Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis

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       “Not Tomorrow—but Now!”: L.A.’s United Civil Rights Movement (1963)

      In his book Why We Can’t Wait, Martin Luther King proclaimed 1963 “the year of the Negro Revolution.” James Baldwin, A. Philip Randolph, and Roy Wilkins echoed the phrase, as did Newsweek, Time, and the New York Times. On the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, the civil rights movement crossed the Mason-Dixon Line to become a truly national uprising. Its fulcrum, still Southern, was the great struggle in Birmingham—the “most segregated city in America” according to King—where a united Black community, including its children, confronted police dogs, fire hoses, jail beatings and church bombings.¹ Solidarity demonstrations in the North, however, soon led to emulation, as protest groups, often with CORE in the vanguard, embraced the Birmingham strategy of a “package deal”—demanding immediate progress toward integration on multiple fronts.

      In his celebrated essay “The Meaning of Birmingham,” Bayard Rustin wrote that

      unlike the period of the Montgomery boycott, when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had to be organized to stimulate similar action elsewhere, the response to Birmingham has been immediate and spontaneous. City after city has come into the fight, from Jackson, Mississippi, to Chestertown, Maryland … frustration has now given way to an open and publicly declared war on segregation and racial discrimination throughout the nation. The aim is simple. It is directed at all white Americans—the President of the United States, his brother, Robert, the trade-union movement, the power elite, and every living white soul the Negro meets. The war cry is “unconditional surrender—end all Jim Crow now.” Not next week, not tomorrow—but now.²

      If not “now,” a growing number of national leaders began to recognize, the likely alternative might be an abandonment of nonviolence by the Black community. Thus James Nabrit Jr., the president of Howard University, warned in June that unless Washington took immediate action to enforce equal rights, the country would explode, “including the wholesale killing of people.” The SCLC’s George Lawrence called the situation a “powder keg,” emphasizing that it “was no longer just a Southern thing. [It was] exploding all over the country.”³ And in July, United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther predicted, at an Urban League convention in Los Angeles, that the failure to meet Black demands would lead to “civil war.”⁴ Although some of this apocalyptic rhetoric was generated in support of a new civil rights bill, the warnings were for the most part accurate and predicted the ghetto insurrections that rocked US cities for six consecutive summers beginning in 1964.

      Los Angeles became a major, if unsuccessful, arena for the application of the “Birmingham strategy.” At the end of May the SCLC organized a huge rally for King at Wrigley Field, the 22,000-seat baseball stadium east of USC that had been the old home of the Los Angeles Angels minor league team. The city’s leading equal rights advocates—including the ACLU, NAACP, CORE, Jewish Labor Committee, and the UAW—joined together as the United Civil Rights Committee (later Council) (UCRC) to challenge discrimination in housing, jobs, policing and schools. Similar freedom movements, some far more militant, emerged in Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago and San Francisco, and on a smaller scale in Seattle and other cities. This was a unique moment—too often forgotten in a civil rights hagiography that neglects the role of CORE and James Farmer, not to mention Black nationalists like Albert Cleage in Detroit and Cecil Moore in Philadelphia—when mass protest over discrimination in the North was synchronized with the life-and-death struggle of the nonviolent Southern civil rights movement in cities (to invert Atlanta’s slogan) that were “not too busy to hate,” and did so with relentless ferocity. Behind their liberal facade, as King emphasized in his Wrigley Field speech, many Northern urban power structures and political machines were just as unyielding as Birmingham’s, and de facto segregation was, if anything, more intractable than de jure. If civil rights supporters had any illusions on this score, they quickly vanished in a long summer of protest.

      Operation Windowshop

      The Birmingham campaign and the “Negro Revolution” it launched were responses to a string of defeats. 1962 had been a dismal year for the Southern freedom movement. SNCC’s voter registration campaign in Mississippi, another exercise in almost-suicidal courage by young organizers and the Black farmers who sheltered them, barely survived a reign of terror that included assassinations, church bombings, ambushes, vicious beatings, “criminal anarchy” prosecutions, and a food blockade that brought tens of thousands of poor sharecroppers to the edge of starvation. Meanwhile the year’s most ambitious attempts to break down urban segregation—CORE’s campaign in Baton Rouge and the Albany Freedom Movement in Georgia (which SCLC more or less usurped from SNCC)—filled the jails for months but failed to win significant concessions from local elites or protection from Washington. Neither movement, moreover, received any sustained attention in a national media obsessed with the space race and the Cuban Missile Crisis. In Malcolm X’s estimation, “when Martin Luther King failed to desegregate Albany, Georgia, the civil-rights struggle in America reached its low point. King became bankrupt almost, as a leader.”⁵ The Kennedy administration’s СКАЧАТЬ