Overview of a Search Process (Gardner), Followed by Student Findings

While there are many histories of the Civil Rights Movement (including books and online sources) that I might have consulted, I deliberately restricted my search to three sources—Facts on File, The New York Times Index, and The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature—in order to assess how magazine and newspaper coverage of the time reported events that we now understand as historically significant.  One of the first things I discovered was that “Civil Rights Movement” wasn’t a heading in the Times Index: this suggests that the various attempts to boycott businesses and local bus services, or integrate lunch counters, were still so separate and so small as to gather little national attention.  Still the most productive heading for 1955 (as it was for 1943) was the term “Negroes,” whether I looked in the Times Index or the Readers’ Guide.  Under this heading in the Times Index, I found articles reporting that the Interstate Commerce Commission, following the 1954 Supreme Court ruling of Brown v. Board of Education, banned segregation on interstate bus and railroad lines.  Later in the year, the Supreme Court itself banned segregation of public parks, beaches, and golf courses—a ruling bitterly protested by a number of white Southern leaders as soon as it was announced. 

Using “Negroes” as a subject heading in the Readers’ Guide, I found several articles on black economic prospects, with titles ranging from “The Negro’s Economic Progress” (America 1/15/55) to “Wanted: Qualified Negroes” (Time 11/07/55).  Under the subheading of Psychology I found an article entitled “When Schools Are Mixed, Will Standards Fall?” (U. S. News and World Report 4/22/55), which suggests that at least some white readers wore worried that integration would cause public-school education to deteriorate.  Under the subheading of South I found a reference to a Commonweal article entitled “Death in Mississippi” (9/23/55), which reported on the murder of Emmett Lewis Till, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago who was murdered (allegedly for making sexual advances toward a white woman).  From there, I went to “Till, Emmett” as a subject heading, and discovered a total of fifteen articles on the murder and subsequent trial (the two white men accused in this first trial were acquitted by an all-white jury September 23^rd, less than a month after Till’s body was discovered).

Of the three sources I used, Facts on File was least helpful, although it did note that on May 31, 1955 the Supreme Court ruled that integration of public schools must proceed with “all due deliberate speed.”  As the report mentioned, the justices did not specify this “speed” by setting deadlines, and Southern governors and senators openly stated that they took this refusal to set a deadline as a message that they could go on as before.

            1955 was in the middle of one of the largest civil rights movements in the history of the United States. Tension was building between the blacks and the whites and tension was especially high in the south. Jim Crow laws in the south created even more tension the south by creating the “separate but equal” doctrine. On December 1, 1955 a lady named Rosa Parks finally stood up to the Jim Crow laws. Mrs. Parks was riding a bus in Montgomery, Alabama when she was asked to give up her seat to an oncoming white passenger and move the back of the bus. Instead of complying like most blacks did during the time, she refused and did not move until she was arrested. Her arrest caused the black community to boycott the bus system. The manager of the bus company “said that ‘several thousand’ Negroes rode the bus system on a normal day” (New York Times, Dec 6, 1955).  This caused an enormous loss of revenue for the bus system causing them to have to raise rates (New York Times, Jan 8, 1956). 115 people including Rosa Parks were indicted on charges related to the boycott. The grand jury, which ironically was composed of “seventeen white men and one Negro,” said that the primary cause for the tensions between whites and blacks in the south are the segregation laws and the attacks on them by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. They even stated that they “‘intend to maintain’ separate facilities in schools, public transportation, and elsewhere” New York Times (New York Times, Feb 22, 1965). This goes to show that the issue was not even receiving a fair trial because the jury was biased before the trial even started. It was not until the case went to the national level that segregation was finally struck down.

            The boycott gave way for the rise of another prominent figure of the civil rights movement. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a local reverend that took charge of the movement in the area and eventually became a champion of the national civil rights movement. As a result of the court cases that followed the boycott and the actions of Rosa Parks, segregation in the south began to fall starting with the segregation on public transportation. The events that took place in Alabama influenced the entire nation including James Baldwin.

            James Baldwin uses an approach to speak about black and white tensions that reflects how Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were able to accomplish so much in the Civil Rights Movement. In a very similar fashion to Rosa Parks, a young lady named Sara Keys refused to give up her seat to an oncoming white passenger while riding a bus in North Carolina. Keys was not arrested but instead all of the passengers boarded another bus and the driver refused to let Keys board the bus. Very few people have ever heard of Sara Keys even though almost everyone has heard of Rosa Parks. This is because of how the public responded to the events. The only people that knew of Sara Keys were the ones that were on the bus with her. She was not in a state where racial tensions were extremely high nor was a lot of attention drawn to the event. In contrast Rosa Parks refusal to give up her seat happened in a area where tensions were high and although the event itself received little attention, the boycott that resulted received enormous amounts of attention and the court cases that were a result of the boycott received even more attention. Baldwin seemed to notice this and followed the same path best he could. Instead of publishing his work to a local paper where only a few people would read it, he chose to instead publish it in “Ebony” where millions of black readers (people who actually cared about the subject) read what he had to say. Baldwin called out to blacks to stand up for what they believe in. By publishing his work in places that would receive attention from those that agreed with him, he in a way paved the path for a “boycott” and a protest against the way that blacks were treated. He fueled the civil rights movement by calling out to blacks to demand equal rights and fight against the injustices that blacks experienced everyday because of the whites. Just as Rosa Parks brought attention to the unfair treatment that blacks received, Baldwin told stories about the unfair treatment he and his family received.  Although not immediately evident Baldwin used a specific strategy to affect society with his writing by publishing it where it would be seen and read by people who cared about the issue.