1951-1952

Pilgrimage for "Martinsville Seven" Richmond VA (1951)
Student Strike at Moton High VA (1951)
Students and Paraents Challenge School Segregation (1951-1952)
NAACP Builds the Case (1951-1954)
"We Charge Genocide" Petition to the United Nations (1951)
Murder of Harry & Harriette Moore (Dec 1951)

In a sense, 1951 marks the passing of the torch from the civil rights generation of the '30s and '40s to the generation of the '50s and '60s. The effort to save the "Martinsville Seven" at the beginning of 1951 and the "We Charge Genocide" petition at the end of the year are the concluding efforts of the "old left" labor-Marxist-New Deal alliance that had led civil rights struggles for two decades. The Student Strike at Moton High and the challenge to school segregation which culminates in Brown v Board of Education represents the emergence of a new youth-religious-legal coalition that will lead the fights of the '50s and '60s.

Pilgrimage for "Martinsville Seven," Richmond VA (1951)

The "Martinsville Seven," are seven Black men convicted of raping a white woman in Martinsville VA. They are sentenced to death by all-white, all-male juries. But in all of history, no white man has ever been given the death penalty in Virginia for the crime of rape. None of the trials last more than a day. A reporter recently characterized the process as: "It was a justice system that curbed mob-imposed lynchings by supplanting them with court-imposed exectutions."

In the tradition of the "Scottsboro Case" and the anti-lynching campaigns of the '30s and '40s, elements of the "old left" organize a campaign to prevent their execution. Led by William L. Patterson (1890-1980), grandson of a slave, Communist Party official, and head of the Civil Rights Congress, this campaign draws support from Richmond's Black community and progressive unions and organizations across the nation and around the world. Prior to the execution, 500 people — roughly half Black and half white, many from labor unions — stage a protest "pilgrimage" from Richmond to Martinsville.

The seven men are executed in February of 1951.

For more information:
Book: The Martinsville Seven: Race, Rape, and Capital Punishment
Web: 'Martinsville Seven' Case, Richmond Times-Dispatch

Student Strike at Moton High (VA) (April, 1951)

Moton — named after Robert Russa Moton who succeeded Booker T. Washington as head of the Tuskegee Institute — is the Black high school in Prince Edward County Virginia's segregated school system. Farmville, the local white high school, has a cafeteria, gym, school nurse, shop classes, and lockers for students; Moton has no such facilities — it does not even have restrooms for the teachers.

Originally built to accomodate 180 students, by the early 1950s more than 450 pupils attend Moton. It is so crowded that three classes are simultaneously taught in the auditorim, while other classes are taught in old, hand-me-down school busses. When the state of Virginia offers money to improve Moton in 1947, the all-white School Board refuses to accept it. (Since Blacks are denied the right to vote, they have no voice in electing the School Board.) Instead, the Board builds three "tar paper shacks" — freezing cold in the winter, sweltering hot in the spring — which do little to relieve the terrible over-crowding at Moton.

In the winter of 1950, Moton student Barbara Johns — niece of Alabama civil rights leader Rev. Vernon Johns — begins organizing a student strike to protest poor school conditions. She calls a secret meeting of four other trusted students to discuss the problem and plan a strategy. Slowly, carefully, they increase the clandestine committee, first to 10 and then by the Spring of 1951 to 15 of the most respected students at Moton. By April they are ready to act.

On April 23rd they lure the principal out of the school with a false phone call reporting truants causing trouble downtown. Then they forge announcements calling an immediate school assembly in the auditorium. Strike committee leaders ask all teachers to leave the room and then Barbara takes the stage, speaks to the issue and asks the students to go out on strike to protest over-crowding and inadequate facilities. 450 students — almost the entire student body — answer her call. When the principal returns from downtown he tries to talk them out of striking, but their committment is firm — the strike is on!

The student strike committee tries to meet with the school superintendent about their demands for adequate facilities, but he refuses to see them and threatens them with expulsions. The following day, 200 of the student strikers meet with local NAACP leaders who attempt to get them to call off their strike. They refuse. With their organization solid and their committment firm, the NAACP and many of the parents now swing to their support. National NAACP leaders meet with students and parents and propose that they go beyond pushing for better schools — that they demand desegregation.

At a mass meeting on the third day, the students and their adult supporters collectively decide to sue for integration and to continue the strike until May 7, when the school year ends. The lawsuit that the NAACP files on their behalf — Davis et al v. the County School Board of Prince Edward County, VA, et al — becomes one of the five cases that are later consolodated and decided under the name Brown v Board of Education in 1954.

For more information:
Book: They Closed Their Schools: Prince Edward County, VA.
Web:
Students Strike Moton High
Kids Fight for Civil Rights (Rethinking Schools Online)

Students & Parents Challenge School Segregation
The Brown v Board of Education Cases

Background

In its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court legitimized the "Jim Crow" system of segregation that had been imposed on Blacks in the decades following the Civil War. Despite the fact that any sensible person could see that segregation laws violated the 14th and 15th Amendments of the Constitution, the court circumvented these "Equal Protection" clauses with the fictitious doctrine of "Separate But Equal."

Starting in the 1930s, the NAACP begins assembling data to prove that "separate" is not — and never can be — "equal." Focusing on segregated school systems as the clearest example of how separate is not equal, their strategy is to challenge the obvious injustice of segregation in the lower courts, and then appeal those cases to the Supreme Court with the aim of overturning Plessy v. Ferguson.

But before NAACP lawyers can challenge segregation in the courts, there have to be Black citizens with the courage to defy segregation customs and laws in their communities in order to create the cases that the attorneys will argue. To violate the Jim Crow rules means risking verbal abuse, being fired from your job, evicted from your home, the destruction of your business, brutal beatings, jail, and lynching.

The Cases

In addition to Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County which grows out of the student strike at Moton High, the other cases consolodated under the name Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka are:

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka: In Topeka, Kansas, a black third-grader named Linda Brown has to walk more than a mile through a railroad switchyard to get to her Black elementary school, even though a white elementary school is only seven blocks away. Linda's father, Oliver Brown, tries to enroll her in the white elementary school, but the principal of the school refuses. Thirteen other Black parents take their children to schools in their neighborhoods and attempt to enroll them for the upcoming school year. All are refused admission. They sue the school board.

Bulah v. Gebhart: In Delaware the issues are similar to those in Topeka. The schools that Black children are forced to attend are clearly inferior and at much greater distance from their homes than closer white schools. A "white" bus carrying white kids to school passes Sarah Bulah's home each day, but will not pick up her daughter. She demands that a bus be provided to take Black children to school. The state refuses.

Bolling v. Sharpe: In Washington DC, the brand-new, white-only, John Philip Sousa Junior High School has empty classrooms, but Black kids are forced to attend an over-crowded school with inferior facilities. The parents of 11 Black children try to enroll them in Sousa but are denied. They sue.

Briggs v. Elliot: In Clarendon County, South Carolina, 20 Black parents ask the school board to provide busses for their children as they do for the white kids. When they are denied, they sue to end the system of segregated schools. One of the judges (white, of course) who hears the case agrees with the plaintiffs that segregation is wrong. Threats of violence from the KKK force him to resign his post and flee the state. Harry Briggs and other Black plaintiffs are fired from their jobs.

For more information:
Books: Schools and School Desegregation
Web links: Brown v. Board of Education 1950-1954

NAACP Builds the Case (1951-1954)

In Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County which grows out of the Student Strike at Moton High, the U.S. District Court unanimously denies the student's desegregation demand claiming that: "We have found no hurt or harm to either race." Yet they do order the Prince Edward school board to improve the quality of the Black schools (which the board later refuses to do).

In the Topeka case, the NAACP argues that inherent in segregated schools is a message to Black children that they are somehow inferior to whites and that therefore, the schools are unequal. The Topeka school board's defense is that since segregation is the way of life in Topeka and elsewhere, segregated schools are "good" for Black children because they "prepare them" for the segregation they will face all their lives. Since the NAACP's long-range goal in the school cases is to overturn all forms of segregation everywhere, the Black parants are not impressed with the school board's logic.

The Topeka judges agree with the parents that: "Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children... A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn." But since Plessy v. Ferguson made "separate but equal" for Blacks and whites legal, the judges say they are "compelled" to uphold Topeka's segregated school system.

For more information:
Books: Schools and School Desegregation
Web links: Brown v. Board of Education 1950-1954

"We Charge Genocide"
Petition to the United Nations (1951)

In December of 1951, Paul Robeson and William Patterson submit a petition titled, "We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People" to the United Nations. This book-length petition documents hundreds of lynching cases and a clear pattern of government inaction or actual complicity. It charges that in the 85 years since the end of slavery more than 10,000 Blacks are known to have been lynched (an average of more than 100 per year), and that the full number can never be known because the murders are often unreported.

The petition cites the UN's definition of genocide: "Any intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, or religious group is genocide." The petition concludes therefore, that "..the oppressed Negro citizens of the United States, segregated, discriminated against, and long the target of violence, suffer from genocide as the result of the consistent, conscious, unified policies of every branch of government. If the General Assembly acts as the conscience of mankind and therefore acts favorably on our petition, it will have served the cause of peace. With the McCarthyite "Red Scare" and the "Cold War" raging, the U.S. government immediately moves to prevent the United Nations from considering the charges brought in the petition. Working behind the scenes, they are able to prevent any discussion of the petition by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. When one of the American delegates to the U.N. criticizes William Patterson for "attacking your government," Patterson replies, "It's your government. It's my country. I am fighting to save my country's democratic principles."

For this and other actions that challenge the status quo, both Robeson and Patterson (founder and leader of the Civil Rights Congress), are persecuted and harassed by the FBI and State Department throughout the 1950s.

For more information:
Book: We Charge Genocide"
Web: We Charge Genocide (Peoples Weekly World)

Murder of Harry & Harriette Moore

In the 1930s Harry Moore and his wife Harriette begin organizing for the NAACP in central Florida. They launch a legal struggle that eventually wins equal pay for Black and white teachers. In 1941, Harry becomes President and later Executive Director of the Florida state NAACP. Under their leadership, the NAACP eventually grows to more than 10,000 members in more than 60 branches across the state.

[Until 1944, the "all-white" primary is used to disenfranchise Blacks throughout the South. Out of hatred for Lincoln, fury at their defeat in the Civil War, and rage at the Emancipation of their Black slaves, whites in the South vote only for Democrats. With most Blacks denied the vote, no Republican can be ever be elected in the South, so the real election is the Democratic Primary. Whichever Democrat wins the primary inevitably wins the general election. By limiting the Democratic Primary to whites, the few Blacks who do manage to register are effectively disenfranchised because they are not allowed to vote in the only elections that have any meaning (the primaries).]

In 1944, Thurgood Marshall wins Smith v. Allwright in the U.S. Supreme Court which rules that "all-white" primary elections are unconstitutional. With Blacks now allowed to vote in the real elections, the Moores organize the Progressive Voters League of Florida and Harry becomes its President. Florida's voter registration procedures are not as restrictive as those of neighboring Georgia and Alabama, and within a few years the Moores manage to register over 100,000 Black voters, increasing Black registration from 5% to 31% of those eligible. Their slogan is "A Voteless Citizen is a Voiceless Citizen."

For years, Harry travels Florida's muddy backroads and poorly paved highways building the NAACP, helping Blacks register, and organizing the Voters League. In the segregated south, "white" restaurants won't serve him and "white" motels won't rent him a room, many gas stations refuse to sell him fuel or let him use the restroom. Then in 1950, the NAACP's national leadership objects to Harry's dual role as both the salaried state Executive Director of the officially non-partisan NAACP and President of the Voters League which endorses candidates. In November of 1951 they remove him as Executive Director.

In the late 1940s, a major focus of the Moores work is investigating lynchings in Florida and demanding justice for the victims. In 1949, four young Black men are accused of raping a white girl in Lake County near Orlando, at that time a Klan stronghold. Later evidence indicates that the 17 year old girl had been beaten by her husband, and that they concocted a phony rape story to conceal the beating from her parents who had threatened to shoot him if he brutalized her again.

Charles Greenlee (age 16) and war veterans Sam Shepherd and Walter Irvin are arrested for the supposed rape. Ernest Thomas manages to flee, but is gunned down by a Sheriff's posse a few days later. A mob of more than 500 white men assembles to lynch the remaining three. When they can't locate the prisoners, they form a caravan of 200 cars and descend on the Black neighborhood of Groveland where the accused and their families live. They shoot into homes and set some on fire. The Florida Governor has to send in the National Guard to restore order.

Willis McCall, the Sheriff of Lake County, is notorious for his brutality against Blacks. Elected year-after-year with the support of the citrus growers, he supplies them with cheap, chain-gang prison labor at harvest time by arresting Blacks on trumped up charges for minor crimes when the ripe fruit needs to be picked. He also runs union organizers out of the county.

The Moores discover that while in McCall's custody the three Groveland defendants were brutally beaten and made to stand on broken glass with their hands roped to a pipe over their heads. Despite this torture, they refused to confess to a crime they did not commit. Unable to force a confession, McCall's deputies manufacture enough phony evidence to convince an all-white jury. Shepherd and Irvin are sentenced to death, 16-year old Greenlee is sentenced to prison.

Greenlee chooses not to appeal out of fear that a new trial would result in a death sentence. Franklin Williams, Shepherd and Irvin's NAACP attorney, appeals their conviction and it is overturned by the Supreme Court in 1951.

In November of 1951, Sheriff McCall removes the two men from prison. While driving them to Lake County for their new trial, he shoots them, killing Shepherd and severely wounding Irvin. He claims that the two handcuffed and manacled prisoners attacked him while trying to escape. When Irvin recovers enough to speak, he describes how McCall pulled his car off the road, dragged the two men out, and began firing. The Moores demand that McCall be suspended from office and indicted for murder. No charges are ever brought against McCall.

With the Groveland rape trial, appeal, and murders fanning the flames of racism, Harry Moore is called "The most hated Black man in Florida." His mother, visiting for the holidays, voices concern for the Moore's safety. Harry tells her, "Every advancement comes by way of sacrifice. What I am doing is for the benefit of my race."

Late in the night on Christmas Eve, 1951, a bomb explodes under Harry and Harriette's bedroom. He dies on the way to the hospital, she dies of her injuries 9 days later. They are the first Freedom Movement martyrs of the post-WWII era. Though it is widely known that the Ku Klux Klan planted the bomb, no one is ever charged in their murder.

[In 2001 PBS broadcasts Freedom Never Dies a documentary about the Moores and their assasination. This reawakens interest in the Moores and their murder and after articles appear in the press, Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist reopens the case. In 2006 — 55 years after the fact — Crist's 20-month re-investigation concludes that KKK leaders Earl Brooklyn, Tillman Belvin, Joseph Cox and Edward Spivey (all deceased) killed the Moores.]

For more information:
Book: Before His Time: The Untold Story Of Harry T. Moore
Articles:
"Harry T. Moore's Campaign for Racial Equality," by Jake C. Miller, Journal of Black Studies, Nov., 2000
"Somebody has got to do that work.." by Caroline Emmons, Journal of Negro History, March 1997
Web links: Harry & Harriette Moore Murder

Historical Context

1953

Historical Context

1953