LAST
FREE
THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
AT
“I Have A Dream”: The August, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs
and Freedom was the largest political demonstration the nation had ever
seen. Crowds gathered before the Lincoln Memorial and around the
Washington Monument reflection pool heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
offer perhaps the finest oration ever delivered by an American.
FREE
LAST
THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
AT
— 1 —
Slavery Spreads to America 3
A Global Phenomenon Transplanted to America
Slavery Takes Hold
Slave Life and Institutions
Family Bonds
Spotlight: The Genius of the Black Church
— 2 —
“Three-Fifths of Other Persons:” A Promise Deferred 8
A Land of Liberty?
The Pen of Frederick Douglass
The Underground Railroad
By the Sword
The Rebellious John Brown
The American Civil War
Spotlight: Black Soldiers in the Civil War
— 3 —
“Separate but Equal:” African Americans Respond
to the Failure of Reconstruction 18
Congressional Reconstruction
Temporary Gains … and Reverses
The Advent of “Jim Crow”
Booker T. Washington: The Quest for Economic Independence
W.E.B. Du Bois: The Push for Political Agitation
Spotlight: Marcus Garvey: Another Path
— 4 —
Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall
Launch the Legal Challenge to Segregation 26
Charles Hamilton Houston: The Man Who Killed Jim Crow
Thurgood Marshall: Mr. Civil Rights
The Brown Decision
Spotlight: Ralph Johnson Bunche: Scholar and Statesman
Spotlight: Jackie Robinson: Breaking the Color Barrier
CONTENTS
— 5 —
“We Have a Movement” 35
“Tired of Giving In:” The Montgomery Bus Boycott
Sit-Ins
Freedom Rides
The Albany Movement
Arrest in Birmingham
Letter From Birmingham Jail
“We Have a Movement”
The March on Washington
SPOTLIGHT: Rosa Parks: Mother of the Civil Rights Movement
Spotlight: Civil Rights Workers: Death in Mississippi
Spotlight: Medgar Evers: Martyr of the Mississippi Movement
— 6 —
“It Cannot Continue:” Establishing Legal Equality 52
Changing Politics
Lyndon Baines Johnson
The Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Act's Powers
The Voting Rights Act of 1965: The Background
Bloody Sunday in Selma
The Selma-to-Montgomery March
The Voting Rights Act Enacted
What the Act Does
SPOTLIGHT: White Southerners' Reactions to the Civil Rights Movement
Epilogue 65
The Triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 3
— 1 —
Among the antiquities displayed at the United
Nations headquarters in New York is a replica
of the Cyrus Cylinder. Named for Cyrus the
Great, ruler of the Persian Empire and conqueror
of Babylonia, the document dates to about 539 B.C. Cyrus
guaranteed to his subjects many of what we today call civil
rights, among them freedom of religion and protection of
personal property. Cyrus also abolished slavery, “a tradition,”
he asserted, that “should be exterminated the world over.”
Throughout history, nations have varied in how broadly
they define and how vigorously they defend their citizens'
personal protections and privileges. The United States is
a nation built on these civil rights, on the soaring ideals
enshrined in its Declaration of Independence and the
legal protections formalized in its Constitution, and most
prominently, in the first 10 amendments to that Constitution,
known collectively as the American people's Bill of Rights.
Yet one group of arrivals did not enjoy those rights
and protections. Even as European immigrants found
unprecedented economic opportunity and greater personal,
political, and religious liberty in the New World, black
Africans were transported there involuntarily, often in
chains, to be sold as chattel slaves and compelled to labor
for “masters,” most commonly in the great agricultural
plantations in the South.
This book recounts how those African-American slaves
and their descendants struggled to win — both in law and
in practice — the civil rights enjoyed by other Americans. It
is a story of dignified persistence and struggle, a story that
produced great heroes and heroines, and one that ultimately
succeeded by forcing the majority of Americans to confront
squarely the shameful gap between their universal principles
of equality and justice and the inequality, injustice, and
oppression faced by millions of their fellow citizens.
A Global Phenomenon Transplanted to America
Man has enslaved his fellow man since prehistoric times.
While the conditions of servitude varied, slave labor was
employed by the ancient Mesopotamian, Indian, and Chinese
civilizations, in classical Greece and Rome, and in preColombian America by the native Aztec, Inca, and Mayan
empires. The Bible tells us that the Egyptians used Hebrew
slaves and that the Hebrews, upon their exodus from Egypt,
used slaves of their own. Early Christianity accepted the
practice, as did Islam. North and East African Arabs enslaved
black Africans, and Egypt and Syria enslaved Mediterranean
Europeans, whom they captured or purchased from slave
traders and typically employed to produce sugar. Many Native
American tribal groups enslaved members of other tribes
captured in war.
A number of factors combined to stimulate the Atlantic
slave trade. The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople (now
Istanbul) in 1453 disturbed trade patterns and deprived
sweet-toothed Europeans of highly prized sugar. Led by the
Portuguese, Europeans began to explore the West African
coast and to purchase slaves from African slave traders. After
Christopher Columbus's 1492 discovery of the New World,
European colonizers imported large numbers of African
slaves to work the land and, especially in the Caribbean, to
Slavery Spreadsto America
Enslaved Africans on the deck of the bark Wildfire, Key West, Florida,
April 1860.
4 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
cultivate sugar. Caribbean islands soon supplied some 80 to 90
percent of Western Europe's sugar demand.
It is difficult in today's world to understand the
prominent role that crops such as sugar, tobacco, cotton, and
spices once played in the world economy. In 1789, for example,
the small colony of Saint Domingue (today's Haiti) accounted
for about 40 percent of the value of all French foreign trade.
The economic forces driving the Atlantic slave trade were
powerful. In all, at least 10 million Africans endured the
“middle passage.” (The term refers to the Atlantic Ocean
segment — the second and longest — of the triangular trade
that sent textiles, rum, and manufactured goods to Africa,
slaves to the Americas, and sugar, tobacco and cotton to
Europe.) Most arrived in Portuguese Brazil, Spanish Latin
America, and the various British and French Caribbean
“sugar islands.” Only about 6 percent of the enslaved Africans
were brought to British North America. Even so, the AfricanAmerican experience differed profoundly from those of
the other immigrants who would found and expand the
United States.
Slavery Takes Hold
The very first slaves in British North America arrived by
accident. Twelve years after the 1607 founding of the first
permanent British settlement, at Jamestown, Virginia, a
privateer docked there with some “20 and odd Negros” it had
captured from a Spanish ship in the Caribbean. The settlers
purchased this “cargo,” the original slaves in the future
United States.
For the next 50 years, slaves were not a prominent source
of labor in the fledgling Virginia colony. The landowning
elites preferred to rely on “indentured” white labor. Under
this arrangement, potential European immigrants signed an
indenture, or contract, under which they borrowed from an
employer the price of transportation to America. In return,
they agreed to work several years to pay off that debt. During
this period, the sociologist Orlando Patterson writes, relations
between the races were relatively intimate. A small number of
particularly resourceful blacks even obtained their freedom
and prospered in their own right.
Beginning in the second half of the 17th century, however,
both the price of slaves and the supply of immigrants willing
to indenture themselves decreased. As slave labor became
cheaper than indentured labor, slavery grew and spread. By
1770, African Americans comprised about 40 percent of the
population in the southern colonies and a majority in South
Carolina. (Slaves were also found in the northern colonies, but
the slave population there never exceeded about 5 percent.)
Faced with such a large, oppressed, and potentially rebellious
An 1823 drawing depicts slaves cutting sugar cane on the Caribbean
island of Antigua.
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 5
minority, southern elites encouraged a hardening of social
attitudes toward African Americans. The children of slave
women were declared to be slaves. Masters were permitted
to kill slaves in the course of punishing them. Perhaps most
importantly, white Virginia elites began to promote anti-black
racism as a means of dividing blacks from less wealthy
white workers.
Most African-American slaves labored on farms that
produced staple crops: tobacco in Maryland, Virginia,
and North Carolina; rice in the Deep South. In 1793, the
American inventor Eli Whitney produced the first cotton
gin, a mechanical device that removed cotton seeds from the
surrounding cotton fiber. This spurred a dramatic expansion
in cotton cultivation throughout the Lower South, one
that expanded westward through Alabama, Mississippi,
and Louisiana and into Texas. About one million AfricanAmerican slaves moved westward during the period 1790-
1860, nearly twice the number carried to the United States
from Africa.
Slave Life and Institutions
African-American slaves were compelled to work hard, and in
some cases brutally hard. In some states, laws known as slave
codes authorized terrible punishments for offending slaves.
According to Virginia's 1705 slave code:
All Negro, mulatto, and Indian slaves within this
dominion … shall be held to be real estate. If any slave resist
his master … correcting such slave, and shall happen to be
killed in such correction … the master shall be free of all
punishment … as if such accident never happened.
This code also required that slaves obtain written
permission before leaving their plantation. It authorized
whipping, branding, and maiming as punishment for even
minor offenses. Some codes forbade teaching slaves how to
read and write. In Georgia, the punishment for this offense
was a fine and/or whipping if the guilty party were a “slave,
Negro, or free person of color.”
Although the lot of American slaves was harsh, they
labored under material conditions by some measures
comparable to those endured by many European workers
and peasants of that era. But there was a difference. The slaves
lacked their freedom.
Denial of fundamental human rights handicapped
African-American political and economic progress, but
slaves responded by creating institutions of their own,
vibrant institutions on which the civil rights movement of
the mid-20th century would later draw for sustenance and
social capital. Earlier accounts often portrayed the slaves as
infantilized objects “acted upon” by their white masters, but
we now understand that many slave communities managed
to carve out a measure of personal, cultural, and religious
autonomy. “It was not that the slaves did not act like men,”
historian Eugene Genovese writes. “Rather, it was that they
could not grasp their collective strength as a people and act
like political men.” Nevertheless, Genovese concludes that
most slaves “found ways to develop and assert their manhood
and womanhood despite the dangerous compromises forced
upon them.”
One way was the “black church.” Over time, increasing
numbers of African-American slaves embraced Christianity,
typically denominations like Baptist and Methodist that
prevailed among white southerners. Some masters feared
that Christian tenets would undermine their justifications for
slavery, but others encouraged their slaves to attend church,
although in a separate, “blacks-only” section.
After exposure to Christianity, many slaves then
established their own parallel, or underground, churches.
These churches often blended Christianity with aspects
of the slaves' former African religious cultures and beliefs.
Religious services commonly incorporated shouting, dance,
and the call-and-response interactions that would later feature
prominently in the great sermons of Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr. and other leading black preachers. The black church often
emphasized different aspects of the Christian tradition than
did southern white churches. Where the latter might interpret
the biblical Curse of Ham (“a servant of servants shall he be
unto his brethren”) as justifying slavery, African-American
services might instead emphasize the story of how Moses led
the Israelites from bondage.
For African-American slaves, religion offered a measure
of solace and hope. After the American Civil War brought
an end to slavery, black churches and denominational
organizations grew in membership, influence, and
organizational strength, factors that would prove vital to the
success of the civil rights movement.
Family Bonds
The slaves' tight family bonds would prove a similar source
of strength. Slave masters could, and often did, split up
families — literally selling members to other slave owners,
splitting husband from wife, parents from children. But
many slave families remained intact, and many scholars
have noted the “remarkable stability, strength, and
durability of the nuclear family under slavery.” Slaves were
typically housed as extended family units. Slave children,
historian C. Vann Woodward writes, at least “were assured
a childhood, one exempt from labor and degradation past
the age when working-class children of England and France
were condemned to mine and factory.”
6 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
The African-American family structure adapted to meet
the challenges posed by slavery, and later by discrimination
and economic inequality. Many black family units resembled
extended clans rather than smaller, immediate families. Some
were organized with strong females as central authority
figures. Slaveholders sometimes encouraged these family
ties, reasoning that the threat of breaking up a family helped
undermine the threats of disobedience and rebellion.
Regardless, strong immediate and extended families
helped ensure African-American survival. In the Caribbean
colonies and in Brazil, slave mortality rates exceeded birth
rates, but blacks in the United States reproduced at the same
rate as the white population. By the 1770s, only one in five
slaves in British North America had been born in Africa. Even
after 1808, when the United States banned the importation of
slaves, their numbers increased from 1.2 million to nearly
4 million on the eve of the Civil War in 1861.
Slavery brought Africans to America and deprived them
of the freedoms enjoyed by Americans of European origin. But
even in bondage, many African Americans developed strong
family ties and faith-based institutions and laid a foundation
upon which future generations could build a triumphant
civil rights movement. The struggle for freedom and equality
began long before Rosa Parks claimed a seat on the front of
the bus, more than a century before Martin Luther King Jr.
inspired Americans with his famous dream.
A drawing, circa 1860,
depicts a black preacher
addressing his mixed-race
congregation on a South
Carolina plantation.
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 7
African-American
religious communities have contributed
immensely to American
society, not least by supplying
much of the moral, political,
and organizational foundation of the 20th-century
civil rights movement and
by shaping the thought of its
leaders, Rosa Parks and the
Reverend Martin Luther King
Jr. among them.
Enslaved and free AfricanAmericans formed their
own congregations as early
as the mid- to late 18th
century. After emancipation,
fully fledged denominations
emerged. What we today
call the “black church”
encompasses seven major
historic black denominations:
African Methodist Episcopal
(AME); African Methodist
Episcopal Zion (AMEZ);
Christian Methodist
Episcopal (CME); the
National Baptist Convention,
USA, Incorporated; the
National Baptist Convention
of America, Unincorporated;
the Progressive National
Baptist Convention; and the
Church of God in Christ.
These denominations
emerged after the
emancipation of the AfricanAmerican slaves. They drew
mainly on Methodist, Baptist,
and Pentecostal traditions,
but often featured ties to
American Catholicism,
Anglicanism, the United
Methodist Church, and a
host of other traditions.
The great gift, indeed
genius, of African-American
religious sensibility is its
drive to forge a common
identity. Black slaves from
different parts of Africa were
transported to America
by means of the “middle
passage” across the Atlantic.
As slaves, they endured
massive oppression. Against
this background of diversity
and social deprivation,
African-American religious
belief and practice afforded
solace and the intellectual
foundation for a successful
means of solving deep-seated
conflict: the techniques
of civil disobedience and
nonviolence. The black
church also supplied black
political activists with a
powerful philosophy: to focus
upon an ultimate solution for
all rather than palliatives for
a select few. The civil rights
movement would adopt
this policy — never to allow
systemic oppression of any
human identity. Its genius,
then, was a natural overflow
from African-American
religious communities that
sought to make sense of
a tragic history and move
toward a future, not just for
themselves, but also for their
nation and the world.
In short, while some form
of resistance to slavery and
then Jim Crow segregation
probably was inevitable, the
communal spirituality of
the black church in the face
of repression helped spawn
a civil rights movement
that sought its objectives by
peaceful means.
Many of the powerful
voices of the civil rights
movement — King, of course,
but also such powerful and
significant figures as U.S.
Representatives Barbara
Jordan and John Lewis, the
political activist and Baptist
minister Jesse Jackson, and
the gospel legend Mahalia
Jackson — all were formed
from their worship life in
the black church. Indeed,
King's role as chief articulator
of civil rights reflects the
direct relationship between
African-American religious
communities and the struggle
for racial and social justice
in the United States. The
spiritual influence of AfricanAmerican religious practice
spread beyond this nation's
shores, as global leaders
such as Nelson Mandela and
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
learned from King how to
embody a loving, inclusive
African and Christian
identity.
Today's African-American
communal spirituality is as
strong and engaged as ever.
Black churches work to craft
responses to contemporary
challenges such as the spread
of HIV/AIDS, the need to
ameliorate poverty, and the
disproportionate recidivism
of imprisoned African
Americans. The search
toward common identity
remains the foundation of
such a spirituality, however.
Through the election of
the first African-American
president and the increase
of minorities in higher
education, the journey toward
common identity remains
on course.
In sum, the black church
helped African Americans
survive the harshest forms
of oppression and developed
a revolutionary appeal
for universal communal
spirituality. The black church
didn't just theorize about
democracy, it practiced
democracy. From its roots
there flowered the civil
rights movement — creative,
inclusive, and nonviolent.
By Michael Battle
Ordained a priest by
Archbishop Desmond
Tutu, the Very Rev. Michael
Battle is Provost and Canon
Theologian of the Cathedral
Center of St. Paul in the
Episcopal Diocese of Los
Angeles. His books include
The Black Church in America:
African American Spirituality.
The Genius of the Black Church
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 7
8 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
— 2 —
“Three-Fifths ofOtherPersons
”
A Promise Deferred
During the 19th and early 20th centuries,
African Americans and their white
allies employed many strategies as
they fought to end slavery and then
to secure legal equality for the “freedmen.” Progress
toward racial equality was destined to be slow, not least
because slavery and oppression of blacks were among
the sectional political compromises that undergirded
national unity. The Civil War of 1861-1865 would end
slavery in the United States, but once the conflict ended,
northern political will to overcome white southern
resistance to racial equality gradually ebbed. The
imposition of the “Jim Crow” system of legal segregation
throughout the South stifled black political progress.
Nevertheless, African-American leaders continued to
build the intellectual and institutional capital that would
nourish the successful civil rights movements of the midto late 20th century.
A Land of Liberty?
Slavery divided Americans from their very first day of
independence. As the South grew more dependent on a new
staple crop — “King Cotton” — and on the slave-intensive
plantations that cultivated it, the prospect of a clash with
increasingly antislavery northern states grew. The young
nation delayed that conflict with a series of moral evasions and
political compromises.
The United States' Declaration of Independence (1776)
includes stirring language on universal brotherhood: “We
hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and
the Pursuit of Happiness.” And yet its principal draftsman,
Thomas Jefferson, was himself a slaveholding Virginian.
Jefferson understood the contradiction, and his draft sharply
condemned the slave trade — although not slavery itself
— calling it “a cruel war against human nature.” But the
Continental Congress, America's de facto government at the
time, deleted the slave trade reference from the Declaration
to avoid any controversy that might fracture its proindependence consensus. It would not be the last time that
political expediency would trump moral imperatives.
By 1787, many Americans had determined to replace
the existing loose, decentralized alliance of 13 states with a
stronger federal government. The Constitutional Convention,
held in Philadelphia from May to September of that year,
produced a blueprint for such a government. “There were
big fights over slavery at the convention,” according to David
Stewart, author of The Summer of 1787: The Men Who
Invented the Constitution. While “many of the delegates were
actually abolitionist in their views … there was not a feel for
abolition in the country at the time.”
Because any proposed constitution would not take effect
until ratified by 9 of the 13 states, it became necessary to reach
a compromise on the status of the African-American slaves.
Northern delegates to the convention, led by James Wilson
of Pennsylvania, reached an agreement with three large
slaveholding states. Both sides agreed that every five “unfree
persons” — slaves — would count as three people when
calculating the size of a state's congressional delegation. They
also agreed to bar the U.S. Congress for 20 years from passing
any law prohibiting the importation of slaves. (Congress later
would abolish the slave trade, effective 1808. By then, this was
not a controversial measure owing to the natural increase of
the slave population.)
Depiction of George Washington with his black field workers on his Mount
Vernon, Virginia, estate, 1757.
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 9
This “three-fifths compromise” has been described as
America's Faustian bargain, or original sin. As David Walker,
a free northern black, argued in an 1829 pamphlet: “Has Mr.
Jefferson declared to the world that we are inferior to the
whites, both in the endowments of our bodies and of minds?”
The compromise allowed the states to form a stronger union,
but it also ensured that slavery would continue in the South,
where the 1793 invention of the cotton gin had sparked
the growth of a slave-intensive plantation system of cotton
cultivation. It also bore profound political consequences for
the young nation. In the hotly contested presidential election
of 1800, the additional electoral votes awarded southern states
by virtue of their slave populations supplied Thomas Jefferson
with his margin of victory over the incumbent president, John
Adams of Massachusetts.
Of even greater importance was how slavery affected
the nation's expansion. The question of whether new states
would permit slavery assumed decisive importance upon
the congressional balance-of-power between the “slave”
and “free” states. During the first half of the 19th century,
Congress hammered out a number of compromises that
generally ensured that states allowing slavery would enter
the Union paired with new states that prohibited it. The
Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the
Kansas-Nebraska Act all maintained this political balance. In
1857, however, the Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott v.
Sanford case that Congress could not bar slavery in western
territories not yet admitted as states. The decision intensified
the sectional conflict over slavery and hastened the ultimate
confrontation to come.
Even as the young nation's political system failed to
secure for African Americans the civil rights enjoyed by their
white countrymen, brave men and women were launching
efforts to abolish slavery and to ensure that the United States
would live up to its own best ideals.
This map of the United States in 1857 depicts the “free” states in dark
green, slave states in red and light red, and the territories (American lands
not yet admitted to statehood) in light green.
10 FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
The Pen of Frederick Douglass
Although the U.S. political system
proved unable to dislodge slavery from
the American South, the “peculiar
institution,” as southerners often
called it, did not go unchallenged.
Determined women and men —
blacks and whites — devoted their
lives to the cause of abolition, the
legal prohibition of slavery. They
employed an array of tactics, both
violent and nonviolent. And just
as in Martin Luther King's day, the
pen and the appeal to conscience
would prove a powerful weapon.
While the American Civil War was
not solely a battle to free the slaves,
the abolitionists persuaded many
northerners to concur with the
sentiment expressed in 1858 by a
senatorial candidate named Abraham
Lincoln: “A house divided against
itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure,
permanently half slave and half free.”
The stirring words of African-American and white
thinkers forced increasing numbers of their countrymen
to confront the contradiction between their noble ideals
and the lives of bondage imposed on black Americans in
the South. Perhaps the most powerful pen belonged to
Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, journalist, publisher,
and champion of liberty. Douglass was born into slavery in
either 1817 or 1818. His mistress defied Maryland state law
by teaching the boy to read. At age 13 he purchased his first
book, a collection of essays, poems, and dialogues extolling
liberty that was widely used in early 19th-century American
schoolrooms. From these youthful studies, Douglass began
to hone the skills that would make him one of the century's
most powerful and effective orators. In 1838, Douglass
escaped from the plantation where he worked as a field hand
and arrived in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he would
launch a remarkable career.
In 1841, the leading white abolitionist, William Lloyd
Garrison, sponsored an anti-slavery convention held in
Nantucket, Massachusetts. One attendee familiar with
Douglass's talks at local black churches invited him to address
the gathering. “It was with the utmost difficulty that I could
stand erect,” Douglass later wrote, “or that I could command
and articulate two words without hesitation and stammering.”
But his words moved the crowd: “The audience sympathized
with me at once, and from having been remarkably quiet,
became much excited.” The convention organizers agreed.
Their Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society immediately hired
Douglass as an agent.
In his new career, Douglass spoke at public meetings
throughout the North. He condemned slavery and argued that
African Americans were entitled by right to the civil rights
that the U.S. Constitution afforded other Americans. On a
number of occasions, racist mobs attacked these abolitionist
gatherings, but other whites befriended Douglass and
championed his cause. After one mob knocked out the teeth
of a white colleague who saved Douglass from violent attack,
Douglass wrote his friend: “I shall never forget how like two
very brothers we were ready to dare, do, and even die for each
other.” Douglass praised his colleague's willingness to leave
a “life of ease and even luxury … against the wishes of your
father and many of your friends,” instead to do “something
toward breaking the fetters of the slave and elevating the
dispised [sic] black man.”
In 1845, Douglass published the first of several acclaimed
autobiographies. His writings educated white Americans
about plantation life, disabused them of the notion that slavery
was somehow “good” for blacks, and convinced many that no
just society could tolerate the practice. But with Douglass's
sudden fame came a real danger: that his master might find
and recapture him. Douglass prudently left the country for
a two-year speaking tour of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
While Douglass was overseas, his friends purchased his
freedom — the price for one of the nation's greatest men was
just over $700.
An anti-slavery meeting in Boston, 1835, attracts both whites and free blacks.
FREE AT LAST: THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 11
In Great Britain, Douglass was exposed to a more
politically aggressive brand of abolitionism. When he
returned to the United States in 1847, Douglass broke with
William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison favored purely moral and
nonviolent action against slavery, and he was willing to see
the North secede from the Union to avoid slavery's “moral
stain.” Douglass pointed out that such a course would do little
for black slaves in the South, and he offered his support for a
range of more aggressive activities. He backed mainstream
political parties promising to prevent the extension of slavery
into the western territories and other parties demanding
complete nationwide abolition. He offered his house as a
station on the Underground Railroad (the name given to a
network of people who helped fugitive slaves escape to the
North) and befriended the militant abolitionist John Brown,
who aimed to spark a violent slave uprising.
In 1847, Douglass launched The North Star, the first of
several newspapers he would publish to promote the causes
of equal rights for blacks and for women. Its motto was “Right
is of no Sex — Truth is of no Color — God is the Father of us
all, and we are all brethren.” Douglass was an early and fervent
champion of gender equality. In 1872, he would run for vice
president on an Equal Rights Party ticket headed by Victoria
Claflin Woodhull, the United States' first woman presidential
candidate.
Douglass campaigned for Abraham Lincoln in the
1860 presidential election. When the American Civil War —
pitting the northern Union against the rebellious southern
Confederacy — broke out shortly after Lincoln's inauguration,
Douglass argued that the Union should employ black troops:
“Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters,
U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his
shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power
on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to
citizenship.” Too old himself to fight, Douglass recruited black
soldiers for the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Regiments, two
black-manned units that fought with great valor.
During the great conflict, Douglass's relations with
Lincoln initially were choppy, as the president worked first to
conciliate the slaveholding border states crucial to the Union
war effort. On September 22, 1862, however, Lincoln issued
the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring the freedom — on
January 1, 1863 — of all slaves held in the areas still in rebellion.
In March 1863, Lincoln endorsed the recruitment of black
soldiers, and the following year he flatly rejected suggestions to
enter into peace negotiations before the South agreed to abolish
slavery. The president twice invited Douglass to meet with him
at the White House. Douglass later wrote of Lincoln that “in
his company I was never in any way reminded of my humble
origin, or of my unpopular color,” and the president received
him “just as you have seen one gentleman receive another.”
Douglass's remarkable career continued after the war's
end. He worked for passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth,
and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution — the
postwar amendments that spelled out rights that applied
to all men, not just to whites, and prohibited the individual
states from denying those rights. While it would take a later
generation of brave civil rights champions to ensure that
these amendments would be honored, they would build on
the constitutional foundation laid by Douglass and others.
Douglass went on to hold a number of local offices in the
capital city of Washington, D.C., and to continue his work for
women's suffrage and equality. He died in 1895, by any fair
reckoning the leading African-American figure of the
19th century.
The Underground Railroad
Frederick Douglass was a man of singular abilities. His
contemporaries, both white and African American pursued a
variety of tactics to combat slavery and win blacks their civil
rights. In a nation that was half slave and half free, one obvious
tactic was to spirit slaves northward to freedom. Members
of several religious denominations took the lead. Beginning
around 1800, a number of Quakers (a religious denomination
founded in England and influential in Pennsylvania) began
to offer runaway slaves refuge and assistance either to start
new lives in the North or to reach Canada. “Fugitive Slave”
laws enacted in 1793 and 1850 provided for the seizure and
return of runaway slaves, but the Quakers were willing
nonviolently to disobey what they considered unjust laws.
PHOTO ORIGINALE VINTAGE ROY INNIS 1968 LEADER DES DROITS CIVIQUES économies AFRO-AMÉRICAIN
