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C.C. & T.H.

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By the beginning of the 1960s the Civil Rights Movement had taken hold of the United States, where black Americans had been treated unjustly since they first arrived in the nation. During the Civil Rights Movement, black communities all throughout the US South rose up in protest against the segregationist policies that kept them in systematically separate and insufficient living arrangements, a world away from the "separate but equal" treatment promised them by the 14 amendment and its interpretation in the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson.

As a southern state, South Carolina played a major role in the Civil Rights Movement. Alongside many important struggles that also took place in South Carolina, there was an attempt to desegregate Columbia, its capital city, in 1960-1961. Despite the courageous work of student civil rights protestors, segregation proved too strongly rooted in the politics of the state to be shaken by a local campaign.

The campaign to desegregate Columbia began February 14-15, 1960, when students at Allen University and Benedict College (two black schools in Columbia) independently held rallies to protest school and community segregation. These two protests merged into a larger action, which drew several hundred students. Encouraged by the success of this first action, the two schools continued to collaborate on organizing protests, and on March 2 approximately fifty Allen and Benedict students participated in lunch counter sit-ins at two department stores. Approximately ten minutes into the protest, both businesses were temporarily closed, giving the movement a palpable early victory. The very next day, five hundred students gathered together to protest. Two hundred of them marched to the main business center of the city where all the businesses had closed in preparation for their arrival.

Intimidated by this string of successes, white youth drove past Allen University the next night (March 4), and proceeded to burn a cross and throw bricks at one of the school buildings. This prompted retaliation from black students, who violently attacked a white drive-in restaurant and broke car windows. This appears to have been the only violence by black students over the course of the campaign.

In reaction to that violence, the Mayor of Columbia announced he would arrest anyone caught protesting, and student leaders at Allen and Benedict temporarily called off protests, apparently intimidated either by the mayor's threats or by the student violence. On March 5, however, students from Claflin and South Carolina State colleges formed the South Carolina Student Movement Association. This gave new strength to efforts in Columbia. The South Carolina Student Movement Association's stated goal was to collaborate with all South Carolina black schools in order to bring about integration. This group, which included Allen and Benedict students, would take a leadership role in much of the student organizing over the next few months. On the same day that the South Carolina Student Movement Association was formed, however, the Columbia desegregation campaign had its first arrest; the police took Mr. Arnold M. Smith into custody for "loitering," in accordance with the mayor's threat.

On March 15, members of the South Carolina Student Movement Association held a protest in Columbia, designed to take place at the same time as one happening on the same day in Orangeburg, South Carolina (see, "Orangeburg, South Carolina, college students protest segregation, 1960"). Police arrested 11 students over the course of two days.

Students continued with small-scale protests through the spring and summer, yet student organizers had difficulty solidifying an organizational structure through the South Carolina Student Movement Association, as there was no cohesive group that spanned all involved campuses (most notably Allen and Benedict). Both schools had NAACP chapters, yet they had trouble collaborating with one another. Benedict administration also refused to allow members of its student body under the age of 18 to participate in protests, allegedly out of concern for students' safety and in reaction to a Benedict student having recently been stabbed at a civil rights protest.

On October 15, seven months after the establishment of the South Carolina Student Movement Association, students at Allen and Benedict formed the Student Committee for Human Rights in order to facilitate cross-campus and citywide organizing. Allen students did the majority of the organizing for a period of a few months, although progress was slow. Morale was dampened by the discovery in early 1961 that the chairman of the Student Committee for Human Rights had been stealing money from the organization and deliberately slowing its progress in order to collect bribes from local business owners who were reluctant to see the city desegregated. Despite institutional challenges, however, campaigners continued to protest. At a storefront sit-in in February of 1961, police arrested twelve students. Thirteen more, who had gathered outside the jail in order to welcome back their fellow organizers, were also taken into custody. Students became more active in organizing over the next few months.

At a regional NAACP conference in Greenville, student leaders planned a large-scale action to take place in at the Columbia State House on March 2. At the protest, a student leader explained that the goal of the action was to bring public attention to the problem of segregation. Over 200 student protesters attended and nonviolently sang hymns as they marched in the streets. Another student leader is cited as having encouraged the crowd with a religious speech.

Students circled the building once before they were ordered to leave, but once they refused to disperse police arrested 187 of them (one source claims 193) on the charge of "disturbing the peace." Testimony from the police chief overseeing the protest implies students' singing and stomping may have caused fear of violence among the onlookers, although there were no reports of actual violence.

After being found guilty by a state trial court, their case was eventually brought to the United States Supreme Court, which dropped all charges against the 187 protesters in its Edwards v. South Carolina ruling. The ruling brought significant national attention, and was covered by many major newspapers of the day.

Three days after the protest, whites attacked two black student leaders. One, a Benedict student named Lennie Glover, was seriously injured. The attackers were never caught. Mr. Glover became an icon for the campaign, and other student organizers began to use his name as in rallying energy for a very economically powerful Easter boycott of segregated businesses, a boycott they called the "Easter Lennie Glover No Buying Campaign."

The duration of the boycott is unclear, yet despite the strong economic effect it had on local businesses, the area remained segregated. Although the campaign failed in its initial goal of bringing about school integration (as stated by the South Carolina Student Movement Association), and was unable to desegregate local businesses, the publicity of the protests and the trial hastened the south's eventual desegregation.

Research Notes

Myers, Andrew. Black, White, & Olive Drab: Racial Integration at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and the Civil Rights Movement. Univ of Virginia Pr, 2006. Print.

Edwards v. South Carolina, 372 U.S. 229.U.S. Sub Ct. 1963.

Jones, Cherisse Renee. "Repairers of the breach": black and white women and racial activism in South Carolina, 1940s-1960s. Diss. Ohio State University, 2003. OhioLINK, 2003.

Oppenheimer, Martin. The Sit-in Movement of 1960. Brooklyn: Carlson, 1989. Print.

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Students protest segregation in Columbia, South Carolina, 1960-1961

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By the beginning of the 1960s the Civil Rights Movement had taken hold of the United States, where black Americans had been treated unjustly since they first arrived in the nation.

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Williams VS Johnson justice case.

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http://law.justia.com/cases/south-carolina/supreme-court/1964/18237-1.html

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C.C. & T.H.

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In late 1956, over the course of several months, LIFE published what the magazine itself described as "a series of major articles on the background of the crisis brought about by the school segregation decision [Brown v. Board of Education] of the Supreme Court. . . . Although the ground that is to be covered in the series is not wholly new to Americans, it is unfamiliar as a subject of moderate and unprejudiced consideration."

The series in question, ambitiously and simply titled The Background of Segregation, explored the emotionally and politically charged issue at a time when the Civil Rights movement was barely in its infancy. For one especially riveting (then, as now) segment of the monumental five-part series, "Voices of the White South," LIFE dispatched the legendary Margaret Bourke-White to Greenville, South Carolina, where she documented citizens from varying walks of life who wholeheartedly-and unapologetically-supported the legacy and the practice of open, legal segregation.

Here, in striking color photographs that, at times, convey an unsettling intimacy, Bourke-White's work opens a window on an era that, for better and for worse, helped define 20th-century America. There is courage to be found here, and dignity and a cruelty that-in the guise of a patronizing benevolence-shaped the destinies of black and white America for decades, and still echoes in our national conversation today.

The "Voices of the White South" article, which won praise and awards when published, was extraordinary for, among other things, the utterly non-sensational methodology and tone of its reportage. While much of the national debate over desegregation was dominated in the mid-1950s by the language and actions of strident and often hateful zealots, "Voices" was a measured take on the entire issue. Far from emphasizing its own pro-integrationist sensibility, LIFE allowed Southerners to discuss their own pro-segregationist views-in their own words, at length-and created a portrait of the South far more nuanced than the depiction usually found in the liberal "Yankee" press.

The article was not, in the end, an anti-segregationist screed, but instead an honest glimpse into the heart of a culture proud of its fraught heritage, and frightened of what the future might hold.

"Outside the South," LIFE wrote, "the white Southerner who believes in segregation is sometimes pictured as a latter-day Simon Legree who now does with law what used to be done with a whip. If he no longer runs around wearing a bed sheet and setting fire to crosses, he doubtless belongs to a 'Citizens Council,' which Hodding Carter [then a prominent newspaper editor from Mississippi] has described as 'the uptown Ku Klux Klan.' There are Southerners who fit this picture, but there are many more who are thoughtful, pious gentlefolk-and who are still in favor of segregation."

LIFE's Dick Stolley, who would go on to become the magazine's managing editor and the founding Managing Editor of People, among many other roles, worked on the Background of Segregation series as an Atlanta-based correspondent for the magazine. He told LIFE.com that, considering how despised the magazine was across the South for its solidly pro-integration editorial stance, he was "astonished at the time, and I remain astonished today, that I was able to find five Southern whites who were willing to talk to LIFE about their reasons for so adamantly opposing integration."

While the "Voices" article was striking not only for its powerful color photographs and the (largely) subdued tenor of its language-especially in light of the politically and emotionally explosive nature of the topic at hand-a few of the observations made in the piece, encountered six decades later, are beyond jarring. Some of them, in fact-even when read with an awareness of the era in which they were written-are nothing less than shocking to contemporary ears. For example: "[Whites in the South] may call the Negro a 'Nigra' or a 'nigger,'" LIFE bluntly noted at one point in the article, and followed this with the assertion that the same people who routinely use those inflammatory terms "have long since ceased meaning any harm or insult by it."

LIFE reminded its readers that ex-Governor Herman Talmadge of Georgia was only one of countless prominent Southerners "who feel that segregation must be preserved." Talmadge, LIFE wrote, believed that "to destroy segregation would be to destroy the South. . . ."

[His] viewpoint is traditional and has, in the eyes of many white Southerners, the honor that attaches to a great past. "God advocates segregation," Governor Talmadge maintains. "There are five different races and God created them all different. He did not intend them to be mixed or He would not have separated or segregated them. Certainly history shows that nations composed of a mongrel race lose their strength and become weak, lazy and indifferent. They become easy prey to outside nations. And isn't that just exactly what the Communists want to happen to the United States?" This is a viewpoint that has been expressed by generations of southern political leaders and remains widely accepted in the rural South today.

In the "Voices" article, a 38-year-old white sharecropper in North Carolina summed up his support of segregation and his views on his black neighbors and fellow farmers this way:

"We're working to own our farm. We want to hurry up and get someplace. But they just don't work. They just don't care. All they're looking for is the end of the week when the landlord will shoot 'em a little money. [T]hey take a bath once a month, and their fields don't look like they's hardly tending them." At the same time, according to LIFE, the sharecropper's approval of segregation was "based as much, or more, on personal pride than notions of color. He would rather have a Negro living next door than he would a white 'redneck' or 'peckerwood.' In his view, 'there's nothing sorrier than a sorry white man.'"

The white sharecropper's wife, LIFE wrote, "also approves of segregation and will not let her 9-year-old daughter play with an 8-year-old Negro neighbor. This is the reason she gives: 'If our landlord came down here and saw her playing with a colored boy, he wouldn't respect us. Only poor class whites do that. We're trying to keep our self-respect and keep the highest level socially we can. We're willing to work with the Negroes, but that's as far as we'll go."

Another quote from the article that shares the sentiment and even the vocabulary of pronouncements that for decades have sent chills through men and women involved in the struggle for justice and equal rights came from Greenville's white mayor, Kenneth Cass. "There is no race trouble here," he told LIFE, "and there won't be, unless an agitator comes in and stirs it up."

One man quoted at some length in the "Voices" article was Ralph McGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution newspaper. "'There are those who insist that segregation protects the 'integrity' of both races," McGill said. "There are others who believe, with deep sincerity, that Negroes are 'better off' under it. Conceivably this might be argued with some logic. It does not matter. The world . . . has moved on. Segregation by law no longer fits today's world.... Segregation is on its way out, and he who tries to tell the people otherwise does them a great disservice. The problem of the future is how to live with the change.'"
______________________________________________________________________________________________
Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com
Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, is the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

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LIFE and Civil Rights: Segregation in 1956 South Carolina

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In late 1956, over the course of several months, LIFE published what the magazine itself described as "a series of major articles on the background of the crisis brought about by the school segregation decision [Brown v. Board of Education] of the Supreme Court. . . .

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MLK wanting peace

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While the fight for racial equality began in the 1950s, the non-violent techniques the movement embraced began to pay off during the following decade. Civil rights activists and students across the South challenged segregation, and the relatively new technology of television allowed Americans to witness the often brutal response to these protests. This civil rights movement timeline chronicles important dates during the struggle's second chapter, the early 1960s.

President Lyndon B. Johnson successfully pushed through the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964, and a number of other groundbreaking events unfolded between 1960 and 1964, the span covered by this timeline, leading up the tumultuous period of 1965 to 1969.

February 1: Four young Black men, students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, go to a Woolworth in Greensboro, North Carolina, and sit down at a whites-only lunch counter. They order coffee. Despite being denied service, they sit silently and politely at the lunch counter until closing time. Their action marks the start of the Greensboro sit-ins, which sparks similar protests all over the South.

April 15: The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee holds its first meeting.

July 25: The downtown Greensboro Woolworth desegregates its lunch counter after six months of sit-ins.

October 19: Martin Luther King Jr. joins a student sit-in at a whites-only restaurant inside of an Atlanta department store, Rich's. He is arrested along with 51 other protesters on the charge of trespassing. On probation for driving without a valid Georgia license (he had an Alabama license), a Dekalb County judge sentences King to four months in prison doing hard labor. Presidential contender John F. Kennedy phones King's wife, Coretta, to offer encouragement, while the candidate's brother, Robert Kennedy, convinces the judge to release King on bail. This phone call convinces many Black people to support the Democratic ticket.

December 5: The Supreme Court hands down a 7-2 decision in the Boynton v. Virginia case, ruling that segregation on vehicles traveling between states is unlawful because it violates the Interstate Commerce Act.

May 4: The Freedom Riders, composed of seven Black and six White activists, leave Washington, D.C., for the rigidly segregated Deep South. Organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), their goal is to test Boynton v. Virginia.

On May 14: Freedom Riders, now traveling in two separate groups, are attacked outside Anniston, Alabama, and in Birmingham, Alabama. A mob throws a firebomb onto the bus in which the group near Anniston is riding. Members of the Ku Klux Klan attack the second group in Birmingham after making an arrangement with the local police to allow them 15 minutes alone with the bus.

On May 15: The Birmingham group of Freedom Riders is prepared to continue their trip down south, but no bus will agree to take them. They fly to New Orleans instead.

On May 17: A new group of young activists join two of the original Freedom Riders to complete the trip. They are placed under arrest in Montgomery, Alabama.

On May 29: President Kennedy announces that he has ordered the Interstate Commerce Commission to enact stricter regulations and fines for buses and facilities that refuse to integrate. Young White and Black activists continue to make Freedom Rides.

In November: Civil rights activists participate in a series of protests, marches, and meetings in Albany, Georgia, that come to be known as the Albany Movement.

In December: King comes to Albany and joins the protesters, staying in Albany for another nine months.

August 10: King announces that he is leaving Albany. The Albany Movement is considered a failure in terms of effecting change, but what King learns in Albany allows him to be successful in Birmingham.

September 10: The Supreme Court rules that the University of Mississippi, or "Ole Miss," must admit Black student and veteran James Meredith.

September 26: The governor of Mississippi, Ross Barnett, orders state troopers to prevent Meredith from entering Ole Miss' campus.

Between September 30 and October 1: Riots erupt over Meredith's enrollment at the University of Mississippi.

October 1: Meredith becomes the first Black student at Ole Miss after President Kennedy orders U.S. marshals to Mississippi to ensure his safety.

King, SNCC and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) organize a series of 1963 civil rights demonstrations and protests to challenge segregation in Birmingham.

April 12: Birmingham police arrest King for demonstrating without a city permit.

April 16: King writes his famous " Letter from a Birmingham Jail" in which he responds to eight White Alabama ministers who urged him to end the protests and be patient with the judicial process of overturning segregation.

June 11: President Kennedy delivers a speech on civil rights from the Oval Office, specifically explaining why he sent the National Guard to allow the admittance of two Black students into the University of Alabama.

June 12: Byron De La Beckwith assassinates Medgar Evers, the first field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Mississippi.

August 18: James Meredith graduates from Ole Miss.

August 28: The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is held in D.C. Around 250,000 people participate, and King delivers his legendary "I Have a Dream" speech.

September 15: The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham is bombed. Four young girls are killed.

November 22: Kennedy is assassinated, but his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, uses the nation's anger to push through civil rights legislation in Kennedy's memory.

March 12:, Malcolm X leaves the Nation of Islam. Among his reasons for the break is Elijah Muhammad's ban on protesting for Nation of Islam adherents.

Between June and August: SNCC organizes a voter registration drive in Mississippi known as Freedom Summer.

June 21: Three Freedom Summer workers -Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman-disappear.

August 4: The bodies of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman are found in a dam. All three had been shot, and the Black activist, Chaney, had also been badly beaten.

June 24: Malcolm X founds the Organization of Afro-American Unity along with John Henrik Clarke. Its aim is to unite all Americans of African descent against discrimination.

July 2: Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans discrimination in employment and public places.

July and August: Riots break out in Harlem and Rochester, New York.

August 27: The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDM), which formed to challenge the segregated state Democratic Party, sends a delegation to the National Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. They ask to represent Mississippi at the convention. Activist Fannie Lou Hamer, spoke publicly and her speech was broadcast nationally by media outlets. Offered two nonvoting seats at the convention, in turn, the MFDM delegates reject the proposal. Yet all was not lost. By the 1968 election, a clause was adopted requiring equal representation from all state delegations.

December 10: The Nobel Foundation awards King the Nobel Peace Prize.

Updated by African American History Expert, Femi Lewis.

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Civil Rights Movement Timeline From 1960 to 1964

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This civil rights movement timeline covers the struggle's second phase in which nonviolent action was put to the test during the early 1960s.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1964

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The Civil Rights Act of 1964 - North Carolina Digital History

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In the end, proponents of what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would assert, and the courts subsequently would accept, that Congress possessed the authority to ban discrimination in employment, public accommodations, and other aspects of life. They pointed to the constitutional provision (Article I, Section 8) authorizing Congress "to regulate Commerce...

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The Confederate flag first flew over the South Carolina state house in 1961 or 1962.
C.C. & T.H.

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Fifty years ago, the civil rights movement in the United States made huge strides among continued setbacks. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law, banning discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin -- but segregation remained the norm in many establishments.

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January 1964 - Johnson City, South Carolina

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South Carolina was a strongly segregated state
C.C. & T.H

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it reminds us of  the lewis family ~APB

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"Colored" Diner
C.C. & T.H.

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''I have a dream speech"

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Dustin and Adam

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Anti-segregation march
C.C. & T.H.

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Speech~APB