Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement -- Timeline History

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We'll Never Turn Back

History & Timeline of the
Southern Freedom Movement

"History does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do." - James Baldwin

(Skip Introduction)

Jump To: Year-by-year List of events Historical Context
Years: 51-52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

[To suggest additional events to be added to the History & Timeline, provide more information about an event, or comment on or suggest changes to entries, send email to webmaster.]

Introduction

Yetanother timeline and history? — Why?
— To put the "movement" back in the Civil Rights Movement.

There are dozens of Civil Rights Movement timelines, chronologies, and histories on the web, but too many of them minimize the central role played by ordinary people transforming their lives with extraordinary courage.

The mass media calls it the "Civil Rights Movement," but many of us prefer the term "Freedom Movement" because it was about so much more than just civil rights. Regardless of what you call it, our movement was above all a mass peoples' movement — people coming together to change their lives for themselves. But all too often that central fact has been quietly dropped out of history in favor of a "benevolent" court ruling, a couple of charismatic leaders, a handful of famous protests in a few well-known places, some tragic martyrs, and the gracious largess of magnanimous legislators.

In I've Got the Light of Freedom..., Charles Payne challenges:

...what Julian Bond calls the Master Narrative of the civil rights movement. That narrative, so familiar as to constitute almost a form of civic religion, goes:
Traditionally, relationships between the races in the South were oppressive. Many Southerners were very prejudiced against Blacks. In 1954, the Supreme Court decided this was wrong. Inspired by the court, courageous Americans, Black and white, took protest to the street, in the form of sit-ins, bus boycotts, and Freedom Rides. The nonviolent protest movement, led by the brilliant and eloquent Reverend Martin Luther King, aided by a sympathetic federal government, most notably the Kennedy brothers and a born again Lyndon Johnson, was able to make America understand racial discrimination as a moral issue. Once Americans understood that discrimination was wrong, they quickly moved to remove racial prejudice and discrimination from American life, as evidenced by the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Dr. King was tragically slain in 1968. Fortunately, by that time the country had been changed, changed for the better in some fundamental ways. The movement was a remarkable victory for all Americans. By the 1970s, Southern states where Blacks could not have voted ten years earlier were sending African Americans to Congress. Inexplicably, just as the civil rights victories were piling up, many Black Americans, under the banner of Black Power, turned their backs on American society.

We, too, challenge this false and simplistic "master narrative" of the Freedom Movement to which we dedicated our lives. We want to set the record straight. The gains made by the Freedom Movement were won by the courage, determination, and activity of hundreds of thousands of men and women of all ages in cities, towns, and hamlets across the South. It was their blood, sweat, and tears that forced change up from below, and without them there would have been no Freedom Movement, no famous leaders, no court rulings, no new laws, and no change.

Whatand when was the Civil Rights Movement?

To most Movement veterans, the post-WWII U.S Freedom Movement was but one episode in the long struggle of Black Americans for human rights in this country. A struggle that began 400 years ago when the first slaves were brought to these shores and tried to escape, and when Native Americans first fought to defend their homelands. A movement that continues to this day in on-going stuggles to win justice, dignity, and equality for all regardless of race, religion, gender, sexual-orientation or economic level; struggles for fair pay and decent working conditions; and struggles to have every vote counted, every child educated, every senior cared for, every ill person treated, and every human soul accorded a fair share of the Tree of Life.

Today, too many timelines and textbooks tell us that the Civil Rights Movement "began" in 1954 with the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v Board of Education and "ended" with the call for "Black Power" in 1966 or with the assasination of Dr. King in 1968. But to us, our Freedom Movement began in 1951 when a 16 year old high-school girl named Barbara Johns led her Virginia classmates out on a student strike to protest segregated schools.

And as as far as we are concerned, the Freedom Movement never ended, but rather like a living organism it has evolved and flowered into struggles of many kinds that continue to this day. For the purpose of this timeline, we have arbitrarily chosen 1968 to mark the cross-over year in which the Southern Freedom Movement evolved into a new phase with the Poor People's Campaign shifting the focus from civil rights to economic and human rights; and nation-wide campus uprisings against the Vietnam War bringing us full circle to our student roots and the beginning of the next cycle.

Wherewas the Civil Rights Movement?

From what you see today in the mass media and what you read in textbooks and websites you would think that the Civil Rights Movement only existed in a few states of the deep South, — but that is not so. The Freedom Movement lived and fought in every state and every city of America, North and South, East and West. There were some differences between the Southern and Northern wings of the Movement, but those differences were insignificant compared to the Movement's essence. North or South, it was the same movement everywhere.

This website is devoted the Freedom Movement as it existed in the South. Not because the Northern wing of the Movement was unimportant — it was enormously important — but because the Southern Movement was the part of the Movement that we participated in and know enough about to build this website. Hopefully, some day soon activists from the Northern wing of the Movement will do the same.

Anote on Census figures.

Throughout this history & timeline we cite U.S. Census figures for population and income because they're the best we have available. But in every census an unknown number of Blacks were not counted. Blacks living deep in forrests and swamps were often missed by the mostly white census counters. As were many Blacks living in urban slums or working as migrant farm labor. And in some instances, white plantation owners made certain that the census reports under-counted the Black tenants, share-croppers, and field hands existing on their property.

Historical Context

We'll Never Turn Back

History & Timeline of the
Southern Freedom Movement

Introduction

Historical Context

1951-52

1953

1954

1955

1956

1957

1958

1959

1960

1961

1962

1963 (Jan-June)

1963 (July-Dec)

1964 (Jan-June)

1964 (Freedom Summer Events)

1964 (July-Dec)

1965

1966

1967

1968

We'll Never Turn Back

History & Timeline of the Southern Freedom Movement

Introduction

1963 (Jan-June)

1963 (July-Dec)

1964 (Jan-June)

1964 (July-Dec)

History & Timeline of the
Southern Freedom Movement