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THE BATTLE WITH JIM CROW: ST. LOUIS CORE WON WITHOUT
VIOLENCE; ESSAYISTS REMIND US THE JOB'S NOT DONE
by Robert Joiner
More than a decade before the world took note of a few hungry college kids who staged a 1960 sit-in at a lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., a civil rights group here began a nonviolent campaign that eventually shooed Jim Crow from his perch in downtown St. Louis.
The 10-year effort by the St. Louis Committee of Racial
Equality began in
1947. By the time it ended, downtown lunch counters were desegregated.
Quiet as its campaign was kept, CORE planted one of the seeds from which
bloomed the city's public accommodations ordinance, and perhaps the modern
civil rights movement itself.
The original St. Louis CORE was unaffiliated with the national CORE, which was founded in Chicago in 1942. Authorative references don't agree on whether the national CORE initially took the name Committee of Racial Equality or Committee on Racial Equality. The references do agree, however, that the national group eventually renamed itself the Congress of Racial Equality, whose local chapter evolved from the original St. Louis CORE.
That so little is known about this successful campaign is
due partly to a
news blackout by the Post-Dispatch and two other dailies, which
feared that publicity about the sit-ins would trigger more violence. Richard
Dudman, former chief of the Post-Dispatch's Washington bureau,
shed some light on CORE's work in a commentary for this newspaper in 1990.
Now comes another welcome account in "Victory Without Violence."
It offers a fuller treatment of how CORE used a combination of negotiations
and direct action to change behavior.
One of the book's co-authors, Margaret W. Dagen, taught
at Clayton High
School and later at Washington University. She and her late husband, Irvin,
a lawyer, were co-founders of St. Louis CORE. Many of its members then
and later became widely known, including Norman Seay, an administrator
at the University of Missouri at St. Louis; lawyer Charles Oldham and
his late wife, Marian; and the late Allyce Hamilton, a school teacher.
Readers will be struck by the dignified manner in which CORE approached its mission and the strict rules of passive resistance it set for anyone wishing to join the picket lines. Protesters were forbidden to show anger, no matter how much they were provoked, and they were to apologize for being in the way if shoved by a spectator.
Five years after CORE began its demonstrations, nearly two
dozen eating
establishments were integrated. But it wasn't until 1954 that the biggest
target, Stix, Baer & Fuller, reversed its policy and opened its lunch
cou nter. And it would take the St. Louis Board of Aldermen another seven
years to pass a public accommodations ordinance.
Overall, the book is a rather straightforward account. Readers probably would have welcomed more scenes like the one recounted by CORE's Walter Hayes when the group decided to take a dip in the Fairground Park pool. Before city-ordered desegregation, blacks had been restricted to the Tandy, Adams and Buder pools.
Hayes says word about CORE's arrival spread quickly, and he remembers being surrounded by what he says "felt like a wall of hate" as hundreds of whites gathered along the fence surrounding the pool.
"This memory stands out in my mind because, before this incident, I never knew that hatred actually traveled in waves," Hayes said. "I could feel and see those hate waves, similar to heat waves coming at you on a hot sunny day in a desert, coming from the crowd. It was an eerie feeling."
With this highly readable book, the authors have shown how a small integrated group took a stand against an evil system and persuaded business and government to change it.
In "Voices in Our Blood," Jon Meacham visits that same system through a collection of essays by journalists and historians, poets and novelists, activists and artists.
Many of the essays offer fresh perspectives that help us
move beyond the
myths surrounding America's civil rights history. For example, essays
on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—by Taylor Branch, James Reston,
Gary Wills and David Halberstam—help us see King in all his moral
ambiguity. He becomes less of a saint than a radical who was moving beyond
civil rights issues when he was assassinated, raising disturbing questions
about larger issues, such as economic injustices and the Vietnam War.
Notwithstanding the fact that some of the essays were written more than 50 years ago, much of the material seems fresh and appeals to contemporary readers. But much of the writing in this collection sparkles.
Ralph Ellison reminds us in his eloquent prose that Jim Crow also flies north of the Mason-Dixon line; Eudora Welty offers a poignant portrait of a black church in Jackson, Miss.; and Willie Morris gives us a sensitive account of what it meant to grow up white in the South before the movement, while Tom Wolfe takes on the radical chic crowd of liberals who flirted with the Black Panthers in the late '60s and early '70s.
Then there's Howell Raines' Pulitzer Prize-winning gem about
the complex
relationship between his family and its housekeeper. After seeing the
housekeeper years later at a family gathering, Raines is thinking about
the complexities of human nature and the tendency of even well-meaning
whites to say in these times that "guilt, historical fairness and
compassion are outdated concepts, that if the playing field is level today,
we are free to forget that it was tilted for generations . . . "
At one point, he speaks about the injustices inflicted on his housekeeper
in the context of policies during the administration of former President
George Bush:
"I often think of Governor (George) Wallace when I hear about the dangers of 'reverse discrimination' and 'racial quotas' from President Bush or his counsel, C. Boyden Gray, the chief architect of the administration's civil rights policies. Unlike some of the old Southern demagogues, these are not ignorant men. Indeed, they are the polite, well-educated sons of privilege. But when they argue that this country needs no remedies for past injustices, I believe I hear the grown-up voices of pampered white boys who never saw a wound."
And, Raines might add, may never have been the victims of mindless racial profiling on highways and at airports, or employment discrimination, or disfranchisement, which some African-Americans experienced when their long-fought drive to win the right to vote vanished on Election Day in Florida.
These two books show how some Americans have tried to heal that wound through tactics ranging from direct action in the '40s, intended to change laws and customs that made Jim Crow acceptable, to strong affirmative action policies in our time, intended to promote colorblind opportunity and justice for all.
Both works also show us why this struggle must continue,
notwithstanding the effort by Bush and others to retreat. As Meacham notes,
Americans aren't reminded enough that it was "the day before yesterday
that we allowed unthinkable things to be done and said to African-Americans—a
fact that shows how vigilant we all must be to giving in to prejudice
or darker impulses."
