Protest, Civil Rights, and the Power of Conscience

Dear Reader,

In recent years, many Americans have learned two contradictory positions regarding the Civil Rights Movement: that despite the Civil Rights Movement, the United States remained a systemically white supremacist/racist society, and that the Civil Rights Movement was a heroic moment of agency that forced the American government to live up to the American creed. Both are partially correct, but mostly wrong about what happened. America continued to have racial animosity, of course hearts and minds were not going to change over night, but the legal support and foundation of white supremacy was destroyed. The way it happened matters.

I’m a historian of social policy, but I am also a military historian, meaning I am a historian of force and power. My masters focused on the Troubles in Northern Ireland and my dissertation examined race and war in New Deal and Second World War America. To the point, I am an expert in culture and conflict in democratic societies, and it matters if the central state is on your side.

In the 1950s and 60s, political white supremacy was on the ropes. The United States government—the federal government—was dedicated to liberalism, anti-Nazism, and anti-Communism. I call this the liberal anti-Nazi ethos, meaning that the presidents after World War Two were against endorsing racial exclusion and superiority as a national doctrine.

Additionally, the country in 1960 was almost 89% white, 10% African American, and everyone else made up the the 1% in between, although there were some changes on the horizon regarding immigration. At the same time, the United States was the most technologically advanced, richest, and militarily powerful nation on earth—much stronger in relative terms then, than it is today. What this means is that on domestic policy, no one could force the majority population or the US government to do something they were disinclined to do.

So why did nonviolent protest and civil disobedience work? Conscience.

Nonviolence works when the federal government is ideologically on your side, but is slow to act. The protests helped push the federal government to act in the direction it was already leaning.

The Southern states were not budging, and Civil Rights in the South was met with violence: assassinations, bombings, and public beatings by police. It was met by the Stalinist-sounding Sov-Com, the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, an almost secret intelligence organization run by an American state government for the purpose of tracking and, if necessary, facilitating the elimination of civil rights activists. The legislative enabling act establishing Sov-Com authorized it to “do and perform any and all acts deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi, and her sister states..." and to take action to protect Mississippi from "encroachment thereon by the Federal Government or any branch, department or agency thereof.”

It was bad, and Mississippi and Alabama were almost universally regarded as the most oppressive states in the Union.

In February 1965, freedom marchers demonstrated in Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles from Selma. The police moved in and beat them down, and then a policeman shot a local deacon, Jimmie Lee Jackson. The murder of Deacon Jackson provoked the next stage in the movement. Civil Rights activists planned to march from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital, and petition for voting rights. They expected violent resistance and went willingly. Jackson’s murder went unsolved until 2005 when convicted drug trafficking dirty cop, James Bonard Fowler, confessed but claimed “self-defense” and only went down for manslaughter. Violent white supremacy often goes hand-in-hand with corruption.

On March 7, 1965, Amelia Boynton, John Lewis, and Hosea Williams began the Selma march in what became America’s Bloody Sunday when the police charged the marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Raining batons and tear gas to stop Americans from voting. The brutes beat Boynton, a 60 year old woman, unconcious. The country was horrified. Well much of the country was horrified, there were those who celebrated the cruelty, but they were not in power. March 9, MLK led a nervous second march but he turned back at the bridge after an agreement was reached with federal authorities to allow a small “witness” protest of Sunday’s events. The deal was made after a federal judge issued a restraining order blocking the march from proceeding. This allowed MLK and the righteously angry protestors to make their point without violating a court order. The civil rights leadership were disciplined and did what was required to win. And that evening the Ku Klux Klan beat the Unitarian minister James Joseph Reeb, a white man, to death. An all white jury found three of the four men accussed, Elmer Cook, William Stanley Hoggle, Namon O'Neal Hoggle, not guilty. The fourth man known as R.B. Kelley fled to Mississippi which refused to extradite him, and Reeb’s murder was never officially solved or punished.

A week later after the events of Bloody Sunday and “Turnaround Tuesday”, an angry and firm President Lyndon Baines Johnson spoke these words:

I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy.

I urge every member of both parties, Americans of all religions and of all colors, from every section of this country, to join me in that cause.

At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.

There, long-suffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of their rights as Americans. Many were brutally assaulted. One good man, a man of God, was killed.

There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma. There is no cause for self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans. But there is cause for hope and for faith in our democracy in what is happening here tonight.

For the cries of pain and the hymns and protests of oppressed people have summoned into convocation all the majesty of this great Government--the Government of the greatest Nation on earth.

Our mission is at once the oldest and the most basic of this country: to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man…

—March 15, 1965. Lyndon B. Johnson, Special Message to the Congress: The American Promise

On March 21 the marchers set out a third and final time under the protection of the federalized National Guard, LBJ’s troops, making it to Montgomery on March 24. If you can imagine the president responding this way then you risk it all. Selma only works if the federal government is on yourside, if you believe the supporters of that government and the president leading that government have a conscience to appeal to. That they will mourn and not cheer Rev. Reeb’s murder. But if you do not think that, you act differently. The long-suffering Northern Irish tried to do what the African Americans did.

They invoked MLK and formed the Northern Irish Civil Rights Association. In such a situtation you have to appeal to a power that has a conscience. Will the troops fire on the people or will they disobey such an order? Will such an order be given, is it likely to be given? Are the authorities looking for a plausible excuse to use violence? In Northern Ireland the devolved government chose to allow violence, and the government in Westminster was slow to act and when it did it did so as much to reassure the anti-Catholic loyalist as to keep order. Too late London realized its mistake in deferring to the Northern Irish government, but by then the British Army was doing the best it could to fight a revitalized Irish Republican Army. The Troubles should have been over before they started but the British government in Westminster hesistated to use force on the so-called loyalist militants. In the US it was the otherway around, the federal government came down hard on the side of civil rights and human dignity.

In 1965 Alabama the illegal use of force against civil rights marchers had the support of the majority white population, and the African Americans were largely disenfranchised. Outside of the South however, police and Ku Klux Klan violence did not have the support of the majority white population. Southern white supremacists were weaker than white liberals; white liberals controlled the federal government, and white liberals were shocked into action. But shock only worked because white liberals both cared and had power, they held the biggest club. But if the situtation had been reversed, then the violence of Bloody Sunday would have been successful. Too many academics want to speak truth to power but do not dwell on how power works.

If LBJ and the Democratic Party had sided with Alabama, what could the marchers have done? Appealed to the UN where the US has veto power? Invoked the responsibility-to-protect R2P against the greatest military power in history? Tactics are situtational; strategy works in context. The old generation of African Americans learned that when it comes to securing your freedom, what matters is winning, not just doing something because you want to make a statement. The statement has to have a point and a target audience who can respond favorably, who can act because they hold power.

You do not go to Selma if you think Washington will stand behind Alabama.