Tensions Among Black and White Activists During Movement
Tensions Among Black Activists And White Activists During The Civil Rights Movement
In the mid-1950s, nearly one hundred years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation and three hundred years after colonists forced Africans into slavery, Rosa Parks took what is generally considered the first step in the movement that aimed for true equality among blacks and whites. Refusing to give up a bus seat for a white customer, she directly challenged the southern creed that blacks were inferior. Her actions sparked a Civil Rights Movement involving not only blacks but also two white groups who would come to serve a critical function in the movement.
One of these two groups, white college liberals, was a radical product of the Cold War Era. The “inequality of black people was gradually becoming a prime symbol of what needed to be changed in American society” (Isserman/Kazin pg. 50), and liberals aimed to improve the blemish on America’s image – a blemish that had quickly became “a staple of Soviet propaganda” (Isserman/Kazin pg. 50). Liberals fought inequality in order to improve conditions in the nation as a whole in addition to those in the black community as a unit.
The second group, white politicians, affected the movement at the most critical of junctions – the intersection of politics and leadership. White politicians sought a balanced formula that could allow them to fight the evils of segregation and racism without losing votes in the south.
Within ten years of Parks’ rebellion, however, the role whites would play in the Civil Rights Movement would forever change, due to growing tensions between African Americans and the two groups of whites. The tensions between Africans Americans and iberal college students and between African Americans and white politicians would develop separately, but later intersect and result in a “white backlash.”
Radical college students, and specifically those who joined forces with the Civil Rights Movement via the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) and eventually headed south with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), encountered tensions as early as the training period, during which the volunteers learned the nonviolent tactics used in Mississippi. “Many SNCC activists were black veterans who had developed a strong sense of racial pride and considered themselves militants or radicals, while many of the white students had just joined the movement…and considered themselves more idealistic and liberal” (Anderson, pg. 77). A...