The Southern Manifesto (1956)
The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, outlawing racial segregation in public schools, inspired widespread hopes that racial equality was finally on the horizon. It also inspired a campaign of “massive resistance” in the white South. The Southern Manifesto repudiated the Supreme Court decision and offered support to the campaign of resistance then gaining force throughout the South. The Manifesto was a prelude to a decade of sometimes violent struggles as black southerners sought to claim equal rights in American society.
The unwarranted decision of the Supreme Court in the public school cases is now bearing fruit always produced when men substitute naked power for established law.
We regard the decisions of the Supreme Court in the school cases as a clear abuse of judicial power.
The original Constitution does not mention education. Neither does the 14th Amendment nor any other Amendment. The debates preceding the submission of the 14th Amendment clearly show that there was no intent that it should affect the system of education maintained by the States.
In the case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 the Supreme Court expressly declared that under the 14th Amendment no person was denied any of his rights if the States provided separate but equal facilities. It is founded on elemental humanity and commonsense, for parents should not be deprived by Government of the right to direct the lives and education of their own children.
This unwarranted exercise of power by the Court, contrary to the Constitution, is creating chaos and confusion in the States principally affected. It is destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through 90 years of patient effort by the good people of both races.
With the gravest concern for the explosive and dangerous condition created by this decision and inflamed by outside meddlers: we commend the motives of those States which have declared the intention to resist forced integration by any lawful means.
We pledge ourselves to use all lawful means to bring about a reversal of this decision which is contrary to the Constitution and to prevent the use of force in its implementation.
Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” Speech (1963)
Five score years ago a great American in whose symbolic shadow we stand today signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree is a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice… But 100 years later the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later the life of the Negro is still badly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination…
In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men – yes, black men as well as white men – would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”…
We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy… Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood…
There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright days of justice emerge. And that is something that I must say to my people who stand on the worn threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred…
“The Ballot or the Bullet,” by Malcolm X (April 3, 1964)
1964 threatens to be the most explosive year America has ever witnessed. It’s the year when all of the white politicians will be back in the so-called Negro community jiving you and me for some votes. As they nourish these dissatisfactions, it can only lead to one thing, an explosion; and now we have the type of black man on the scene in America today who just doesn’t intend to turn the other cheek any longer.
I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.
What alibi do they use when you and I ask, “Well, when are you going to keep your promise?” They blame the Dixiecrats. What is a Dixiecrat? A Dixiecrat is nothing but a Democrat in disguise.
The black nationalists, those whose philosophy is black nationalism, in bringing about this new interpretation of the entire meaning of civil rights, look upon it as meaning equality of opportunity. Our mothers and fathers invested sweat and blood. Three hundred and ten years we worked in this country without a dime in return.
If you don’t take an uncompromising stand, I don’t mean go out and get violent; but at the same time you should never be nonviolent unless you run into some nonviolence.
We need to expand the civil-rights struggle to a higher level – to the level of human rights. Whenever you are in a civil-rights struggle, whether you know it or not, you are confining yourself to the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam.
The political philosophy of black nationalism means that the black man should control the politics and the politicians in his own community; no more.
The economic philosophy of black nationalism is pure and simple. It only means that we should control the economy of our community.
The social philosophy of black nationalism only means that we have to get together and remove the evils, the vices, alcoholism, drug addiction, and other evils that are destroying the moral fiber of our community. So I say, in spreading a gospel such as black nationalism, it is not designed to make the black man re-evaluate the white man – you know him already – but to make the black man re-evaluate himself.
Lyndon Johnson’s Howard Commencement Address (1965)
By 1965, the civil rights movement had achieved many of its goals, including national laws mandating equal access to all public facilities, banning discrimination in employment, and restoring the right to vote to black southerners. Yet violent outbreaks in black ghettos, beginning in Watts, Los Angeles, in 1964, drew attention to the national scope of racial injustice and inequalities in jobs, education, and housing that the dismantling of legal segregation left intact.
Lyndon B. Johnson believed that special efforts must be made to counteract the heritage of slavery and segregation. In a speech at all-black Howard University in 1965, Johnson sought to redefine the relationship between freedom and equality.
In far too many ways American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope.
This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity.
For the great majority of Negro Americans – the poor, the unemployed, the uprooted, and the dispossessed – there is a much grimmer story. They still, as we meet here tonight, are another nation. Despite the court orders and the laws, despite the legislative victories and the speeches, for them the walls are rising and the gulf is widening.
Thirty-five years ago the rate of unemployment for Negroes and whites was about the same. Tonight the Negro rate is twice as high.
Between 1949 and 1959, the income of Negro men relative to white men declined in every section of this country. From 1952 to 1963 the median income of Negro families compared to white actually dropped from 57 percent to 53 percent.
This is the devastating heritage of long years of slavery; and a century of oppression, hatred, and injustice.
Perhaps most important – its influence radiating to every part of life – is the breakdown of the Negro family structure. For this, most of all, white America must accept responsibility. It flows from centuries of oppression and persecution of the Negro man.
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s Petition against Vietnam War (1965)
The protest against the Vietnam War in the U.S. began slowly, but grew into a great national movement. Blacks in the South were among the first to refuse to be drafted, but this refusal became widespread all over the country. It soon became clear that the U.S. was committing atrocities in Vietnam.
In 1966, two-thirds of the American people supported the war. By the early 1970s, two-thirds of the population opposed the war.
In McComb, Mississippi, in July 1965, civil rights activists in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party circulated and published this petition. It was one of the first petitions against the war in Vietnam.
Here are five reasons why Negroes should not be in any war fighting for America:
- No Mississippi Negroes should be fighting in Vietnam for the White Man’s freedom, until all the Negro People are free in Mississippi.
- Negro Boys should not honor the draft here in Mississippi. Mothers should encourage their sons not to go.
- We will gain respect and dignity as a race only by forcing the U.S. Government and the Mississippi Government to come with guns, dogs and trucks to take our sons away and be killed protecting Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana.
- No one has a right to ask us to risk our lives and kill other Colored People in Santo Domingo and Vietnam, so that the White American can get richer. We will be looked upon as traitors by all the Colored People of the world if the Negro people continue to fight and die without a cause.
- Last week a white soldier from New Jersey was discharged from the Army because he refused to fight in Vietnam; he went on a hunger strike. Negro boys can do the same thing. We can write and ask our sons if they know what they are fighting for. If he answers Freedom, tell him that’s what we are fighting for here in Mississippi. And if he says Democracy, tell him the truth – we don’t know anything about Communism, Socialism, and all that, but we do know that Negroes have caught hell right here under this American Democracy.
Muhammad Ali’s Speech against the Vietnam War (1966)
The protest against the Vietnam War in the U.S. began slowly, but grew into a great national movement. Blacks in the South were among the first to refuse to be drafted, but this refusal became widespread all over the country. It soon became clear that the U.S. was committing atrocities in Vietnam.
In 1966, two-thirds of the American people supported the war. By the early 1970s, two-thirds of the population opposed the war.
Muhammad Ali caused outrage in the media when he petitioned for exemption from military service in Vietnam and then, when denied, refused to be drafted. As a result of his protest against the war, Ali’s title was revoked and he was sentenced to a five-year prison term. Ali’s battle against the sentence went to the U.S. Supreme Court and was not reversed until 1971. In 1966, Ali spoke in Louisville, Kentucky, his home town, about the reasons for not fighting in Vietnam.
Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I am not going ten thousand miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would put my prestige in jeopardy and could cause me to lose millions of dollars which should accrue to me as the champion. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is right here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by become a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality…
If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to twenty-two million of my people, they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. But I either have to obey the laws of the land or the laws of Allah. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail. We’ve been in jail for four hundred years.
The Ten Point Plan of the Black Panther Party (1966)
- We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black and oppressed communities.
- We want full employment for our people.
- We want an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our black and oppressed communities.
- We want decent housing, fir for the shelter of human beings.
- We want decent education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.
- We want completely free health care for all black and oppressed people.
- We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people, other people of color, all oppressed people inside the United States.
- We want an immediate end to all wars of aggression.
- We want freedom for all black and oppressed people now held in U.S. federal, state, county, city and military prisons and jails. We want trials by a jury of peers for all persons charged with so-called crimes under the laws of this country.
- We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace and people’s community control of modern technology.