This photo shows civil rights lawyer Joseph Rauh, founder of Americans for Democratic Action and general counsel of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, co-chair of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The march program called on the ten co-chairs to lead the procession from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial for a mass rally. Each of the co-chairs delivered a speech as part of an official presentation that included performances by other dignitaries and artists. Educator and civil rights activist Harry Tyson Moore was one of the first leaders to be assassinated during the modern phase of the civil rights movement. Moore was a leader in voter registration and worked as a national organizer for the NAACP in Florida, focusing on establishing branches in rural areas. He began his career as a teacher in a public school in Brevard County, Florida, first in an elementary school and later as the principal of Mims Elementary School. He and his wife Harriette, who also taught at the school, joined the NAACP in 1933. They organized a local in Brevard and filed a lawsuit in 1937 against the unequal salaries of black and white teachers, the first of their kind in the South. In 1951, Moore and his wife fell victim to the terror of the Ku Klux Klan when a bomb exploded in their home. In 1953, the NAACP launched the “Fight for Freedom” campaign with the goal of abolishing segregation and discrimination by 1963, the centennial of Abraham Lincoln`s Emancipation Proclamation. The NAACP promised to raise one million dollars a year until 1963 to fund the campaign. The concept is reminiscent of the Lincoln Day call with which the NAACP began. The NAACP has strengthened this connection with Abraham Lincoln throughout its history with annual Lincoln Day celebrations, related events, and programs that evoke Lincoln`s foundational ideas about liberty and human brotherhood.
The NAACP has adopted “Fight For Freedom” as its motto. Roy Wilkins (1901-1981), executive secretary of the NAACP, spoke on August 28, 1963 at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom at the Lincoln Memorial on upcoming civil rights laws. In 1969, the NAACP reached another milestone: its 60th anniversary. The NAACP held its 60th annual meeting in Jackson, Mississippi, a first for Mississippi – a battleground of the civil rights movement. The convention preceded the inauguration of NAACP Mississippi Director Charles Evers as mayor of Fayette, the first black man elected mayor of a biracial city in the state since Reconstruction. The NAACP noted this progress, as well as problems stemming from the civil rights policies of the Nixon administration and a discouraged black community. NAACP delegates left the historic session with a renewed determination to continue the fight. This poster reflects that determination. In 1957, A.
Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Roy Wilkins jointly supported the Freedom Prayer Pilgrimage to call for federal action against school desegregation and to show support for the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Held at the Lincoln Memorial on May 17, on the occasion of the third anniversary of Brown v. The pilgrimage attracted about 25,000 people. Turnout was lower than organizers expected, but remains the largest civil rights protest to date. The pilgrimage created the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and helped promote Martin Luther King Jr. as a national leader. Hundreds of protests erupted in towns and villages across the country. National and international media coverage of the use of fire hoses and attack dogs against child protesters sparked a crisis in the Kennedy administration that it could not ignore. Bombings and riots in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 11, 1963, forced Kennedy to call for federal troops. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s reflected the goals of the NAACP, but leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference felt that direct action was needed to achieve them.
Although the NAACP has been criticized for its overly rigid work within the system and its focus on legislative and judicial solutions, the association has provided legal representation and assistance to members of other protest groups over an extended period of time. The NAACP even posted bail in the `60s for hundreds of Freedom Riders who traveled to Mississippi to register black voters and challenge Jim Crow policies. In 1957, Clarence Mitchell garnered bipartisan support in Congress for a civil rights bill, the first since Reconstruction. Part III, a provision empowering the Attorney General to prosecute civil rights cases, was removed from the legislation prior to its passage. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 established a new Civil Rights Commission to investigate civil rights violations and created a Civil Rights Division within the Department of Justice headed by a Deputy Attorney General. It also prohibits measures to prevent citizens from voting and empowers the Attorney General to seek injunctions to protect the right to vote. Although the law does not provide for proper enforcement, it has paved the way for stricter legislation. In 1961, CORE organized Freedom Rides to the Deep South to comply with the 1960 Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia, which concluded that segregation in train and bus station facilities serving interstate passengers was illegal.
On May 4, 1961, thirteen black and white drivers, including CORE National Director James Farmer, left Washington, D.C., by bus to New Orleans. On May 14, in Anniston, Alabama, a bus was set on fire and the passengers of another were attacked. In this letter, farmer A. Philip Randolph asks for help raising funds to support the Freedom Rides. The long-time NAACP Secretary Mildred Bond Roxborough (*1926) speaks in an interview with Julian Bond (born 1940) for the Civil Rights History Project in 2010 about the organization`s achievements. In the fall of 1956, Bayard Rustin discussed with Martin Luther King Jr. the need for an organization larger than the Montgomery Improvement Association that could support the protests in the South. With contributions from civil rights activists Ella Baker and Stanley Levison, Rustin wrote seven discussion papers for a workshop on nonviolent social change.
After studying the papers, King convened a conference at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta in January 1957. There he discussed with more than sixty ministers their common problems of the struggle of the South. The group voted unanimously to establish a permanent organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Prominent civil rights activist Percy Sutton (1920-2009) describes the psychological aspects of participating in the Freedom Rides in this television interview, which is included in the documentary Walk in My Shoes, released on September 19, 1961 via ABC in the Bell & Howell Close-Up! Row. On June 11, 1963, President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) delivered a major televised address to the nation, announcing that he would soon ask Congress to enact civil rights laws. Kennedy granted documentary filmmaker Robert Drew unprecedented access to conversations in the Oval Office with his advisers included in the film Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, which first aired on ABC on October 21, 1963 and re-aired in this remastered version, Kennedy v. Wallace: A Crisis Up Close, twenty-five years later in the PBS series The American Experience.
This included further interviews with participants. The NAACP challenged the law and won a legal victory in 1915 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Guinn v. the United States that grandfather clauses were unconstitutional. Komla Agbeli Gbedemah, Minister of Finance of the new African nation Ghana, visited the United States in October 1957 on official business. On October 9, Gbedemah dined with referee Theodore Kheel and Roy Wilkins at the Waldorf Astoria. The next day, he was denied service at a Howard Johnson`s restaurant in Dover, Delaware, en route from New York to Washington, D.C. President Eisenhower then invited Gbedemah to lunch at the White House to make amends. This incident was one of several involving dark-skinned diplomats and Jim Crow.
The song “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” was composed by jazz pianist and educator Dr. Billy Taylor (1921−2010). Although written in 1954, the song did not gain popularity until the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and became known in the 1960s with a recording of the song by singer Nina Simone. The title expresses one of the fundamental themes of the movement – the desire to live freely and with dignity in America. As mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert Humphrey was a member of the National Urban League and supported its efforts to fight discrimination in Minneapolis and St. Paul. In 1947, he met Whitney Young, then director of labour relations for the St. Paul Urban League.
In the letter, Senator Humphrey Young congratulated the March on Washington and pledged his “full commitment to President Kennedy`s Civil Rights Act.” In 1964, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield named Humphrey as the bill`s Democratic leader.
