By the 1890's,an era historian Rayford Logan has famously termed"the nadir"of the black experience in America,Southern state legislatures had begun the devious process of eliminating black voting across the former Confederacy.Lynching of African American men began to appear in newspapers almost every other day.Magazines ran insulting caricatures of blacks and published articles of pseudo scientific nonsense about Negroes' genetic backwardness.Finally,in 1896,the U.S Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson certified Jim Crow segregation as the law of the land(Dray).
Neither had the labor movement shown itself willing to accommodate African American workers,except under the most rigid,piecemeal terms.Sam Gompers(AFL) and William Sylvis(NLU) wanted inclusion because discrimination had the effect of creating an available pool of cheap labor that industry could and did exploit,using blacks as replacement workers and strikebreakers.It was equally clear that only unity across racial lines would guarantee labor the fullest bargaining power.Gompers,however, was limited in how much he could dictate policy to unions within the federation,and the AFL response remained inconsistent.By 1885,Gompers became weary of the fight for inclusion.Several nationally prominent unions were open in their stated exclusion of blacks(Dray).
Labor's inability to achieve integration was more truly a national failure.In 1897,Booker T. Washington openly criticized the AFL warning that the federation's racial policies left him no choice but to side with employers against labor unions.W.E.B.Du Bois stated that the history of the labor movement from1886 to 1902 has been a gradual receding from the righteous declaration of earlier years.Given the reality of race relations in the country at the time,which were essentially nonexistent,and black citizenship rights,which had become invisible,labor's success would have been remarkable(Dray).
Jim Crow segregation continued throughout the south until the 1940's.In 1946,Morgan v. Virgina,won by Thurgood Marshall, desegregated buses in interstate transportation. A group of people was organized to test the Supreme Court decision in a practical way.The"Journey of Reconciliation"(1947),organized by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Congress of Racial Equality, had heavy participation from men who had been imprisoned draft resisters during WWII( Jim Peck,Igal Roodenko...I met in the early 70's at the War Resisters League).Bayard Rustin was also a member who desegregated the prison systems during the war when he served time for resisting the war.This action eventually led to the desegregation of the armed forces a few years later by Truman.The"Journey of Reconciliation" ran into trouble in North Carolina and many were arrested for riding together(whites in the back, and blacks in the front) of the bus and using the posted bathrooms in the same manner.Igal Roodenko spent three months in jail for his participation.
The First Freedom Ride left Washington D.C. in May,1961 to demonstrate if a 1955 Supreme Court ruling against discrimination(unconstitutional) on interstate buses was being enforced properly..Seven black and six white people traveled south on two buses.They met resistance in Rock Hill,South Carolina and Anniston,Alabama where the vigilantes firebombed and destroyed a bus. Many were attacked and beaten by the angry crowds that wanted the bus system to remain segregated. The national media picked up the story and all of American became witnesses to the violent discrimination.On May 29, 1961, bowing to the demands of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other leaders, as well as international outrage, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, in an unorthodox legal maneuver, sent a petition to the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to comply with a bus-desegregation ruling it had issued in November, 1955, Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company. That ruling had explicitly repudiated separate but equal in the realm of interstate bus travel, but, under the chairmanship of South Carolina Democrat J. Monroe Johnson, the ICC had failed to enforce its own ruling.In September 1961, bowing to pressure from the Attorney General and the civil rights movement, the ICC issued the necessary orders, and the new policies went into effect on November 1, 1961, a full six years after the ruling in Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company. After the new ICC rule took effect, passengers were permitted to sit wherever they pleased on interstate buses and trains, "white" and "colored" signs came down in the terminals, separate drinking fountains, toilets, and waiting rooms were consolidated, and the lunch counters began serving people regardless of race.
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