the mid-1950s, the struggle for equal rights for blacks in the South and elsewhere had been led by northern-based civil rights organizations which were largely funded by white liberals and which focused on legal battles against discrimination in the courts. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) achieved some major court victories, most notably the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. the Board of Education, which led eventually to the desegregation of the nation's schools. However, Weisbrot commented that in the South, that case, "by threatening white supremacy so forthrightly, intensified Southern resistance to civil rights programs" (11).
Despite the intervention of the federal government in the Little Rock school crisis in 1957 and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of that year which authorized the Justice Department to enforce through litigation the voting rights of blacks in the South, little real progress had been made there. By 1961, 99 percent of black children in the South attended separate schools, "blacks in much of the South still went to the polls at peril to their jobs," and most public accommodations remained segregated (Weisbrot 1).
The first Freedom Rides were organized by CORE which sent an interracial team of bus riders through the Upper South in 1947 without success. Weisbrot said that "this setback left CORE a small, Northern-based group staffed mainly by whites, vainly seeking to trigger a Negro mass movement" (13). The refusal in 1955 of Rosa Parks, a 42 year old seamstress and NAACP official, to move to the back of a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama triggered a 380 day bus boycott which led to the integration of buses there. Her defiance signalled a new determination of blacks in the South to resist segregation. As Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver later said: "somewhere in the universe a gear in the machinery shifted" (Chafe 162).
In the late 1950s, the civ...