1 10 5 https://farmer.umwhistory.org/files/original/240aec86334bf26b744c352acd1822b6.mp4 7f77a233e3550e0b1e0afdd837cfab5b https://farmer.umwhistory.org/files/original/de63bc5165a4668cb7f8451d6eb8d401.srt 4f34024d0cecc20b3a6d5a0bf7161911 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Lectures Description An account of the resource In addition to his Reflections series, the UMW Special Collections and University Archives possessed three recordings of classroom lectures from Dr. James Farmer's Civil Rights Movement class. The James Farmer Project undertook the task of captioning and transcribing these recordings, making them publicly available for the first time. Moving Image A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Lecture Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Sounds like you had it right, Council on United Civil Rights Leadership. And we just might ask you what that was. And let me repeat what it was, the Council on United Civil Rights Leadership was an organization set up by the heads of the civil rights organizations, it was an umbrella organization. Its members were Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, Dorothy Height, John Lewis, and James Foreman, the SNCC, and me. We met roughly once a month in New York City, and its purpose was to provide a forum where the heads of the civil rights organizations could compare notes on a regular basis, discuss and debate tactics, and map strategies. In other words, where we had differences of opinion, sometimes sharp differences of opinion, we would talk those out behind the closed doors of people we were leading. Sometimes we would argue. But that was, if we may use the analogy of warfare, that was the tent and not the battlefield. When we went out on the battlefield, we were united. And the disagreements, the debates, the arguments were kept for the tent, reserved for the tent. So that was the Council of United Civil Rights Leadership, known as CUCRL, where Randolph proposed his March on Washington idea to CUCRL, and the idea was adopted and it was the various civil rights organizations who combined their resources to put on the march. And other groups were drawn in, such as some of the labor groups, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the National Council of Churches, Anti-Defamation League, Catholic organizations, and so on. It was a giant coalition that put on the march. Now I proceed. We'd like you to be able to define integration - what do we mean by integration? So you can give that some thought, between now and examination time. Define black nationalism, too. Among the black nationalist leaders were Malcolm X, that is the best known of them, were Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and before them, of course, there was the late Marcus Garvey. Rap Brown, who followed Stokely Carmichael as national chairman of SNCC, was also a nationalist, black nationalist. [Student: What was his name again?] H. Rapp, R-A-P-P, Brown. Rap Brown was even more militant than Stokely Carmichael was. We didn't talk much about him, of course, in these lectures and discussions. Rap had a very brief tenure in SNCC, SNCC went out of existence under his tenure, and he was arrested, jailed, charged with inciting arson, in Cambridge, Maryland, where he made a fiery speech, no pun intended, proposing that they burn down the city. And when he left, Cambridge would be set afire, parts of it. Cambridge, Maryland. Rap Brown, now, by the way, has changed his name, he has taken a Muslim name and he has joined the Nation of Islam, the so-called Black Muslims. And he owns a grocery store in Atlanta. It was curious, the semester before last, one of my students here decided to write a term paper on H. Rap Brown. And he found out that Brown was down in Atlanta, running a grocery store, a Muslim grocery store. Halal foods, no pork, et cetera, et cetera. So he fetched a long-distance call down there, a man answered. He said, may I speak with Mr. Brown, please? The guy said, "There is no Mr. Brown here." He said, "Well, I'm very anxious to get in touch with Mr. H. Rap Brown, because I'm writing a term paper on him and I'm in Jim Farmer's class at Mary Washington College." And I've decided I want to do a term paper on H. Rapp Brown. The voice on the other end of the line said, "Well, I'm the former H. Rapp Brown, my name is such and such and such and such now." And gave him an interview for about half an hour on the phone. And gave him my regards. I was surprised, because H. Rapp Brown and I were hardly on speaking terms when he was with SNCC. But anyway, those were some of the militants, and black nationalist militants. So you want to be able to define black nationalism, how it differs from integration, and I'd like you to make a stab at defining pan-Africanism, too. It's a term we've mentioned, I don't know that we've discussed it at any length. Marcus Garvey considered himself an Africanist in the 1920s, 1930s. DuBois began a Pan-Africanist movement at one stage in his life. Stokely Carmichael considers himself to be a pan-Africanist now, and is working for a pan-Africanist organization. The Pan-Africanists originally spoke of a 'back to Africa' movement, that all persons of African descent should return to Africa. Now very few of the pan-Africanists talk about returning to the motherland. They talk more frequently about the African diaspora, or persons of African descent scattered throughout the world, wherever they are, considering themselves Africans because of a certain assumed similarity of culture and of heritage. That is what most of the pan-Africanists think now: a unity of all those of African descent. Wherever they are in the world, whether they're in the Carribean, or in Africa, or the United States and the islands of the sea, or wherever. Now, let's see. One of the essay questions probably will be, "What were the..." Oh, this was a good essay question. It'll be very simple. Back to our question. What were the major legislative accomplishments of the Civil Rights movement in the sixties? Well, that's simple. Anybody want to make a stab at it? [Student: "Civil rights act."] Civil rights act of what year? [Students together: 64.] Sixty-four. [Students: Voting Rights Act.] Voting Rights Act. That was what year? [Students: sixty-five.] Sixty-five, that is correct. It also wants you to tell us where and when the non-violent direct action movement for civil rights in this country began. [Student: Greensboro.] Well, actually, no. That's not what we're looking for - in Chicago, in 1942, when CORE was organized. But people did not know very much about that, it did not receive much publicity, but the technique was used from 1942 on. It became popularized in 1956, with the publicity surrounding the great Montgomery Bus Boycott. But we want you to know where it began. It was in Chicago in 1942, with the organization of CORE. It also wants to know where the Southern Student Sit-In Movement began, and when. Greensboro, North Carolina, and 1960.The month, and you won't be expected to remember that, was February. February first, 1960. Greensboro, North Carolina isimportant, and the year, 1960. The Freedom Rides began, took place, in what year?[Students: Sixty-one.] Sixty-one, correct. Montgomery Bus Boycott, what year? [Fifty-six.] Fifty-six, yes. A little in fifty-seven, went over into fifty-seven. Actually, it started in December of 55, very shortly after Rosa Parks was arrested, but 56 would be a good date, 56-57. The objective of the Southern Student Sit-In Movement. The sit-in movement that began in Greensboro, what is the objective?[Student: Desegregate the lunch counters at Woolworth.] Not only in Woolworth, but the other variety stores like Woolworth. That was the original objective, but very soon after it started, it spread to desegregation of all places and public accommodations. Originally it was desegregation of the lunch counters at the variety stores. The objective of the Montgomery Bus Boycott? [Inaudible student answer.] Desegregate what? [Student talking, inaudible.] Sit where you wanted on city buses in the city of Montgomery, Alabama. In other words, desegregation of the municipal buses in Montgomery. The objective of the Freedom Rides? [Student replies.] Yes, desegregation of interstate bus travel, that is, buses traveling from state to state, between states, all over the country. Let me see... Basically, that covers it. I want you to know... I want you to tell us what you think about the success or the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the Civil Rights Movement of the sixties. What were its major accomplishments? What were its limitations or failures? I'd also like you to make a stab at your evaluation or appraisal of the state of civil rights in the United States today. That's opinion. That's opinion. And what would you do in the future? Do you have any questions, not just about the examination, but anything in the area of civil rights? I don't presume that I have all the answers to anything, but at least I'd like to get the questions. You know, in the sixties, I was amazed at the amount of answers I had. I had answers to everything then. But I've forgotten most of it. Now I'm not sure I know most of the questions. But there were lots of them in the sixties. [Student: I'd like to ask, um, for your exam schedules, is it at one time?] The exam schedule. [Student: Yeah.] Um, yes, what is the - [Are you offering it at that one time?] Just at one time. If there are those here, if there's only one person, who finds that most inconvenient, then you can arrange for another time, a better time for that individual for those individuals. Okay? [Thank you.] Any other questions? [Student: I was wondering if you could touch again on the subject of the teachings of Gandhi?] On what?[I was wondering if you could touch on the subject once again of how the teachings of Gandhi were quite influential in the nonviolent movement?]Oh, yes. Well, in 1941, just before Pearl Harbor and immediately after Pearl Harbor, a number of pacifists, including myself, were interested in finding nonviolent solutions to conflict situations. We did not find it enough for us, for our consciences, simply to refuse participation in war. Because to say no to participation in war was a negative act, and we had to do something positive to feel that we were constructive. So we were looking for nonviolent solutions to violent conflict situations. Not only the international scene, but the domestic scene as well. And there were two major problems to be concerned with on the domestic scene: the first was, one, rather than the first, but one was labor and management, labor and industry. And the other was race. My major concern was race. And I began studying the techniques of Gandhi, including Gandhi's writings and what was written about him and especially a book by Krishnalal Shridharani,a disciple of Gandhi's who was then studying in Columbia University. His book, titled War Without Violence, was an analysis of Gandhi's program and methods. Step-by-step procedures as used by Gandhi. Well, this small band of pacifists in Chicago and New York, chiefly in Chicago then, began studying Gandhi. And I wrote two memoranda to A.J. Muste, who was head of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a religious pacifist organization for which I worked at the time. In 1941 I began writing the memos, completed the first memo in early 1942. I sent these memos to Muste, proposing that the F.O.R, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, sponsor the establishment of an interrracial organization using Gandhian techniques of nonviolent direct action, including civil disobedience, noncooperation, jail-going where necessary, and filling up the jails where necessary, in an attempt to bring an end to racial segregation and other forms of racial discrimination in this country. The Fellowship of Reconciliation's national council, which was its governing body , discussed the two memoranda and decided not to sponsor such an organization but to authorize me as its traveling race relations secretary. Part-time, fifteen dollars a week. And that was poor pay even in those days. Supposed to be part-time but it's actually a lot more full-time. More like full-time. They agreed that they would continue paying my salary, fifteen dollars a week, and allow me on their time to set up a pilot project along the lines which I had outlined in the memos. In one city, Chicago. And then they would determine, after a while, whether to sponsor it or not. After the pilot project was set up. The pilot project was the first chapter of CORE. In the course of the next year, I traveled around the country for the F.O.R., and in those travels organized about a dozen other organizations, like the Chicago Committee of Racial Equality, and then the next summer we called a conference of those organizations, and set up the national CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. So that was the connection between Gandhian technique and the civil rights movement in this country. Now, to repeat what I'd said earlier, we had no publicity. Though we were making successful use of technique of nonviolence, this was prior to the advent of television. Television was a post-World War Two development. Actually, it was not even in homes here until, well, I guess the early fifties. We had no television coverage, very little on the radio. Very little in the written press. Perhaps there would be a small item on the back page of a local paper such as the Chicago Tribune, saying that yesterday a half-dozen nuts and crackpots sat down in this restaurant until they were served or thrown out, whichever came first. But that was all. So a nonviolent movement did not take to the skies. Not until Dr. King with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1956. Television coverage and charismatic leadership captured the imagination of people not only in this country but all over the world. And the movement was on wings, then. It was after that, several years later, that the Southern Student Sit-in movement began, inspired in part by the example of Dr. King in Montgomery, the technique of nonviolence. And the CORE Freedom Rides followed a year later. 1961. So the movement was well on the way then. Other questions? [Student: Do you think part of the lack of publicity was because in the early forties we were in a world war and it was the biggest news of the time, bigger than anyone?] Of course. And people were not inclined to listen to nonviolence in a time of war. It sounded like a bunch of nuts, you know? People were talking about nonviolence, don't strike back, when we were fighting for our lives. Yeah, thank you, you're quite right, it was very annoying. Very annoying.[Student: Sometimes something is so important, the most important thing that's going on, they're gonna want publicity.] True. Yep. Whatever's bigger than you in someplace else, publicity-wise, you're dead. You're absolutely right. [Student: What do you see as your failures in the movement?] Failures? [Yeah, what are its limitations?] Our limitations... yeah. There are many; we left untouched some vital areas, such as residential segregation, very important, very. The movement, per ce, did virtually nothing on that. Martin, Martin Luther King, Jr., began moving in that direction in 1967 in Chicago. His efforts there were a failure. And he was literally astonished at the amount of prejudice and outright hostility and hatred that he encountered in the city of Chicago. He marched in Chicago and marched in Cicero or Cairo. Dr. King had grown up in the South and done most of his work in the Deep South, and had come North to get support for his efforts in the South. Financial support, moral support, et cetera. Here he was marching in the North, not in the South. And he was astonished by deeply-rooted racism in the Chicago area. He was pelted, the marches were pelted with stones and sticks and eggs and everything else, and obscenities were shouted at them as they went by, and police had to protect them as mobs gathered. Finally, in what I consider the three AM of his soul, he blurted out, "The people of Mississippi wanna learn how to hate? They oughta come to Chicago." He found more hatred there, he thought, than he had seen in Mississippi. Well, we did very little on housing, almost nothing. We did very little to try to counteract racism itself. We were attacking the effects of racism, the structures that racism built up to protect itself. Segregation, for instance. But for the prejudices themselves, we did virtually nothing. Another weakness of the movement was we did no long-range planning. We should have. But our excuse for not doing it was that we were crisis-oriented, we were constantly confronting emergencies and crises. And couldn't find the time to indulge in the luxury of thinking and doing long-range planning. As a consequence, when success in terms of achievement of the short-term goals - Civil Rights Act of 64, the Voting Rights Act of 65, came upon us, we were caught without programming for the future, what to do after we get the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. What were the problems likely to be? We should have thought at the time. Several times, in CORE, I scheduled think sessions where we planned to pull the entire CORE staff in, out of field, at some camp, out in the woods, away from the telephone, for some extended period of time, maybe two weeks. We would have scholars there with big baseline data so this wouldn't simply be batting the breeze, but strategy sessions. And we would talk about what the problems were probably going to be, in 1970, 1980, 1990. The year 2000. And how we can deal with those problems. Trying to anticipate the obstacles that would arise. How we should be getting to prepare our youngsters for those jobs. What ought to be done, you know, futuristic thinking. Futurism. But we didn't do it. I arranged a schedule and had everybody put it on their calendars, but invariably, before the dates rolled around, some emergency would arise. A CORE member would get jailed, or get killed down in Mississippi, or we'd have three thousand people in jail in Greensboro, North Carolina. And it seemed obvious to us then. We could not indulge in the luxury of thinking but I think the movement is paying a penalty for not having done any longterm planning. So now there is a lack of unity among civil rights organizations because there is no clear and united sense of direction and objective. There is nothing comparable to CUCRL, the Council On United Civil Rights Leadership, today. The issues, granted, are much more complex than they were in the sixties. But even so, it should be possible to get some unity to the point of union, so that there can be concerted action on them. So those are some of the limitations, as I see. Some are pages of omission, and others shortsightedness. Yes? [Student: Some are saying that the President's administration is trying to turn back time... that is, trying to reverse some of the achievements made during the Civil RightsMovement. Your comment? Well I agree with that, quite, I think that is true. His administration is trying to do that. I hope that I will not offend those who are supporters of President Reagan, I respect him as an individual and as a person, but I disagree with him strongly. During the sixties, Mr. Reagan was opposed to the Civil Rights movement, sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, and he said so in no uncertain terms. While the Civil Rights Act was up for debate in Washington, he spoke out several times in California against it. He thought it was a mistake, he thought it was an infringement on the rights of the businessmen who man restaurants and other places of public accommodation for the federal government to get in and cull the divide by telling them who they could serve and who they could not refuse to serve. But he was opposed to it. And it has been my feeling, and the feeling of many other civil rights activists, that since he's been president his Senate is trying to undo what has been done by the Civil Rights Movement. In a number of ways, the Voting Rights Act is an example. When the Voting Rights Act was up for renewal and extension, he was opposed to it and said so. He wanted it to die right then. We don't need it anymore, it served a useful function but that time, its time, has passed. Which of course was the same point of view held by the segregationist Strom Thurmond. Who took the lead in Congress in trying to get the ball rolling on letting the Voting Rights Act die. But we managed to mount such a public relations campaign to bring political pressure there on Capitol Hill: letters, and telegrams, and phone calls, and rallies, and marches, that they saw that ending the Voting Rights Act was not gonna fly politically. So then they adopted a new strategy and that was to change it, amend it. So that in order to establish discrimination, you would have to prove intent to discriminate. In other words, the effect - if the effect is discriminatory - that didn't matter. You had to prove that that was their intention. Well, of course we know in a long history of civil rights activity that it's virtually impossible to prove intent. There you're being asked to read a person's mind. The gentleman intended, she intended. You're being asked to go into the closet with them and to pray to their god. They talk to their conscience, their conscience talks to them. So you can't tell what they intended, you can only tell the effects of what they do. In my opinion. They finally dropped that, the pressure that we founded was sufficiently great. So the bill went through, the extension went through, and the President signed, albeit reluctantly. Now, the Justice Department under Ed Meese and Bradford Reynolds is bringing [Continued in Part 2.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Farmer Lecture: Exam Review and Q&A (Part 1) Subject The topic of the resource Farmer, James, 1920-1999 Description An account of the resource First part of the recording of a lecture from James Farmer’s The Civil Rights Movement In The 20th Century class, which has been split in half by the James Farmer Project for upload space. Originally titled Lecture 038 by Special Collections. Farmer begins by reviewing for the upcoming final exam, discussing the Council on United Civil Rights Leadership (0:00:00), the March on Washington (1:44), figures and movements in black nationalism (2:46), and pan-Africanism (5:55). He and the class then review the major legislative accomplishments and movements within the Civil Rights Movement (8:08). At 13:22, Farmer asks the class if they have any questions, either about the exam or about the movement. He discusses the influence of the teachings of Gandhi on the nonviolent movement and the origins of CORE (14:37), then addresses CORE’s early lack of publicity in relation to the Second World War. Farmer then discusses what he sees as the Civil Rights Movement’s limitations (22:35). Then, at 29:25, Farmer begins to answer a question about the Reagan administration’s attempts to dismantle the work done during the Civil Rights Movement. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource James Farmer Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Mary Washington Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986-04-22 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource HIST 428 Spring 2020 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright is retained by Special Collections and University Archives, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington. This item is available for use in research, teaching, and private study. Items may not be reproduced or used for any commercial purposes without prior written consent from the University of Mary Washington. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource .MP4 Language A language of the resource English Classroom Education Lecture https://farmer.umwhistory.org/files/original/84bfe3d7e8d3a6de616448bc4ac9e856.mp4 ddb19b4ba1fd89c4e9430f79175064e5 https://farmer.umwhistory.org/files/original/689060ebe4032aa50d05f52bfe7cc20d.srt 466445459388c865e5e16251801ae3f1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Lectures Description An account of the resource In addition to his Reflections series, the UMW Special Collections and University Archives possessed three recordings of classroom lectures from Dr. James Farmer's Civil Rights Movement class. The James Farmer Project undertook the task of captioning and transcribing these recordings, making them publicly available for the first time. Moving Image A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound suits against civil rights workers in the Deep South who are trying to register people to vote, register blacks. In some cases, in Alabama for instance, the civil rights workers are using absentee ballots. They're using forms to take to old people and sick people who cannot go down to the courthouse or wherever it is they have to go to get the registration forms. Taking them to them, having them sign forms, have them notarized, with a notary public there, and then taking them back, registered. And trying to do the same in voting by using absentee ballots. This has been done by the white communities in Alabama for many, many years. But now, however, that the civil rights workers are doing it to register blacks. The Justice Department is writing a suit against them for voting fraud, charging voting twice. How? Well, they say, Spiver Gordon, you voted for yourself, right? Okay, then you took an absentee ballot over to Sister Jones, who is ninety-two years old, and so arthritic she can't get out of her house, and you showed her where to sign? So you showed her where to sign it and where to vote. You, in effect, voted twice. And that is a criminal offense. And so, Spiver and a number of the other civil rights workers have been indicted, multiple indictments Spiver has been convicted, I mention him particularly because he was, of course, a member of CORE. He is appealing. I don't know if they will win or lose. Also, affirmative action, which was another victory - I didn't mention affirmative action as a legislative victory because it was not legislative, it was the executive department, executive order where the federal government is concerned, an administrative decision. The president has said, and the Justice Department Attorney General has said, they're opposed to affirmative action and numerical goals and timetables. They say affirmative action's not so bad, but numerical goals and timetables, which sound like quotas, are terrible, because they color-conscious and not colorblind, which this administration hates a lot. When you say to your employers that since you don't have any blacks or Puerto Ricans in your employ, in the next five years we want to see you bring the number of blacks and Puerto Ricans up to ten percent of the workforce, let's say approximately ten percent of the population in this area. So that's numerical goals and timetables, and that is a quota, and that discriminates. It discriminates against whites. It is color-conscious, and not color-blind, as the president, and says 'at least.' Therefore, the President has said and repeated on several occasions that he intends soon to issue an executive order which will ban numerical goals and timetables and affirmative action. Well, now, there are many companies, business concerns, and city agencies such as police departments and fire departments which have worked out plans of affirmative action, including numerical goals and timetables. Some of them have had no blacks in their force, the fire department or the police and they worked out a plan with the NAACP or whatever other civil rights organization exists in that community to improve that gradually in the next five years or ten years, aiming at parity with the population, percentage in the population. Roughly. It's not a hard and fast figure, it's a goal, and it's flexible. Negotiable. They've worked out a plan, they've agreed to it. The Justice Department has learned from it. The Justice Department's gone up and written, "You must not do this, because this discriminates." "This is color conscious. We want color blind" These companies and these agencies say, "Look, Justice Department, please get off our backs." "We're happy. Our workforce is happy. The community organizations are happy." "The special interest groups are happy. The trade unions are happy. Everybody's happy, would you please leave us alone?" But instead of leaving them alone, Judge Reynolds files a suit against them. Takes them to court. But yeah, they're trying to turn back the clock on those. Part of it is ideological, I think. Honestly, some persons in the administration, I assume this is true of Reagan, feel that... Let's see, how should we put it? That if - that there's no longer any systemic discrimination against blacks as a group, or other minorities as a group. And that if a black person works hard, and follows the Protestant ethic of work habits and everything else, he will do as well as anybody else, because there's no longer any racial discrimination. And this individual will become a white person, with an invisible black skin. I don't think that's true. It has become popular, and it has for years, to say that there's no longer any racial discrimination. In fact, one black man, a guy in Michigan, a professor, wrote a book entitled The Declining Significance of Race. Other blacks, black intellectuals, neoconservatives, you know, black and white and such, have taken the position that it is no longer a race problem, it is now just a class problem and there's no longer any problem with race. Color doesn't mean anything anymore, it is class, class only. It is an economic problem. In fact, I heard a discussion on that this very morning, in New York City, on a TV show. They were being taped. The discussion was of Bayard Rustin, whom I've known many years, 1942, as a matter of fact. He used to be militant, now he's very, very neo-conservative and takes the position that it's no longer a race problem, it's now an economic problem. That we did it all in the sixties. Well, for me, that's simply nonsense. I think it is both race and class. There's still racism. Ask yourself if when you see a black person, you see just a person, or do you see a black person? Those of you who are white. Those of you who are black, ask yourself if when you see a white person you see a person who happens to be white, or do you see a white person? I suspect it is the latter. I suspect that all of us, when we see a person for the first time, view that person through race eyes. Because - it's nothing to be ashamed of. It's nothing to deny. Because we've grown in a society which conditions us in that way. And we have to decondition ourselves, if there is such a word as decondition. Decondition ourselves. It is... I would say this, this is an extreme statement but I think that it is accurate. It certainly used to be completely accurate, twenty years ago I'd say it without any second thought. Now, I'd think before. It is, I used to say it is impossible for any person in our country to grow to adulthood, whether that person is black or white, without having some residues of racial feeling. That was an extreme statement. Now, a bit more sensitive, I'd still make the statement. But with some reservations now. The more sensitive among us, among white and among black, work hard to get rid of it, to root it out of us. And if we're very, very sensitive, we succeed. The less sensitive, we succeed to a lesser extent, if we are insensitive we don't succeed at all. If we don't try, we certainly don't succeed. But it is hard, because we grow up in a society which conditions us to racial responses. We're black and white. To say that race doesn't count now, that color doesn't matter, that we are colorblind, is to tell ourselves a lie. That is the worst kind of lie, the lie we tell ourselves. When you tell yourself one, you're kidding yourself. No, the time will come when we will have no racial responses, I'm sure. I don't think that time has come yet. I don't think that. I know a good friend of mine in New York, a woman from South Dakota. I think it was South Dakota, it doesn't matter. Who is very much anti-racist. In South Dakota, I don't think there were any blacks there. One or two, maybe. But she was leading some children in the street, blocked off street, in some game. She was a social worker. And she had to line them up somehow and decide who was going to play what role. So she started off, "Eenie, meenie, miney, moe, catch a -" [Muffles self.] "You know the saying, don't you? "Eenie, meenie, miney, moe, catch a nigger by the toe." "She said, eenie, meenie, miney, moe, catch a - [choked noise]." It's the tiger by the toe. And she worried, brooded about that for weeks. She finally told me, and I laughed uproariously. "Why in the world didn't you go ahead and say it?" "Get it out. Because it meant nothing to you. But the fact that it troubled her so much said it meant a little to her." Well, we can get rid of our biases, and I think you young ladies and young gentlemen who ten years from now will have families will have an awesome responsibility and a great privilege of seeing to it that if your children grow up to be decent human beings, with decent, humane values, that one of those humane values that you'll instill in your children will be that of knocking racism. I think parents could do it. More than the teachers, more than the preachers, more than anybody else, but then they can do much better if they have first done it for themselves. Any other questions? [Student: I just had a comment about when you were talking about the limitations of the movement, and one is how it did not counteract racism, I'm not sure the movement as such can, because that's something in someone's head - so how do you do that, as a movement?] Well - [How does that come in through the back door, through legislation?] That's a good point. [I don't think that's a failure, maybe I'm not -] Well, some of the movement intellectuals argued during the movement's day that we were trying to get at racism, that laws have educational effect in the long term. Because people don't want to be law violators, they keep abiding by a law which says, you treat everybody the same, and by and by, long enough, you will begin to feel that everybody is the same. I guess maybe that is true in the long term, but it's a very slow process. How do you do it, how could a movement do it? I'm not sure. I was talking with Doctor Kenneth Clark, one of the better-known black psychologists, who thinks that it can be done and that it would be a task for colleges and publicists to work out together. What they'd have to do in these fields is reach into the kind of input that goes into determining people's thinking, how they think and how they feel. Or how they feel, I guess, then how they think. That would mean the television, a kind of image to get on television, this would have to be a concerted approach where you sit down and kind of program it. Obviously, movies, certain books, especially preschool books, textbooks, children's books. Comic books would be very important because people read those more than anything else. The danger of that, of course, is that it might be too Big Brother. If it's to be so all-encompassing, affecting every instrument which comes to disseminate culture, and that's what he's talking about, then it would have to be orchestrated, I suppose, by government. And if the government begins orchestrating, involving every one of those instruments, where does that stop? Would the cure not as bad or worse than the disease? I don't know. But I think your question is such a good one, I'm kind of trying to talk around it, there. I'm not sure what can be done, can be orchestrated, but I think it might. I know dictatorships can do it. Cuba, by fiat, or is it fai-at, fiat, wiped it out. But that's a totalitarian society now. But the pre-Castro regime was not anti-racist. Castro came in and made a remonstration of racism. From weapons and all of the instruments which turn how people think and so forth, and get that message across. And I'm told by people who spent time there that it seemed to work. I think it's gonna be hard. Other questions? [Student: There was a comment about a theory that few people were racist towards someone they knew well.] Knew well? [Because once they know people well, that sort of decreases racism?] Yes, generally that's true. I would put one caveat down. Maybe I'm wrong, know that you can disagree with me. [Student: Okay.] Good. Isn't it possible, though, for a person to, say, know a servant well and love that servant, and still treat that person as a servant and think of the person as a servant? Which could well be a form of racism. Yes. Could be a form of racism. [Student: But wouldn't that imply to whites having white servants and blacks having black servants address them as people and not as colors? But just as the position of servant, not the rank.] Well, now, would it? Let's, let's discuss it, I think it is an important point. A person has a white servant, the servant is a servant but there is no concept of genetic inferiority. But it is quite possible for a person to love a black servant, love that black servant dearly, as we loved the mammies, the black mammies, as we loved Uncle Toms, Uncle Toms, we loved Uncle Toms. But there was the concept of genetic inferiority and the basic difference. The basic difference. No less affection or love, but it was superior - inferior genetically. Now with white I assume it would be superior with inferior on status level, but not on a genetic level. [Student: We could automatically assume that... I hope that you can see, either way, it's a problematic business.] [Other student: There's also the fact that the Irish were discriminated against, and the Irish weren't allowed to go into some stores, and they had to go into the back doors to things, and people had Irish servants that even if they were white families and the Irish were white, they still thought there was something that made them better than them.] Did they think it was genes, though? [It'd be cultural.] Cultural. As in the South, the white plantation owner, this plantation owner was an absentee owner, and there was the riding boss, store boss, driving boss on the plantation. Now, he was on a different level from the poor whites who worked on that plantation, the sharecroppers or tenant farmers. But it was not a caste system, that's the distinction. It was not a caste system, because it was still possible for that tenant farmer to become a store boss. [Student: Maybe a better example than the Irish would be Hitler's race theory on the Jews. They were thought to be genetically inferior.] I'd argue they were thought to be genetically superior.[Not in the Nazi perspective.] Not in the Nazi period, that's right. Yeah. [And Jews are still - people are still prejudiced against Jews today. (Overlapping talk.) Not to the point of Nazi Germans, but still.] Yeah, but you see, there is one thing different - I'm not finding the words that I want to put my finger on it, but there is a qualitative difference. The antisemite looks at the Jew and feels the Jew is somehow less of a person than he, the antisemite, is. But he does not say that he is inferior to me. The thought is, the Jew is smarter. And the Jew would outdo him in business. That the Jew would run circles around him, therefore he hates him. But there is not that thought in dealing with a black. When he looks at the black, he does not see a man who he thinks is smarter than he is, he sees a man who he thinks is genetically not the smarter. [Student: But even based on historical background, the first blacks came here basically as slaves, but our introduction to Jews here in the United States was, the first interactions seem to match, the sort of limiting of freedom.] Well, there were white indentured servants, nearly slaves. But Europe was not a caste system. Intermarriage was not taboo. That is a classic distinction. Slaves are, it is true, thought to be inferior. Aristotle looked at the Greek slaves and concluded so in his writing. "See? No wonder they're slaves, look at them." "They're obviously inferior to the rest of us and inferior to their masters." "Otherwise they wouldn't be slaves." Well, of course, Aristotle made a common mistake. He confused the effect for the cause. They became inferior because they were slaves, because they were treated that way, not the other way around. That's the way this thing even started. You had to brainwash a slave to make him act like a slave. You beat him and whip him and sometimes he prefers death. I'm glad that at last we've got some questions, people are challenging some assertions. All right, that's good! Because, you know, you may be right and I may be wrong! I think there's a qualitative difference and I think the qualitative difference is because you do have some residues of a racist feeling. I don't doubt - you know, before black power, most blacks considered themselves inferior to whites. I looked at my father, and he always astonished me, not just because of his brains, he could speak and write and read and think in so many languages, but because I was convinced that in his heart of hearts, he believed that blacks were inferior and whites were superior, despite himself and his obvious superiority. But then I asked myself, how could he believe anything else? He was born in Kingstree, South Carolina, 1886. As a small boy, moved to Peterson, Georgia, and there he was brought up, and everything that he saw or heard told him that blacks were inferior. A black was told that he was inferior, and came to believe it. How else do you explain the phenomenon of a black with kinky hair referring to kinky hair as 'bad' hair? And straight hair as "good hair"? I have bad hair.[Class laughs][Addressing a student:] Your hair's good hair. We're trying to lighten one's feeling, but good question. On the other hand, whites try to darken their skin, by cooking themselves in the sun. [Class and Farmer laughs.] And curl their hair, too! I think it really was ridiculous, but blacks did reject themselves. And considered themselves inferior, and thus began acting inferior in the presence of whites. That's why it was such a breath of fresh air, in spite of all its potential for danger and for evil, when the young blacks in the middle of the sixties began shouting, "Black is beautiful, it's not ugly!" "I'm somebody!" I haven't got bad hair, it's good hair! I won't try to get rid of those kinks, I'll grow them long in a bush and celebrate every kink! And make a few more of them!" So there was something refreshing about that, a person coming to terms with themselves, In spite of the danger of that person then saying, "If you are not black, and your hair is not kinky, then there's something wrong with you." You're not pretty, you're ugly. You're not beautiful, you're ugly. And that's of course what happened with many of the Black is Beautiful black power advocates. But many social movements have those negative, general... Bill Wilson said he believed in black power once, he was almost convinced, he'd go to a meeting, and hear Stokely Carmichael's full oration, and he'd be all fired up, once he'd listen to one of the orations, and his chest was stuck out, and his head held high. He'd walk down the street and told himself that the first brother or sister he saw, he was going to give them the old black power salute, you know? He said he'd got a cab on the way, and he saw a brother coming toward him, a black brother coming toward him. He waited until he got real close, and he gave him the old salute. He said, "You know what that guy said? He said, you better get both hands up, baby." [Laughter.] This is a stick-up. [More laughter.] Black is not automatically beautiful. The point is, it's not automatically ugly. That is the best thing to have you learn. I think that... blacks hated themselves. And believed themselves inferior and most whites believed blacks to be inferior. I told Senator Bilbo... This was 1938, 37? You don't know that name, do you? Senator Bilbo? Ted Bilbo, Mississippi, the granddaddy of all senatorial racists. The twenties and the thirties, and I guess the early forties, too. Bilbo ... I talked to him, and had an appointment with him, I was literally eighteen years old or so. And he said that "there ain't a nigger a fourth as smart as any white man." Which is of course an absurd statement. That's a very intelligent man, he was an intelligent man, obviously. So I round off of this with a few Negro - that is the word used in those years - Negro geniuses. He thought for a minute, said, "I bet every one of them had some white blood." I mentioned one, one black scientist who performed some miracles in surgery. The first successful operation on the human heart. Open heart surgery. A black surgeon, I mention that to Bilbo he thought for a while. He said, "Yeah, that's right, niggers always were good with knives." [Scattered laughter.] I had a laugh, too. You just can't win with this guy. Maybe I told you last week that - did I tell you? That I learned that he had a black mistress and black children – half, actually – whom he put through college. He loved his illegitimate family. I got this information from a chauffeur of Bilbo's, taking him to this lady's house. At least twice a week. Yet he was the worst Negro hater in the South. He'd educated his children. It's a funny thing. It's a strange love-hate complex. Less so now. Less so now than it was in those years, but we still have residues of it we have to try to get rid of. What time is it? Do we want to take a break, or do we want to - have I gotten all your papers? Are there some who still have their papers here, or are there some who don't have their papers here to turn in? Okay, you will get them into the office - [Student: Tomorrow.] Okay. Those that have not brought their papers, please try to get them in tomorrow. Okay? Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 34:28 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Farmer Lecture: Exam Review and Q&A (Part 2) Subject The topic of the resource Farmer, James, 1920-1999 Description An account of the resource Second part of the recording of a lecture from James Farmer’s The Civil Rights Movement in the 20th Century class, which has been split in half for upload space. Originally titled 'Lecture 038' by Special Collections. Starting from where the previous video left off, Farmer discusses the Reagan administration's reactions to civil rights legislations, including their opposition to numerical goals and timetables (2:19). He discusses his opposition to the idea that racial discrimination no longer exists in America (5:13). He then answers a question about whether it's possible to eliminate racism by legislative means (13:35) and the idea that people are less racist towards those they know well (18:05). Finally, at 26:10, he begins to discuss internalized racism, the black power movement, and an encounter with Mississippi's Senator Bilbo. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource James Farmer Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Mary Washington Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986-04-22 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource HIST 428 Spring 2020 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright is retained by Special Collections and University Archives, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington. This item is available for use in research, teaching, and private study. Items may not be reproduced or used for any commercial purposes without prior written consent from the University of Mary Washington. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource .MP4 Language A language of the resource English Classroom Education Lecture https://farmer.umwhistory.org/files/original/37f3a911e3921f015439afd2532fc64a.mp4 cbfeb4019316df6f33a8ee4aca579248 https://farmer.umwhistory.org/files/original/13146d5ecf7c3df7ba9dcc49487acc3d.srt 5387fe6f138ec3500820e9f1b8e38a1d Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Lectures Description An account of the resource In addition to his Reflections series, the UMW Special Collections and University Archives possessed three recordings of classroom lectures from Dr. James Farmer's Civil Rights Movement class. The James Farmer Project undertook the task of captioning and transcribing these recordings, making them publicly available for the first time. Moving Image A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:32:15 Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound In the sixties, the Civil Rights Movement was essentially a non-violent group. They had Martin Luther King, who was a dedicated pacifist who had accepted nonviolence not only as a tactic but as a philosophy of life, a way of life in principle. Then there were CORE and SNCC, who accepted it as a tactic which would unite pacifists and non-pacifists around acceptance of nonviolence as a workable tactic. Most of the people who were involved in the movement felt that violence was impossible as an alternative to nonviolence in solving the conflict situation of race relations in the United States. There were other voices, however, that did not agree. There was the Nation of Islam, the so-called Black Muslims, led by Elijah Muhammad, and their chief spokesman, best-known spokesman, that is, was Malcolm X. Now, the Muslims did not preach violence per se, not aggressive violence, but they preached self-defense, and their rhetoric seemed to inspire violence. Malcolm thundered forth from platforms all over the country. Attack no man, but if any man molests you, may Allah bless you. And their packed auditoriums would thunder their approval back at him. Yet they did not attack, they did not use the guns which it was claimed they had gathered together. There were others who were even more outspoken: there was Robert Williams down in North Carolina, who proposed violence as a solution to the problem of race. He was a collector of guns and he had many of them there in his home. His home was said to be an arsenal. I never saw it. He was finally charged with kidnapping of a white couple. As the police were about to move in on him they were allegedly held as hostages. And after he had been so charged he left Monroe, North Carolina and finally left the country by the way of the Canada. There were other voices, many less well known than those, who preached violence. Most of them, however, like Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, preached only self-defense. CORE, as I indicated earlier, was not a pacifist organization. We did not try to tell our members what to do when they were on their own, off of CORE demonstrations. They pledged themselves to the CORE discipline of non-retaliation and nonviolence while on CORE demonstrations. But if, let us say, a CORE member were walking down the street and were attacked by someone, there was nothing in the CORE discipline that spoke to what that individual ought to do in reply. That was left to him with his conscience and his God, what he did. This came to a head down in Louisiana, Bogalusa, when some of the black men informed me as the head of CORE that they were organizing to defend their homes. They were organizing a group they called The Deacons for Defense and Justice. Deacons because they were all deacons in their church, their churches and they were to defend themselves, they said, against the attacks of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan had made it a practice in Bogalusa as in many other towns in that and other Deep Southern states of going on night rides. And those night rides involved having a caravan of cars loaded with Klansmen driving through the black section of town and then firing their rifles and other guns into the black homes. The blacks, up until then, had not replied with violence. But the Deacons were pledged to to return fire when the Klan fired. They told me that they were not asking for my permission, because it was not mine to grant them my permission. They were simply informing me, since CORE was very active in the town, as in the whole state of Louisiana, and they wanted me to be aware of it. Well, my response was that when they were on CORE demonstrations they must pledge themselves to the usual CORE discipline and stick to it. When they were off of CORE demonstrations, then they were on their own. Well, the Deacons' self-defense ideology appeared to work. The Klan once rode through the black community, firing into homes, the newly organized Deacons For Defense and Justice members got their guns and returned fire, and the Klan drove rapidly out of that section and did not return. That ended the night ridings in Bogalusa, so far as I know. So the Deacons for Defense and Justice were organized, and there were other similar self defense groups organized throughout Louisiana and other states. Now, there was a mood of violence that was beginning to grow even as early as 1964 in the black community. When I had to leave Plaquemine, Louisiana in the back of a hearse, as I told you in a previous lecture, to escape from a lynch mob, riding in that hearse with me was a young CORE member, and at the end of the ride, as we we arrived safely in New Orleans, he said to me: "Jim, we love you dearly, we'll go with you through hell and high water, but if we ever have to go through a night like that again," that night, the black community had been terrorized by mobs, "we will have hardware with us." And it was awfully hard to argue against that. There were other defectors from the spirit of non-violence. Remember that Stokely Carmichael, who now has the name of Kwame Ture, had in the early sixties, been a dedicated nonviolent activist in SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, so that H. Rap Brown who was his successor as a national chairman of SNCC, both of them worked in the Deep South and had gotten their heads cracked too many times by billy clubs, and by mobs, and shed too much blood, and finally came to the point where they rejected non-violence and began calling for violence. There were others of less articulateness, feeling a great frustration. Those were poor people in the streets, who were not members of the Civil Rights Movement, not acting in it, not members of any of the organizations. We must remember that the civil rights organizations, up until the March on Washington in August of 1963, were largely middle-class in membership. We recruited chiefly from churches, schools, fraternal and civic organizations social clubs, and from friends of those who were already members. We did very little recruiting from the streets of the ghetto. The March on Washington was thus a middle-class demonstration. While it cut cleanly across racial lines - there were whites as well as blacks in large numbers there, cut across sectional lines - there were Southerners and Northerners, Easterners and Westerners there. It cut across religious lines: there were Protestants, Catholics, and Jews and the spirit was a warm one, of friendliness and brotherhood. But I repeat, it was a middle class demonstration, because the class makeup of the civil rights organizations, as opposed to the black nationalist organizations, The Nation of Islam's or Black Muslims' and a number of others, the civil rights organizations were basically middle class. We realized that in CORE. We have been, throughout our history, from 1942 up until that time in '63, largely a group of means-oriented idealists, standing outside of the black community, working on its behalf, working for it, to elevate, to solve the problems which afflicted it. But we were not really a part of it. We were not in that community. We realized that shortcoming. It was Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam and other groups which were recruiting from the streets of the ghetto. They were recruiting from the prisons, they were recruiting from among dope addicts and prostitutes and others, and they were reclaiming these people. That was one of the very positive things which they accomplished. They were making them strong family people, moral people. They were stressing what is known as the Protestant ethic: working hard and saving money and so forth, but they were recruiting from the streets they were recruiting the poor the untutored, the illiterate and the functionally illiterate. The ones that most of the civil rights organizations had left out. So I'm sure the other organizations recognized this, too. But I sent it directly to all CORE chapters, urging all of our chapters - we had about, oh, 165 at our peak - urging them to establish their offices in the hearts of the ghetto in the middle of Harlem, the middle of Watts, in the middle of the other ghettoes of the large metropolitan areas, and to begin recruiting from the streets, from the young people there from the poor as well, as from our traditional sources of members and most of the chapters responded to that and began recruiting from the streets. Then the class contact of our organization began to change. We found it becoming less middle-class, less dedicated to the means, the method. More dedicated to the end that is freedom at any cost, and freedom by any means necessary. That tenet became a battle cry. It was therefore not surprising when, in the summer of 1964 the buildup of frustration among youngsters in the inner city led to an explosion of violence. First in Harlem, and then in successive summers and purposes, Watts, Hough, which is in Cleveland, Newark, New Kersey, and Detroit, and those riots were followed by riots of larger magnitude in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This was not a planned thing. I don't think any of those summer riots of which you have no doubt read were planned or organized by anyone. There was no strategy involved, no one sat down in a tent or a smoke-filled room and said, "Now let's have a riot, this is the place to start." The frustration was there, the inner cities were a powder keg in the summer when it was hot and people were out on the streets especially since those youngsters were unemployed. There were no job. And they simply ate away at themselves in their bitter frustration and the frustration turned easily into hatred. This was powder keg waiting to be ignited. The spark that ignited it, in just about every case, was an incident of police action, real or alleged police brutality. Let me tell you as briefly as I can of the Harlem riot. And I saw it firsthand, our national headquarters being in Harlem, in New York City, and so I lived in Harlem at the time of the riot. The spark was the shooting of a black youngster, a sixteen-year-old kid, by an off-duty white policeman. It was a group of youngsters who were teasing and playing with the so-called super, a superintendent of a building, really the janitor, a maintenance man. He was watering what lawn there was there and he would spray water at them, and they would run and yell and finally one of them sneaked up behind him, turned the hose on him, sprayed water at him. Then they dropped the hose and ran. An off-duty policeman, who some said had just come out of a bar, witnesses, eyewitnesses, who had his gun with him, as off-duty policemen often do. The off-duty policeman yelled, "Hey!" The youngster was running away and he stopped and was shot. Shot in the back and the revolver was emptied into thekid. The kid was dead. Eyewitness reports, which we got his affidavits, say that the off-duty policeman then walked away from the body and turned it over with his foot. I'm sure that the kid, whose name was Powell, was dead. But I called a press conference, really, well-covered. And I thought this off-duty policeman should be arrested and tried for murder. He thought I had called him a murderer. I'd come pretty close. I consulted with counsel before I'd made that statement. That was as close as I could come, legally. He sued me, but then he withdrew his suit. His suit was worth something like a million dollars, you know, write a check, maybe? [Classroom laughs.] Don't know whatever good it would do. But he withdrew the suit. One night, while this was still a headline, the Powell shooting, I got a call at two o'clock in the morning from the New York CORE office, which was located in the streets of Harlem. CORE said, Jim, get up here fast. Harlem has gone wild. There's kids throwing bottles and bricks through plate glass windows, bottles and bricks are flying everywhere and the cops are shooting like cowboys. I said, "Live bullets?" They repeated, "Live bullets." Ricocheting off buildings. So I went up there, and surely enough, it was the acrid smoke of guns in the air. And occasionally you would hear a bullet whining as it ricocheted off a building. The streets were fairly deserted, and starting up to the CORE office in Harlem, which was on the second floor, over a storefront, I stopped and I saw a bunch of young black men, oh, late teens, early twenties, walking down the street in the direction of the CORE office. Maybe 50 or more of them. Across the street from them, walking in same direction, were equally as many perhaps more city policemen, the so-called tactical police force of New York. The riot squad. With their battle helmets and large clubs, service revolvers and small firearms stropped to the ankles. They walked along, so this appeared to be two armies, eyeing each other as they walked along. One armed with real guns and live ammunition, the other armed with bottles and bricks. I went up the stairs to the CORE office. The kids stopped against the wall on the other side of the street. They stopped in front of the CORE office and the police stopped just across the street from them. I sent one of the young CORE officers downstairs to mingle with the crowd of kids, to find out what they were talking about, what they were planning for their next move. He came back up very quickly. And you want to know what they talked about? They talked about raiding the CORE office. Because they said you have white CORE members up here. And the slogan, in those terrible days, was "Get whitey." I'll stop for a second, saying, hate is contagious. And the hate that had been blazing on the headlines and the television screens of the Deep South, where heads had been bloodied, where fire hoses had been turned on women, rolled out on kids in the Birmingham demonstration, police dogs released on kids, this hate built up a counter-hate, and since the hate that they saw on the tubes, had read in the paper, was white against black, they produced, then, a black hate against white. They said "Get whitey, get whitey," that became the slogan. So then they said "Thought about raiding the CORE office? They've got white CORE members up there." Well I called a quick meeting of the people there to decide what we're gonna do. First of all, I said, we have to get the white women members of the Harlem chapter of CORE out of this CORE office. There could be a conflagration there. Everybody agreed to that, except the white women members, who said, "we're members, too, we'll stay here." But we overruled. But how to do that, with the kids out there at the front door? We decided that what they should do is have me go out as a decoy. I go out to make a speech to the youngsters. And while their attention's on me, then the women we got out with black male escort to one of the CORE cars parked on the street, and taken home. The white men remained in the CORE office, and the black men and black women. I went down, elbowed my way into the middle of the crowd. The kids recognized me from the TV. They said, "You gonna talk to us, Mr. Farmer, you gonna talk to us?" I said, "Yeah I'm gonna speak." They said, "Well, don't tell us about no non-violence. We don't want to hear that blankety-blank! We don't wanna hear that stuff! No non-violence! Well, I began to speak and they booed. Soon they booed very lustily. I spoke louder and the boos grew less loud. Then I began telling them what we were doing down South to fight the segregation there, they booed even more. They didn't care about lunch counters down South or restaurants there, or hotels, what did they care? That didn't put bread on their table or milk in the mouths of their baby sisters or baby brothers, or stop the roof from leaking, or the plumbing from being stopped up, or the rats from biting the babies. What did they care about what was happening in the South? So they booed. Then I shifted, and began talking about what we were doing in the North. The booing stopped, and they listened more. Then suddenly it occurred to me: why, we met yesterday, we had to meet with the deputy mayor, Screvane, Paul Screvane. Mayor Wagner was out of the country, touring Europe, campaigning for reelection. So we met with Screvane. And then they listened. Their ears pricked up. "Then we made this demand, and this demand, and that demand." Then they began to applaud, at last I had them going along with me and that we will not stop until we get an answer from Screvane. On that, yes, they applauded. And I said, "We will keep it up until we win." Out of the corner of my eye, then, I saw the window of a car roll down and a microphone was stuck out. The next day, on the radio station, every hour, on the hour, they played that brief tape. "CORE Director Farmer, addressing rioters in Harlem." "We will keep at it until we win!" [Laughter in classroom.] "Keep at it until we win." Well, I said that there's only one thing you can do to help. "What is it, Mr. Farmer, what can we do to help?" I said, "Get off the streets and go home." They shouted in unison, "No, we'll go home when them stormtroopers go home. They stay, we stay. They go, we go." Well, another plan came to me. That was a high ideal. Someone whispered, suggested in my ear, and I said, "Cool." "All right, line up behind me, let's march." My plan was to try to turn a disorderly riot into an orderly peaceful demonstration. Best trick you can do. But it was a drastic attempt. They lined up, said, "You wanna lead us, Mr. Farmer, you wanna lead us?" I said, "Yes, I'll lead you. Line up behind me. Line up in twos!" Then I sent a young CORE member across the street to tell the police what we were doing. They'll go tell them what the plan was. We were going to walk into the encroaching tide and try to get them to disperse. Tell them, 'if we pass by the house, drop your weapon and go home." And we started marching. "We want justice, we want justice, we want justice." They were watching. One fellow said, "How many blacks there? Get back and scare them." "We want justice." Wherever we skipped, it seemed to be working. When we turned up to go further north in Harlem, Amsterdam Avenue, Several dropped out, went into those tenement slums. Those walkouts, those vast buildings. We continued to walk. And the police, the tactical force, came up behind us and began shooting guns. The marchers dropped to the ground, dashed behind cars for cover. I almost fought them, I was scared, too. Because bullets were falling on buildings and gliding through the air. They were shooting rooftops and windows. I went to, walked up toward one, to the lieutenant. And four of these kids, kids, I say, nineteen or twenty, surrounded me. These were so called 'young punks.' The underclass. Who people say had no feeling, no compassion. No humanity at all. No remorse. They say they'd put a knife in you as quickly as a butcher would in a side of beef. These four kids came up to me. One stood in front, one on each side, one behind. Shielding my body with their bodies. Covering my head with their hands, trying to protect my head from the flying bullets. Those kids have no feeling, no human feeling? That obviously was not true. They walked with me, this little rank of four around me, as we walked to the lieutenant. We said, "Why did you start shooting?" He said, "You tell those people to stop throwing bottles and bricks at us!" "I didn't hear anybody throwing bottles and bricks until you started shooting." "You tell them to stop throwing bottles and bricks." There probably was... someone from a rooftop threw a bottle. Or a brick. And the tactical police force, not being as well-trained as they were supposed to have been, panicked and opened fire with their small firearms, emptied them, refilled, opened fire again. Well obviously there was no more I could do to stop the riot I went to the CORE office and there we got out some CORE arm bands, orange armbands with C.O.R.E. in blue. Put them on CORE staff members, send them out on the street's stretches to bring in wounded. And there were a lot of wounded. People lying in the gutters, on streets. Wounded from bullets and wounded from blows, billy clubs. And if nurses couldn't bandage them up, they were sent to Harlem hospital. Well, this went on for a couple of more nights, and then it was ended, it died down. I stood there in that room, looking out the window and through the blinds. Hating the hate which I saw, and the hate that had produced it. One youngster who had been brought in on a stretcher, his head bloody, put on the stretcher and one of the white CORE members went over to wash it off to begin to begin the process of bandaging him up. Finally he opened his eyes, looked at him, jumped up and yelled, "What's wrong with - what you got this whitey here for? What's - what are you doing here?" "I thought you trying to help us!" I said, "I am. He's here to help you." "Old whitey can't help us!" The kid, with the blood still streaming down his head, ran back down the stairs. Hate produces hate. It is contagious. Somewhere we have to stop that, it is certain. And that's what the movement was about, too. That's what King was about, and that was the importance of King, I guess. He preached a message of love. The riots ran their course. People soon realized the stupidity of it. Tearing down their own buildings and their own homes and creating a mess without resolving the conflict. But one message was clear, and that was that we would neglect and ignore the poor in our communities at our own peril. The movement then moved more forthrightly than ever before to bring into its midst those who were poor, even the illiterate. And hence the maximum feasible participation of them, of the anti-poverty program which came to be. I think the movement's about to rise again. Frankly I do. I've been encouraged by the demonstrations in front of the South African ministry, the embassy, with the extent to which college students all over the country have involved themselves in, white and black. Where would you expect black students when white students have gone off here and gone to jail. Mary Washington students in jail. In front of the embassy. University students all over the country, they're involved in seeking to get their institutions to divest themselves of investments in South Africa. Now we find more students volunteering to go down to Alabama, and participate in attempts to get more blacks registered and voting in the election, which is in process. Now, that is the dedication of Freedom Summer. 1964. So I would predict that before this decade of the eighties is over, there will be a rebirth of the movement, and a rebirth of the compassion exemplified by the era of Kennedy and King. Thank you. [Applause.] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Farmer Lecture: Militant Resistance and the Harlem Riots Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource James Farmer Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Mary Washington Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1986-03-06 Description An account of the resource Recording of a lecture from James Farmer’s The Civil Rights Movement in the 20th Century class, Titled 'Lecture 040' in UMW Special Collections. Farmer discusses the nonviolence philosophy in the dominant Civil Rights Movement (0:00), more militant organizations (00:58), the distinction between nonviolence and pacifism (3:00), one case of the successful use of self-defensive violence (3:40), and notable detractors from the philosophy of nonviolence (7:05). He then discusses the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement’s lack of attention to the lower classes (8:00). He connects class to the rise of rioting in inner cities in the mid-sixties (12:43) and goes on to describe his personal experience in witnessing the 1965 Harlem riot (14:37). Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Hist 428 Spring 2020 Classroom Education James Farmer Lecture Video https://farmer.umwhistory.org/files/original/73eb317a375a4fd7af952be1b277e582.mp4 efc8802a096304fdd393767bfc5db4ec https://farmer.umwhistory.org/files/original/723bcb60ea562bca1f2a96d9d84781ef.srt 1de80ac015f564be15cbfcd7d3058277 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Lectures Description An account of the resource In addition to his Reflections series, the UMW Special Collections and University Archives possessed three recordings of classroom lectures from Dr. James Farmer's Civil Rights Movement class. The James Farmer Project undertook the task of captioning and transcribing these recordings, making them publicly available for the first time. Moving Image A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 53:54 Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound This climb, and part of that climb is catalogued in Booker T. Washington's autobiography Up from Slavery, which by the way you should read, if you have not read. Washington is a controversial figure, but indeed most of the important persons and personages in the struggle have been controversial. He's considered far too moderate and too accommodating, but Booker Washington was born in slavery. He was just a few years old, a small boy, in the time of emancipation. And as often happens when people are born during torrential times, they grow up early. They grow up fast, and he became a man quite early, matured soon, quickly. By the time he was twenty, he had already started, had founded a college, a school, an institution which became Tuskeegee Institute in Alabama, and that became his life's work, really, his idea of the kind of education which blacks should undertake as their road toward freedom if not toward equality, their road toward advancement, and that was at once his strength and his weakness. Booker Washington argued that we should cast down our buckets where we were. We should not attempt to become the social equals of whites. He was opposed to social equality and this endeared him to whites, even, indeed, to white Southerners. His famous speech, which I trust you'll have an opportunity to read during the rest of your college career, was his speech in Atlanta. It must have been before the turn of the century, probably around 1890. And that was a speech at a crowded convention hall of people involved in the cotton industry. There were both blacks and whites in the audience, but they were thoroughly segregated. Blacks were over there in one little roped-off section, sitting quietly. Most of the people there were, of course, white. They were planters and large landowners of the great cotton industry. Booker Washington had been invited to speak because his views were those which most of the white Southerners would accept. He was not threatening to it. He was a good speaker, so they tell me, I never had the opportunity to hear him. He was dead before I was conscious of what was going on in the world, and there he electrified his audience - told a nation of blacks, and looked to the section where blacks were seated, to cast down their buckets where they were, the water was good there. And they should seek industrial education. Vocational education, that is. He spoke out against social equality. He said we can be as separate as the fingers on the hand in all things social, but then in all matters of mutual concern and patriotism, we will come together like the fist. And his audience stood and applauded - that is, the whites, who were the bulk of the audience. They stood and they applauded, gave a standing ovation that went on for many many minutes and his speech was interrupted many times with such ovation. And some of the blacks were weeping. Just dabbing their eyes with handkerchiefs, probably not really knowing why they were crying. Maybe crying partly because here was a black spokesman who was speaking to a large white audience and they were listening to him. Maybe they were not sure what he was saying, but somehow the whites in their audience felt it was good. Or they, the whites, were not threatened by what Booker T. Washington was saying. He then became the darling of Southern whites and, indeed, many Northern whites. Philanthropic money poured into Tuskegee Institute and it mushroomed in size. This became the symbol of industrial education and vocational education for blacks. It is the same idea, by the way, which led to the birth of Hampton Institute in Virginia. They're the same kinds of institutions. Booker Washington was lionized all over the country. Presidents invited him to the White House to consult with them. He was the only black spokesman who had the ear of the nation, and the ear of the press especially. He had detractors, especially black, and his chief detractor was a brilliant, aristocratic, then-young black intellectual and scholar: Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. The first black to get a PhD from Harvard University. Dr. Du Bois was born up in Massachussetts, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Probably, this family was the only black family in that little town of Great Barrington. He had a brilliant academic record in elementary school and high school. Then he went to Fisk University, a black university in Nashville Tennessee, and that was his first introduction to the race problem, and he observed it and studied it. Then he went up to Harvard, PhD in history, studied sociology and economics as well, then went over to Germany and studied in, studied at Oxford and came back as the most learned black man of the nation had yet seen. He was just a few years younger than Booker T. Washington. And when Washington made that great Atlanta speech of his, Du Bois immediately labeled it the "Atlanta Compromise." And then the debate was on, and the debate between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois raged across the country, with Du Bois arguing that he would reject the notion that blacks should be pointed to industrial education and vocational education exclusively. That he was opposed to the development of a permanent color labor caste, with black people working with their hands and white people working with their brains. Instead, he says blacks should go do academic feats as well, and should become scholars, and the talented tenth of the black community should be the black leaders. And those should soak up as much education as they could in all fields of Arts and Letters, and that was the argument between Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. Actually, the press picked it up and made it a question of either/or, either this or that, when really what each one was saying is that his view was that the emphasis be on one kind of education as opposed to the other. Later in DuBois's life, as he was an old man, he pointed out quite candidly that he and Booker Washington were not as far apart as they'd been made to appear. That it was just a matter of emphasis. He of course believed in vocational education, but he believed that we needed at that time in our history to concentrate more on academic education. And Booker Washington believed on the contrary that we should concentrate more on vocational education. Washington was an accommodationist; he felt that he was not going to attack segregated education at all. He was not attacking the unequal status of the races in this country. He felt that theonly way blacks, or Negroes as they were called then, could survive was to accept their role of social inferiors and become the best that they could at whatever jobs were available to them, and if they became so good at those jobs which were available, then the nation would rely upon them, would need them. And furthermore there would be no conflict with the whites because they would not be threatening to the whites. And Du Bois insisted we must be threatening to them, of course, because anything that they have, we too must aspire to. And we must seek social equality, we will seek all things that are available to any other American because we are American citizens. Well, Du Bois, who would seem like an egalitarian, really was not an egalitarian, he was a snob and an aristocrat and an elitist. I'll never forget meeting him for the first time. Well, meeting is hardly the right word. Seeing him and accosting him, more like it. I was 21, and this is 1941, December, right after Pearl Harbor. I was seated in Union Station, the railroad station in Washington DC, just arrived there by train, and before going to my parents' house I had decided to sit there at the station for a while until there were taxis available. The taxis were taken up with men in uniform and their lovers, their girlfriends, their wives, or what have you. Everyone was standing there holding everybody else and people crying kissing and so on and the taxis were all clogged up, and the streets were clogged up, too - so I sat just to wait this out out a while, and I suddenly looked up and here was this unmistakable figure. A short man, meticulously attired in a three-piece suit, and he had on spats - you know what spats are? They go over your shoes, you know, part of your shoes, they cover the place where your shoes and socks come together. He had on spats, he had a gold chain in his vest, and he had a little Van Dyke beard. His head was bald, he walked along with his hands folded behind his back, and looking up as though he was studying the scenery or lost in thought. It was probably the latter. And he walked down the street with measured steps. Immediately, I recognized him as Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. So I smiled, stood in his pathway, and said, "Doctor Du Bois!" and extended my hand. He paused, frowned a bit, reached in his pocket and got his pince-nez. Clipped them on his nose, looked up at me and said, "Let me see. Do I know you?" I shook my head and said no and sat back down. And Du Bois walked on. So that was Du Bois. He was fond of people, but not often. But a great scholar. He wrote his own, I guess, 15 books or so. There are good ones, there are great ones, they are all solid scholarship. One of his best-known works of scholarship with a history of the Reconstruction period entitled Black Reconstruction. It's a massive book. His most famous book is beautifully, artistically written, almost prose poetry. It was one that he wrote as a very young man at the turn of the century, 1903, I believe. The Souls of Black Folk. That's a classic, an undying classic. And you should read if you have not read it. He wrote many other books - Dusk of Dawn, et cetera. Booker Washington pretty nearly controlled money that came into the black community. Before any person receives any cash, any black person receives a grant for any idea that he had from government or philanthropy, Booker T Washington was consulted, and if he said no, that person did not get money. If he said yes, the person did get the money and he built what was called the Tuskegee Machine. That was the machine that dominated the black experience and black leadership for a long period of time. Du Bois suffered from that, and yet he was able to start the Niagara movement and attempted building a protest organization which lasted, oh, just two or three years until the NAACP was set up. And Dubois was one of the originators of the NAACP, that was 1909, and he became editor of the NAACP's publication, Crisis Magazine. Finally, Du Bois was kicked out of that job, he was fired and forced to resign because the NAACP had an official position on an issue and Du Bois was not interested in what the official position of the NAACP was. He was only interested in what his official position was. And so, frequently, the Crisis Magazine took the position which was opposed to that of the organization, and the Crisis Magazine was the official publication of the organization. So, the Board of Directors of the NAACP decided that the official journal of the organization could not take a position that is diametrically opposed to that of the organization. So Du Bois just had to leave, and went down to Atlanta University, that great complex of black colleges and universities - Clark College, Morehouse, Spellman, et cetera. There in Atlanta, called the Athens of black education and was a professor there, and a researcher, until the president of Atlanta University, who was also black, had to get rid of him. It had come to the point where it had to be decided whether he, the president, was going to run Atlanta University, or Dr. Dubois, one of his professors, was going to run it. The Board of Trustees decided the president would run it, so DuBois left again and he moved from job to job in academia and wrote books and lectured around the country but contended that, as he put it, he would constantly assail the ears of the nation with the story of how the strong restores the Negro. And he did that, from platform and with pen. He was radical, and in his later years he was accused of being a communist in the McCarthy period. You are familiar with the McCarthy period, are you? Of the early fifties, Joe McCarthy, who made it a practice of calling people communists, without proof usually. "Within the State Department there are 568 communists!" During that period, Dr. DuBois was charged with being a communist and was finally arrested in New York, handcuffed, his imminence got, Great Scott, great thick ones, handcuffs him on and charged with being an unregistered agent of a foreign power. Can you imagine handcuffs on this little man? You've gotta shoot somebody. This picture was on the front page of the New York Times and DuBois, of course, was just outraged. He was an old man then when he got out of jail, and he called a press conference on his 80th birthday. And said to the press: "Gentlemen, I have called you here to help me celebrate my 80th birthday. I'm going to celebrate that birthday by giving up my citizenship in the United States of America and moving to Ghana, in West Africa, where at the invitation of Ghanian President Kwame Nkrumah, I shall undertake the task of preparing an encyclopedia of Africa. He said, that's the first way I'm asking you to join with me in celebrating my 80th birthday. The second: I want to announce to you, and I'm sure you'll be pleased to hear this, that I am so puzzled by the fear that strikes at the hearts of most Americans when they hear the word 'communism'. The fear that put handcuffs on me and put me in jail. I cannot understand why that is so. In order to find out, I have today, on my 80th birthday, joined the Communist Party." So he said, "I ask you to join with me in celebrating my 80th birthday." Well, it was quite a raucous press conference, I'm told. One reporter said, "Dr. Dubois, one question." "Yes?" "Isn't it a bit pretentious of you to undertake the preparation of an encyclopedia of Africa, a massive job, at the age of 80?" Du Bois shot back, "That is a pigheaded question." He said, "As long as there is a breath in my body, I will continue working and fighting and speaking and writing and teaching what I believe to be right." Well, he died in Africa. The encyclopedia of Africa was never finished. He died in 1963 on the eve of the March on Washington, and that was announced at the March on Washington that W.E.B. Du Bois had died. One of the great tragedies in the cycle of tragedy of his life, whole life, is that is he now lies in the virtually unmarked and unkept little grave. I was talking to a friend a personal friend who was in Ghana very recently, the friend being a tourist with his camera, and he was across the field looking for a certain castle and he stumbled suddenly, fell to the ground, got up and found he had stumbled over the headstone, the grave of Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. Grown with weeds around him. That's most unfortunate, because he was really one of the greatest men that America has produced, I think. In spite of all the warts and the blemishes, he was a fine scholar. Those were truly great men who set the framework for the struggles that were following. The NAACP continued its work of fighting against lynching, trying vainly, it is true, to get anti-lynching legislation. By the turn of the century, there were at least two recorded lynchings per week, more than a hundred per year. There were many others that were not recorded. The NAACP fought unsuccessfully to get such legislation, federal legislation. The thing which served as their greatest obstacle was the concept of states' rights. Many in Congress held that they include not telling the states how to deal with such a problem. As mentioned, that was a matter for the states, and if the federal government tried to establish such a law, it would be a violation of the rights of the states. When lynching did decline around about the forties, many believed that it probably did not decline in numbers but it went underground, as it were. Rather than having screaming mobs abducting the accused and stringing him up to a tree or tying to a post and setting fire to him, the person would simply disappear in the dark of night and the body was found later, maybe much later, floating in one of the rivers, the Mississippi or Alabama. It was nonetheless lynching, but did not fit the classic mold of lynching. But it did decline, it declined gradually. One of the last highly publicized lynchings was that of Emmett Till, young Emmett Till of Chicago.A 14 year old kid who went down to Mississippi to visit his uncle. A fourteen year old Chicago boy, with I think his cousin, went shopping at a country store. And the fourteen year old kid, swaggering like many fourteen-year-old boys, wanted to impress his cousin with the fact that he wasn't afraid of anything. He looked at the lady behind the counter in the country store and whistled at her and, allegedly, rolled his eyes. Whistled. [Whistles]. Well, she reported that to her husband, and her husband and his brother went to the house of the kid's uncle, where he was visiting, at night and took the boy out of bed and killed him, beat him up, shot him, tied weights around his body and dumped him in the river. The wire rope with which the weights were tied around him broke, and the body surfaced and was found. That was one of the last highly publicized lynchings. There are others, the Klan has been revitalized recently, but the NAACP put enormous work in slowing down lynchings, reducing the numbers of them, and it was on the forefronts of other fronts, too. One of the most significant was, of course, its efforts to desegregate the school. At first it was a battle to equalize separate schools, the separate but equal concept, Plessy versus Ferguson. And finally it became clear that separate could not be equal. In fact, the NAACP argued before the court, said that the very fact of separateness made it unequal. The court agreed even though a law school would just state the bill for blacks might objectively be equal to that for whites, in terms of this library, in terms of its professors' training and preparation, in terms of the building's physical plan, it could not possibly provide an equal education because it could not provide the tradition. It could not provide the privilege to its graduates of being alumni of the same institution from which the judge had graduated. The graduates could not go into the judge's chambers and talk to him about old times at the Alma Mater, and they could not compare notes with peers in this profession or from major law schools in the country. And for that reason the separate law schools, though physically equal, could not provide an equal education. So the NAACP evolved in its arguing to the point where it argued that segregation was first stage inequality, and they won in Brown Vs. Topeka Board of Education. Well, prior to that decision, back in the forties, a group of young pacifists, black and white, including me, were studying Ghandi and experimenting with Ghandian techniques of non-violent direct action, nonviolent resistance, including non-cooperation, civil disobedience, willingness to go to jail, willingness to accept the consequences, and we were having sit-ins in 1942, 43, and throughout the forties. That was in an organization known as CORE, The Congress of Racial Equality. We organized similar groups in twelve or fifteen other Northern cities, organized a national organization, and throughout the forties and the fifties CORE was active and winning victories, but they were unsung because there was no television in the forties, the early days. Forties. Television came after World War II, and did not become widespread in use until the fifties. So the movement of nonviolent direct action did not take to the skies, did not take wing, until the Montgomery Bus Boycott triggered by Rosa Parks, this black seamstress, who was tired. She wasn't a crusader, she wasn't trying to start a movement, she wasn't a troublemaker, she was just tired. And she didn't sit at the front of the bus, the Montgomery City Bus, she sat in the back where she was supposed to be. Then a white man got on the bus and the bus was crowded, and he wanted to sit where she was sitting, so he told her to get up and stand so he could sit down where she was sitting. She said no, I'm not getting up. She was tired of getting up. The bus driver told her to get up. She said no. So the police carted her off and arrested her and that started the movement, the Montgomery Bus Boycott. And Martin Luther King, Jr. rose to the occasion and burst upon the American scene never to be forgotten. A star was born, as it were. And the movement took wing, the imagination of people was captured, throughout the country, all over the world. Youngsters, young black college students inspired by the example of King and having talked with a white merchant in Greensboro, many people are not aware of this. A white merchant, name of Johns, I forget his first name, who had been on the CORE mailing list for quite a few years. He knew of CORE activities. Johns had been trying to get some some students in Greensboro, some black students, to sit in at a Woolworth lunch counter for years. No, no, no. Was the guy crazy or something? But finally, he convinced four freshmen: that's generally not known, but he convinced them. These four freshmen went downtown and made their other purchases in Woolworth's. "Are you ready, man?" "Yeah." "Let's go and get some coffee." The others said, "Dig it." They went over, they, they sat down, they sat not at the end of the lunch counter where blacks traditionally sat where there's a sign saying "Colored," but at the main section of the lunch counter, where there was a sign saying "White Only." They sat there and asked for coffee or whatever it was, a hot dog, and they sat until the place closed and they decided to do it again next day. They called on Dr. Simpkins, a black dentist who was the president of the local branch of the NAACP, for help. And he called CORE because he too knew CORE's work. He called CORE's headquarters in New York and CORE sent one of its two teen secretaries down there and said that he set up an institute to train in nonviolent direct action but the students joined in the city. By this time, the TV cameras were there. The next day, the next day, and the next day. And the crowds of people going to sit in that lunch counter grew, white students in Greensboro joined them. Finally there's no place for anybody else at Woolworth! Everybody there was waiting to sit in at the lunch counter! There were dozens and finally hundreds waiting to sit in at the lunch counter. Oh, it was up and running, and since this was on TV, other black college students throughout the South saw it on the tube and said "Hey, man, look what our brothers and sisters are doing there in Greensboro. What's wrong with us? Let's do it here." And they did. It spread, of course, like the birth of a wildfire. What really broke the camel's back, the camel of segregation at the lunch counter, was the nationwide boycott of the variety stores in support of the Southern students' efforts to be desegregated at the lunch counter. And that brought them to their knees, and they desegregated. Woolworth, in its annual report the following year, reported that the curve of profits had gone down in 1960. They didn't lose money, but the curve, which had been up, that fallen down. And they gave the first reason for that to the nationwide boycott of their stores in support of the desegregation efforts at the lunch counters in Southern stores. Well, the next year I should point out that SNCC was organized out of the southern student cities. SNCC was not really an organization, it was set up to be a temporary thing. In fact, that was its first name: the Temporary Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Finally, they dropped the T and it was just SNCC. And the press gave it the nickname "snick," S-N-C-C. I think they had their tone of the cheek when they called it "snick", like "snake." And SNCC began calling SCLC "slick", to show them what they thought of it. There's a tension between the two organizations that were SNCC and SCLC. 1961: the Freedom Rides. I won't go into details on that, but what started out to be a lonely little idealistic ride of 13 people, roughly half-white, half-black, and the process in which one man so badly beaten he had stroke and had been confined to a wheelchair - ever since that day in May 1961, still in a wheelchair. Another man, also white, was so brutally beaten, he had to have 56 stitches taken in his head, and partly as a result of that beating, I think, he has suffered a series of strokes and is now in a nursing home in very bad shape. Those two men, incidentally, have sued the FBI successfully, because we learned that I sent copies of our itinerary to the president, the Attorney General, the FBI, the ICC, Greyhound, and Trailways before the ride began. The FBI gave these copies of our itinerary to law enforcement offices in the state of Alabama whom they knew to be leaders of the Ku Klux Klan. As a result, the Klan had a warm reception for us at every stop in that state, and on the basis of that knowledge, which we gained from Senate hearings, they sued successfully, and I don't know how much money they got. One of the men sued for two million and the other sued for one million. They didn't get anything like that, but they got a nominal amount for damages. We were victorious. This little group could go no further when some SNCC students joined by CORE students picked up the Freedom Ride in Birmingham, and I rode with them from Montgomery and to Jackson and to Jackson Jail. We filled up the jails of Jackson City, the Hinds County jail, the Hinds County Prison, then the maximum security unit to the State Penitentiary at Parchman in Misssissippi. Well, we were staying in as long as we could, and still filed appeals. That was 40 days of Mississippi law out of the one year sentence. Every day, some new Freedom Riders coming in on virtually every bus, so many more were pouring in. As few bailed out, more poured in. And we won. Missisippi called on the federal government to do something. And Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy as the attorney general, asked the ICC to issue an executive order which he then enforced. The ICC issued an order that on November 1st, 61 all "For Colored" and "for white" signs must come down from the buses and the terminals used by interstate passengers, and would be replaced by signs saying "segregation by race induced in these facilities is unconstitutional. Violation subject to fine and/or imprisonment." This must be posted on all buses used by interstate passengers and all bus terminals similarly used. And printed on all tickets for interstate passengers. We tested the enforcement of that order on the effective date, November 1st, and it was enforced. It was completely successful. The ride was an absolute success. Won its objective. The movement of the early sixties won its objective too, its objectives, which were legislative. The Civil Rights Act of 64 and the Voting Rights Act of 65, the two major legislative components of the movement of the sixties, the Civil Rights Movement of the sixties. What we did in the 60s was not to eliminate racism There is still a lot of racism in this country. What we did was to regulate practices, behavior, by the enactment of those laws. Since the prejudice is still there. They threaten to pop out at any time. Whenever the enforcement becomes lax, they bubble up to the top, out a game or when those with the strongest prejudices find a loophole or ways to maneuver around the laws, they do that. And so eternal vigilance is called for. But now, today, our problems are even greater than that. We've got to close the gaps, the gaps in education. We still have kids in the ghettoes and barrios of our cities graduate from high school functionally illiterate, only a reader to a fourth or fifth grade level. Outrageous. Gaps in income, median average income of blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans less than sixty percent of the median income of whites. Health, infant mortality rate, of those nonwhite minority groups, more than twice as high, in some cases much much more than the national average. And the life expectancy gap is widening among males. Worse than that, the life expectancy of the black male has dropped in the past few years, dropped from 64 to 61. We die down before we collect social security. We don't know all the reasons for that, but we can speculate. Part of it's success. More of us have moved into the middle class as a result of the efforts of the Civil Rights Movement, the 60s. New jobs, untraditional jobs move in without the preparation and training for those jobs as we work all the harder trying to keep the guy behind you from getting your job, and trying to get the job of the guy in front you. You know, legal records. The system. And hypertension goes up. Oh, the hypertension rate is much higher in the black community. It's gone up remarkably. So there's been a great rise, rapid rise in strokes and the heart attacks. The cancer rate has gone up too, maybe it's because some of us smoke too much. And the suicide rate has gone up. That too is a part of success people who are in the rat race tend to commit suicide. Not the bottom of the ladder. I remember Dick Gregory back in 1961, and in the Q&A period someone said, "Well, Mr. Gregory, if things are as bad as you say they are black people, quite a little more of you commit suicide, why don't you kill yourself?" Dick said, "Two things: one, we have to spend so much time and energy trying to keep people from killing us, we don't have time to think about killing ourselves. And second," he said, "do you ever hear of a cat jumping up out of a basement window?" I thought that was very perceptive. It's the person who has moved up on the ladder that jumps down to bash his brains out. The guy who's at the bottom can't go any lower, so he doesn't commit suicide, he spends his energy trying to keep alive. One of the other reasons, however, the treatment in the mid 60's to the mid 70's of soul food, which is just Southern food, really, and it's it's greasy fried food and that may taste awfully good, but it's not awfully good for you. There's a lot of cholesterol and a lot of fat and everything else, and we tend to use a lot of seasoning, a lot of salt and other kinds of seasoning which aren't particularly good for you. So there are many reasons for it, but the life expectancy of the black male has dropped. There are indications that the drop has not hit rock bottom yet. Then, finally, we have become painfully aware, that awareness has become a national issue now, of deterioration within certain segments of the black community of the black family. I hasten to say 'certain segments' because one of the errors of much of the publicity of this issue is that it gives the impression that that is THE black family. It is not THE black family. It is a portion of the black family. It is a large portion of the black family of the lower economic classes, but not of the middle classes. The middle-class black family adheres with greater tenacity to the same values that the white family respectfully adheres to. Just about the same as the white middle-class family, but more so. In a way it's an adaption, you might say an imitation, and like most imitations it exceeds the prototype. We get the impression from some of the stories and documentaries that that is the black family. But yet it is of great enough magnitude that we must give time and attention to finding a solution. Nor is the problem of teenage pregnancies a 'color problem' exclusively. Teenage pregnancies are in the white community and the rate of them has been going up. There are one-parent households in the white community, and their rate has been going up, too, not as rapidly as in the black community, but remember that poverty is not as widespread in the white community as in the black community. There is more correlation between poverty and those problems than there is between race and those problems. Yet since they affect those of color, civil rights advocates and leaders must now give major attention to them, otherwise they would be derelict of their duties. Well, now that's kind of a running summary hopscotch, skip, jump over what we've been talking about, or haven't been talking about, or should have been talking about over the past semester. And I conclude by saying that I've enjoyed immensely and have found your questions and comments to be stimulating. Most of you are lower-class, lower class for students. I have to keep reminding myself of that. So I look forward to a great future for you, not only in academia but in life after academia. And indeed, there is life after academia. Thank you. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Farmer Lecture: Overviewing the Civil Rights Movement Description An account of the resource Recording of a lecture from James Farmer’s The Civil Rights Movement in the 20th Century class. Farmer discusses Booker T. Washington (00:00), W.E.B. DuBois (06:55), the struggle against lynching (25:11), the desegregation of schools (29:08), the early days of CORE (31:20), the Montgomery Bus Boycott (32:39), the Greensboro sit-ins and ensuing nationwide movement (34:23), the formation of SNCC (38:38), the Freedom Rides (31:39), and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts (44:06). Farmer then moves to discuss the continuing struggle against racism (44:32). He addresses continuing racial disparities in education, income, health, and family structure (45:32). Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource James Farmer Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Mary Washington Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource Undated Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource .mov Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Hist 428 Spring 2020 Classroom Education James Farmer Lecture Video Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Lectures Description An account of the resource In addition to his Reflections series, the UMW Special Collections and University Archives possessed three recordings of classroom lectures from Dr. James Farmer's Civil Rights Movement class. The James Farmer Project undertook the task of captioning and transcribing these recordings, making them publicly available for the first time. Website A resource comprising of a web page or web pages and all related assets ( such as images, sound and video files, etc. ). Local URL The URL of the local directory containing all assets of the website https://umw.access.preservica.com/SO_ce626316-d3a3-4086-bba8-15b6997523df/ Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource James Farmer's Reflections Lectures Description An account of the resource In 1987, PBS station WNVT-TV and Mary Washington College partnered to film the James Farmer Reflections series, thirteen of Dr. Farmer’s lectures given when he was Professor of History. These lectures are compiled online by the Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Mary Washington (see link). Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived https://umw.access.preservica.com/SO_ce626316-d3a3-4086-bba8-15b6997523df/ Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Special Collections and University Archives Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1987 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Hist 428 Spring 2020 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright is retained by Special Collections and University Archives, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington. This item is available for use in research, teaching, and private study. Items may not be reproduced or used for any commercial purposes without prior written consent from the University of Mary Washington. Relation A related resource The James L. Farmer Collection Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Classroom James Farmer Lecture Video