a way, King’s demise began right after the March on Washington, even if in 1964 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Also, Kennedy’s proposed omnibus civil-rights bill was stuck in Congress because it was deemed too radical, and the President lacked the diplomatic skills and the nerve needed to bargain with and convince Representatives. Then, Kennedy was shot in Dallas. Perhaps the assassination had something to do with the fact that Kennedy’s civil-rights bill met with more interest in Congress; but more important was the contribution of Kennedy’s successor. It is certainly an irony of history that the man who managed to secure at last the legal basis for the equality of all races, President Lyndon B. Johnson, was a Southerner from Texas; but Johnson had had a long career as a Congressman before becoming Vice President, and his bargaining skills finally helped pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The first bill prohibited the segregation of public buildings, jobs, educational institutions, and the like; the second prohibited poll taxes and such measures as literacy tests, even subjecting those officials to terms of imprisonment, who refused to register voters on grounds of race.

The intention of the two laws was sufficiently clear—namely to end all legal forms of racial discrimination—but their practical worth was another matter. That became obvious in Selma AL, where, at the time that the second bill was discussed in Congress, a riot flared up which was even more brutal and violent than that which had occurred in Birmingham. The two laws’s limited practical worth became conspicuous when, a few days after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, something happened which demonstrated that, though the purely legislative aspects of the struggle for civil rights may have been over, a more fundamental struggle had not even begun. In August 1965, Watts, the black ghetto of Los Angeles, was shaken by race riots that lasted a week, leaving 34 people killed and thousands injured. The explosion of Watts marked the beginning of a new stage in the struggle for equal rights—for in the six years to come, some 200 Northern cities would witness similar eruptions. The theater of the struggle for the civil rights of blacks moved from the South to the North—a shift that was in accord with the fact that by the mid-Sixties the majority of blacks lived in the urban centers and not in the rural South. Their situation was not determined by legal discrimination, but by a more pervasive one—one dominated by multiple prejudices—and those kinds of discrimination had not yet been touched.

The problems of the people living in the ghetto were not solved by such measures as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Indeed, those people could claim with a good deal of justification that their situation was completely ignored. President Johnson may have declared that his administration would begin an all-out "War on Poverty," but he pumped a good deal more money into the war in Vietnam than in his city redevelopment program—ambitious and successful as that was in isolated instances like Baltimore and Detroit. The war in Vietnam showed better the nation’s priorities: it was a rich man’s war fought by the poor, by the disproportionately large number of blacks who were drafted. Anger and frustration boiled over, first in Watts, then erupted, in the next years, in the ghettos of Detroit, Newark, Chicago, New York, Buffalo, Rochester—even in Des Moines, Iowa. During the two decades since World War II, living conditions in the inner-city neighborhoods had changed dramatically. The influx of blacks had gone on unabated, while the white middle class left in large numbers for the suburbs. As the new inhabitants were poorly educated and unskilled, and often without a regular income, the departure of the middle class deprived the cities of their tax base. With less and less to redistribute from rich to poor, drastic budget cuts were necessary, affecting schools and public facilities; the cities deteriorated, and the deterioration drove away more white middle-class families, leaving the poor and hopeless behind who was not permitted to and could not afford the suburban home. But whites still owned and controlled housing—a square foot of an exclusively white upper-class suburban house in St. Louis cost as much as a square foot of a rat- and roach-infested flat in the ghetto of East St. Louis. Municipal low-cost housing projects do not exist in American cities, where poverty and hopelessness have compounded to a vicious circle that, once it started, turned faster and faster. Claude Brown’s autobiographical Manchild in the Promised Land gives a compelling description of a Southern black boy’s move to a Northern ghetto and his subsequent life there during the late 1950s.

Martin Luther King went to Chicago’s South Side in 1964 and moved to Watts in 1965, to see what could be done there. He was to learn that the methods which had been so successful in the South could not be applied in the Northern ghettos. Peaceful protest needed an aim that was clearly discernible, and direct non-violent action was ineffective when there was no obvious oppressor like "Bull" Connor. King was eyed with suspicion by the radical leaders of the ghetto, who thought him to be too moderate. The spokesman of the Black Muslims, Malcolm X, saw in King a new Uncle Tom who, if not sent by whites, had at least come to promote the white man’s interests. Those radical leaders spoke out for "Black Power"—the slogan was coined by Stokely Carmichael. The Black Panthers demanded not just racial equality, but a true black identity independent of whites. As the SNCC, the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee, shifted its base to the ghettos, it dropped the "N" for "non-violent" from its name. King was really at a loss in the Northern ghettos, but became a hero when he was assassined by a white racist in April 1968.

Let me, then, by way of a conclusion, address some of the issues concerning the situation of African Americans over the last thirty years. If what I will say may seem too negative to some of you, this is intended, for I do not regard the history of the African Americans’ struggle for equal rights to be the story of success that it is sometimes made into. Quite the contrary, I think in many respects the situation today is bleaker than it was in, say, 1968, when Edward Kennedy noted that the African American part of the U.S. population not only had made no progress in social matters, but had lost more ground. The Senator’s statement is really as valid today as it was then—despite the jubilant report published by the London Economist last June, which claimed that more blacks than ever had a college degree and that the percentage of blacks dependant on welfare programs had actually gone down over the last thirty years, from 42% to 36%. The Economist, we know, makes no secret about its ideological stance, and that must be taken into account. It is true that a rising black middle class has developed over the last thirty years, a middle class that is growing rapidly in numbers; but at the same time, the number of blacks dependent on welfare programs would have risen even more dramatically, had not Republican administrations cuts those programs drastically. Official statistics may want to make believe that this is not so; but the inner-city ghettos with their predominantly black population have further deteriorated. The South Bronx is now in complete ruins, a waste land. When it comes to assessing the situation of inner-city blacks, one must be a cynic to arrive at an easy answer to the problem—like that Undersecretary of the Bush administration who claimed that the government programs which the Democrats set up in the 60s to pump good money after bad in inner-city redevelopment were actually responsible for the misery, because they spoiled the people.

A concluding statement must take into account the many facets of the issue. The situation of some African Americans has improved, and they are recognized by the white majority. In 1966 Edward Brooke became the first black U.S. Senator—in the state of Massachusetts, which has a black population of about 4 %. In 1967, NAACP leader Thurgood Marshall was appointed to the Supreme Court, from where he retired, a highly respected member, in 1991, two years before his death in 1993. In 1968, Shirley Chisholm was elected in New York City, thus becoming the first woman Representative who was also black, reelected six times, she refused to run again in 1982, though urged by everyone to run again because Congress could not afford to lose her. In 1989, Virginia chose a black governor. Black athletes and entertainers have become too numerous to be mentioned, and black artists have gained major ground. Subsumed under the names of Black Aesthetic and Black Arts Movement, distinctly black quests for literacy—for reading and writing oneself and one’s culture—have produced some stunning works of art and criticism which treat exemplarily the question of race, gender, and class.