BY CLAUDINE L. FERRELL
In the 1960s, many Americans shared Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of equality achieved through non-violent means. They marched in Alabama and Washington, D.C. They led the Freedom Rides through the South. They planned programs to ease the burden of poverty for blacks and whites. They reasoned against their critics’ verbal assaults. They took the physical blows inflicted by some of their opponents.
Commonwealth Professor of History James Farmer
Early in 1986, four of those men who shared Dr. Kings vision-James Farmer, Ralph Abemathy, Walter Fauntroy, and Andrew Young, all still active in their quest for an egalitarian America brought their stories to Mary Washington College and Frederickburg.
Listening to them speak on separate evenings in Dodd Auditorium were community residents who had once experienced the trials and tensions of the 1960s. And listening were MWC students. All were present because of James Farmer, who is cmrently Commonwealth Professor of History at MWC and is teaching a course called “The Historic Struggle for Racial Equality.”
Mr. Farmer’s decades of work in the civil rights struggle was the basis of his combination public lecture series and history course. Farmer’s experiences-in the Freedom Summer, with Ku Klux Klan assassination plots, with Dr. King and Malcolm X--served as the unifying thread of the series, the most recent in a seven-year line of programs offered by MWC’s Department of History and American Studies. The respect that Farmer is accorded brought to Dodd Auditorium three of the men who were compatriots in the struggle.
East Texas-born and educated, Farmer chose to study theology at “the black Athens,” Howard University in Washington, D.C. His studies at Howard from 1938 to 1941 led this young black man, already a pacifist, to an important decision. His final thesis was “A Critical Analysis of the Historical Interrelationship Between Religion and Racism.” This work confirmed not only his opposition to theories of God-ordained black inferiority but his earlier decision to refuse ordination rather than accept ministering to a segregated Methodist Episcopal Church. His goal, he told his father, would be to “destroy segregation” by relying on some form of “mass mobilization in the use of the Gandhi technique.”
In April 1942, Farmer and several pacifist and socialist friends, who shared an interest in Gandhi, founded CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), an organization built on the idea of a non-violent, directaction attack on discrimination. Next followed the “first organized civil rights sitin in American history.” The sit-in by 28 black and white men and women forced a Chicago coffee house to change its discriminatory policy. Yet most Americans, regardless of color, knew nothing about either the strategy of non-violent direct action or the tactic of sitting-in, until the 1960s made both staples of the evening news.
The ’60s were perfect for both Farmer and CORE to make an impact on American race relations. Farmer’s efforts at what he has called “the cutting edge of the movement” meant he endtu'ed the constant threat of death. Most Americans came to know Farmer during and following his participation in one of the first steps taken by the civil rights advocates in the ’60s: the Freedom Rides of 1961.
While Farmer had been studying at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, and then at Howard, a young Ralph Abernathy was studying at a Baptist boarding school in Linden, Ala. From
there he went to Alabama State University and then to Morehouse School
of Religion where he received an M.A. in sociology. After 18 months as
an administrator at Alabama State and as pastor in Demopolis, Abernathy
became pastor of Alabama’s oldest black congregation, Montgomery’s First
Baptist Church.
The Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy
Like Farmer, Abernathy could not blind himself to the racial inequities around him. The result of his clear vision was his organization of the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott, which he led with Dr. King. The boycott lasted over a year and was successful in forcing a change in the city’s blacks-to-the-rear-of-the-bus policy. But before success was his, Abernathy’s home was bombed and his church dynamited, his personal possessions were sold in a public auction, and he was beaten until his attackers believed he was dead. This treatment was reason enough for the man, who today is pastor of Atlanta’s West Hunter Street Baptist Church, to assert to his MWC audience, “America has never been America to me.” Nevertheless, undeterred by his brutal treatment and that of other blacks in the South, the young Baptist minister joined Dr. King in 1957 in forming the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), in organizing and participating in numerous marches, and in enduring many stays in jail for their non-violent protests against discrimination.
When Dr. King was killed in 1968, Abernathy, his “civil rights twin,” succeeded him as president of the SCLC and oversaw the successful Poor People’s Campaign. Abernathy as “mayor” of Resurrection City, a city of the poor on the Mall in Washington, D.C., helped push Congress Congressman Wa/ter Fauntroy toward aiding the hungry, the ill, and the elderly.
Sharing this concern for the economics of discrimination, Walter Fauntroy told his audience that “the basic problem in America today” is not black inferiority or welfare cheats but rather “the flight of American capital abroad, taking millions of jobs.” It is a view, he noted with irony, that he shared with Alabama Governor George Wallace, a man against whom so many civil rights battles had been fought.
Fauntroy, a native of Washington, D.C., is a graduate of Virginia Union University and Yale University Divinity School. Like so many other black leaders throughout American history, he began his career as a pastor. And like so many, including two of his fellow MWC lect1u'ers, he continued that career while working in other, yet related, directions. While he continues to serve as pastor of his first church, New Bethel Baptist in Washington, his other causes have led him to fight a variety of battles. In the 1960s, Fauntroy was director of the Washington bureau of the SCLC and was national director of the Poor People’s Campaign.
After serving on the D.C. city council, Fauntroy in 1971 became the District’s first elected representative in Congress. He has served in that position ever since and is now fifth in seniority on the House Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs. A member of the Congressional Black Caucus and president of the National Black Leadership Roundtable, he is also chairman of the board of the SCLC. And in 1984 his multiple interests led him to work on issues and strategy for Jesse J ackson’s “Rainbow Coalition” presidential primary campaign.
Most recently Fauntroy has focused on South Africa, creating the “Free South Africa Movement.” His protests against apartheid led to his arrest in November 1984 outside the South African Embassy, and recently he took a fact-finding trip to South Africa to study the apartheid system firsthand. As he informed his MWC listeners-tying together the strings of his interest in and philosophy of discrimination-“Apartheid is, at heart, a labor control system that feeds on cheap labor and foreign investment.”
Fauntroy’s interest in a variety of racial, economic, and political subjects is shared by Andrew Young of Atlanta. Young, like the D.C. congressman, participated in the 1960s civil rights movement before beginning a political career. As Young has explained, “I have fought and will continue to fight for the inclusion of all in the economic mainstream of Atlanta as I have for the inclusion of all across the nation.”
When elected to represent Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District in 1972, Young became that state’s and the Deep South’s first black representative in over a century, a victory attributable to a coalition of black and white support since his district was 60 percent white. The coalition re-elected him twice, allowing Young to serve on the Banking and Currency Committee and on the powerful Rules Committee. It also gave him theopportunity to work on a variety of issues, including mass transit, foreign affairs, and civil rights. These issues, in ef- fect, link Young’s early and later careers.
A graduate of Howard University and the Hartford Theological Seminary, the young Georgian took part in most of the major civil rights protests in the 1960s. He worked with Martin Luther King Jr. in Birmingham and Selma. He worked on the Poor People’s Campaign and protested against the Vietnam War. He was active in voter registration, labor organization, economic development, and leadership training.
Young’s career, which also saw him serve as a pastor in Georgia and Alabama and for the National Council of Churches, took him to the United Nations in 1977. He was appointed ambassador by President Jimmy Carter, the former governor of Georgia. In 1982, he became mayor of one of the nation’s largest and fastest growing urban centers: Atlanta-a city of over 2,000,000 people, two-thirds of whom are black. Young oversees one of the country’s most successful cities in dealing with desegregation and integration. As he once noted, “The thing that separates Atlanta from most cities is that people here admit that racism is a problem and, as a result, are willing to talk about it.” In working on integration, the city recognized that success depended on “learning to accept and learning not to be threatened by cultural differences.”
Mayor Andrew Young
Four men. Farmer, Abernathy, Fauntroy, Young. They tired, as did black poet Langston Hughes, “of hearing people say / Let things take their course. / Tomorrow is another day.” And they brought to MWC and Fredericksburg their fight to make tomorrow now.
Claudine L. Ferrell, assistant professor of history, taught for several years in her native Texas and for one year at Kansas State University before corning to MWC in 1984. She teaches 20th Century U .S. History, Black History, and Legal/Constitutional History.
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