Portside

Militant Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Catches On (1960)

MARCH 5 IS THE 65TH ANNIVERSARY of the day when a 5-week-long outbreak of militant anti-racist protests spread from the South, where it began, into Boston, New York City, Newark, Washington,D.C., Los Angeles and Seattle.

After beginning on February 1, the unprecedented wave of challenges to segregation had shut down scores of lunch counters in 35 population centers across eight southern states.

The breadth of the movement can be seen in the number of locations where, in just five weeks, Jim Crow business-as-usual finally began to meet its match: 

13 cities in North Carolina – Chapel Hill, Charlotte, Concord, Durham, Elizabeth City, Fayetteville, Greensboro, Henderson, High Point, Raleigh, Salisbury, Shelby and Winston-Salem

Five in Virginia – Hampton, Norfolk, Petersburg, Portsmouth and Richmond

Five in South Carolina – Charleston, Columbia, Orangeburg, Rock Hill and Sumter

Five in Florida – Daytona Beach, Miami, St. Petersburg, Tallahassee and Tampa

Two in Tennessee – Chattanooga and Nashville

Two in Kentucky – Frankfort and Lexington

Two in Alabama – Montgomery and Tuskegee

One in Houston, Texas

While the tide of protest was still rising in the South, on this day it spread to the North, where hundreds of pickets, organized by the Congress of Racial Equality, jammed the sidewalks outside stores owned by the same national chains – Woolworth, McCrory, W.T. Grant and Kress – that were helping to enforce Jim Crow in the South. 

To everyone with the slightest connection to the civil rights movement, the five weeks leading up to March 5 were a watershed. Demonstrations and sit-ins were not new, but there had never been so much activity in so many places over so much time. 

And it kept growing, like a chain reaction, inspiring and attracting an ever widening circle of militants willing to risk their safety by engaging in non-violent protest in the face of occasionally violent opposition, willing to risk arrest; and also inspiring a chain reaction of support from people willing to use their experience and their influence and their money to help the movement grow.

The substantial daily coverage of the movement’s growth played a role in the decision of liberals to revive a civil rights bill that had been languishing, actionless, in the House for seven months. The House proposal was focused almost entirely on voting rights – not the right of citizens to equal treatment – but for any pro-civil rights action to make progress in Congress was nearly unheard of. 

The immediate Congressional response, on March 10, was positive. The bill sailed over a procedural hurdle by a vote of 312 to 93. Two weeks later, the House passed the bill by 311-109. It passed the Senate on April 8 and was signed into law on May 6. It was only the second federal civil rights law to be enacted in 85 years.

While Congress and the President were discovering value in promoting civil political rights, the demands of the sit-ins began to gain traction. On April 5 in Galveston, Texas, the management of all downtown lunch-counters agreed to serve customers without discrimination.   

On April 15, the conference that resulted in the creation of the hugely influential Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee convened in Raleigh, North Carolina, under the leadership of Ella Baker. On May 6 the Civil Rights Act of 1960 became law, and on May 10, six downtown Nashville, Tennessee, lunch-counters gave in to the demand they desegregate.  

Then on July 25, 1960, less than six months after the wave of sit-ins began in Greensboro, the managers of chain-store lunch-counters in both Greensboro, North Carolina, and Norfolk, Virginia, abandoned their refusal to desegregate. And the militant movement was still gaining momentum, as it would continue to do for years to come.  https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis60.htm#1960sitins

The 20th Century’s Largest One-Day Demonstration (1930) 

MARCH 6 IS THE 95TH ANNIVERSARY of the International Day for Struggle Against World-Wide Unemployment, during which hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of unemployed workers and their supporters demanded “Work or Wages!” in many hundreds of cities and towns on six of the seven continents. 

It was the 20th century’s largest 1-day international protest action, which was organized by the Communist International and coordinated by the International’s member parties.

When the demonstration took place in 1930, the Great Depression was only six months old. Some 7 million U.S. workers were newly unemployed. Bad as that was, conditions were going to get worse for at least another three years by which time the number of U.S. unemployed would have doubled.

The total number of demonstrators can only be guessed at, but it seems safe to say that it was at least a million if not twice that. According to the CPUSA, the turnout was 110,000 in New York City, 100,000 in Detroit, 50,000 each in Chicago, IL, and Boston, MA, 40,000 in Milwaukee, 30,000 in Philadelphia, 25,000 in Cleveland, 20,000 each in Pittsburgh and in Youngstown, OH, 17,000 each in Trenton and Paterson, NJ, 15,000 each in Buffalo, NY, Newark, NJ and Canton OH, 10,000 each in Los Angeles, CA, Waterbury CT, Providence, RI and Washington, DC, 6000 in Rochester NY, 5000 each in New Haven, CT, Rockford, IL, Worcester MA and Stamford, CT, not to mention hundreds and hundreds of smaller gatherings all over the U.S.

In the short run, the day of protest was not particularly effective; it was not, as many hoped, the curtain-opener for revolutionary change.  In addition, the federal government would continue to do little or nothing to provide relief until Roosevelt replaced President Hoover in March 1933; on a scattered basis, some state and local governments increased employment and relief expenditures, for fear of the electoral backlash that was already gathering steam. Many private charities substantially increased their focus on stemming the growing immiseration.

In the U.S., the sea change demanded by the March 1930 protest would not begin to come until November 1932, when the voters created the largest shift in U.S. electoral history, giving the incoming Roosevelt administration a mandate to treat the catastrophic reduction in the standard of living as the national emergency it was. https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1930/v06-n312-NY-mar-07-1930-DW-LOC.pdf

‘Bloody Sunday’ (1965)

MARCH 7 IS THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY of the first attempt by a group of 600 civil rights activists to publicize the injustice of Alabama’s refusal to allow the state’s African-American citizens the right to vote. The events of the day are known as Bloody Sunday. 

The peaceful, unarmed marchers planned to march 54 miles to the state capitol in Montgomery. When the marchers reached the bridge over the Alabama River, which marked the Selma city limit, police prevented photographers and other media workers who were with them from crossing the bridge with them. The police also prevented volunteer emergency medical workers from remaining with the march.

When the marchers crossed the bridge their way was blocked by a phalanx of some 200 state police on foot, dozens of men on horseback armed with whips and an assortment of members of the public armed with clubs. The police ordered the marchers to stop and go back. The marchers, who expected to be arrested, went down on their knees, many of them to pray. Rather than arrest the unresisting marchers, the police ran at them striking them with heavy billy clubs.  When the police literally ran over the vanguard of the kneeling marchers, those closer to the back of the line stood up to flee.  

Then the horsemen with whips charged anyone who remained on the bridge, while other police fired teargas grenades at the retreating marchers.  A few of the marchers lay still on the bridge, some of them unconscious, others too badly hurt to move. The police literally forced any marchers capable of running back to the church where the march began.

At least 17 marchers were hospitalized with injuries inflicted on them by police and those working in tandem with them. You can watch a 6-minute video reflecting on the events of Bloody Sunday here: https://youtu.be/Vn6uQBDAr_U?si=WclGzUyA-8C7evxzh  

March 8, International Women’s Day

Every March 8, early in the day, I make a practice of watching a 2-minute clip of a performance of “Bread and Roses” (with subtitles) from the 2014 film “Pride”, directed by Matthew Warchus and produced by David Livingston. I have tried, without success, to learn who to credit for the vocal performance. The tune is by Mimi Fariña. The version performed in the film would be even more moving than it is if it included the entire 1911 poem by James Oppenheim, upon which the song is based.

Below the complete poem is a link to the clip of the performance in “Pride”.

Bread and Roses

As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing, "Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses."

As we come marching, marching, we battle, too, for men—
For they are women's children and we mother them again.
Our days shall not be sweated from birth until life closes—
Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses.

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient song of Bread;
Small art and love and beauty their trudging spirits knew—
Yes, it is Bread we fight for—but we fight for Roses, too.

As we come marching, marching, we bring the Greater Days—
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler—ten that toil where one reposes—
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.

https://youtu.be/D6hIMsd6BlQ?si=SR99TczPj91CCjxe

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