Cherrydale Sit-In

Today is the annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. As I have done for each of the past six years that the Washington Wizards have hosted a matinee game on this holiday, today's post has something to do with the Civil Rights Movement. While there is plenty of action in the NBA today, this is not the day to post about basketball. Basketball today is a megaphone for something greater than a game.

Over the past six years, I have tried to write about places that had some significance to today's namesake, Dr. King. I've written about the Sanitation Workers' Strike in Memphis; the Lorraine Motel in that same city (where Dr. King was assassinated); the Lincoln Memorial (where he gave his famous I Have A Dream speech); West Park in Birmingham, Alabama (site of some particularly violent 1963 protests); and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on the National Mall. To reinforce my own understanding of these events, in the last six years, I have been to each of these spots where these events happened. There's nothing like being there to understand history.

Sandwiched between all that, I wrote a post about the timeline of the Civil Rights Movement. I figured marking the milestones of the some of the events making up the Movement might help me understand the bigger picture. It did.

This year I'm going way smaller and way more local. To Cherrydale.

About two years ago, I got married and moved to Cherrydale, a section of Arlington, Virginia defined by I-66 to the south; Cherrydale Baptist Church at the intersection of Lorcum Lane and Military Road at the north; Utah Street to the west; and a variety of roads at the east edge. Check out Google Maps for the internet-defined boundaries. 

I am fortunate to work in Clarendon, which means on days that are cool enough (which is generally about September through May), I can walk to work. When I can, my commute involves walking down the north side of Route 29 (yes, I'm refusing to use that other name) past the 7-11, the nail salon, the yoga place and the Safeway all the way down to Highland Street and then hanging a right to walk uphill to Clarendon. Apologies for using the generic names of the establishments along my walk. The names of these businesses don't register with me; I just know them by topic. I know there's a mattress place, a fishing tackle place and a tanning place on the opposite side of the street and I don't know those names either. I'm getting older, what can I say.

Sometime in the last couple of years, I noticed something had changed on my commute route. There had been a plaque set into the wall of the nail salon. Since pretty much nothing else on my morning and afternoon walk changes ever, I figured I'd stop and read it. Turns out in June of 1960, there was a sit-in at the counter of the Cherrydale Drug Fair to protest segregated lunch counters then in place throughout the south.

It is difficult today to think of Arlington as a segregated society. It's not like it's Alabama or Mississippi where people are still clinging to the idea of the old south in the 21st century. But I suppose at one time, it was just as bad if not worse than those places are today. I suppose that really it's not quite as accepting as I think it is today. I'm sure we still have lots of work to do here like we do most places.

On June 9, 1960, six college students from Howard and Duke Universities walked into the Cherrydale Drug Fair, sat down at the counter and because they were not all white, were refused service. They sat at the counter for almost 10 hours and endured threats and assaults throughout the day, including being pelted with cigarette butts and having to suffer through a visit by George Lincoln Rockwell (shown above) who was head of the American Nazi Party which was headquartered in Arlington at that time.

Compare the pictures above to those of similar events in Wichita, Kansas or Greensboro, North Carolina, and I'm sure the crowd standing, berating and leering at protestor Dion Diamond looks pretty tame. I mean there is genuine violence present in some of those photos in places elsewhere. But I'm pretty sure some of the white kids and adults shown above would have taken matters into their own hands quite willingly had the opportunity arisen.

I think it's important today to remember that places where we live today around D.C. were just as complicit in racial segregation as some of the states and towns that I've written about on this day in past years. I also think we need to remember to reject anything like this way of thinking. Today is not about basketball. Today we need to think about what this day means.

That's it for this year's post. Wiz - Pistons today at 2! Let's go Wizards!!

Long Way To Go

Today is the annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. As there are most years on this holiday (which is sadly not a holiday for everyone) there are a series of afternoon NBA games to mark the occasion and cause us to reflect at least hopefully a little bit about Dr. King's legacy. And hopefully also the lengths we still have to go in a country that promises equal rights for all. 

Since I've been writing this blog, I've featured a post dedicated to Dr. King or the Civil Rights Movement each year the Washington Wizards have hosted a home game on this date. I've tried to make an effort to visit relevant sites so I can write in the first person about how being in the places where these events happened made me feel, although honestly the logic behind someone white writing about how sites where racial injustice occurred is a little laughable I know. I figure better to do it anyway than just ignore it.

My intent this year was to write something about the Memphis Sanitation Workers' Strike of 1968, the event that led Dr. King to be in that city the day he was assassinated. Yes, I know I wrote about the assassination last year so that would make two consecutive posts about Memphis on this holiday day. 

As a civil rights event, the Sanitation Workers' Strike lacks the shock factor of women and children being beaten by policemen like they were in Selma, Alabama or school kids being subjected to high pressure water attacks like they were in Birmingham in the same state. Don't get me wrong, there was plenty of unprovoked police on non-violent protesters violence in Memphis; it just didn't affect the nation's consciousness the same way events in Selma or Birmingham did.

So I'm not writing that post. Instead, I'm saying as far as we think we have come as a country with race relations, we really haven't come very far at all. Sure, the law theoretically guarantees equal rights for all regardless of race. But there is still a huge problem here. If you need to look for any evidence of the work still left to be done, look no further than last Friday and Kentucky's own Covington Catholic High School.

In case you missed it, or in case you've been completely ignoring Twitter for the entire weekend, there were a few marches down on the National Mall last Friday. Two of these were the March for Life, a protest I guess against the fact that the United States legally allows safe abortions like pretty much every other modern country on the planet, and the Indigenous Peoples March, an event designed to bring attention to injustice against native Americans in our home of the free and land of the brave.

Somehow, parts of these two marches came together and ended up with a bunch of students from the all-male Catholic high school (who somehow have strong opinions at their young age about women having the right to abortions) wearing Make America Great Again hats taunting Nathan Phillips, an Omaha elder and Vietnam veteran, with chants about building a wall to keep immigrants out of our country.

I do not know the facts that led to this encounter, although I've read a number of varying accounts on the internet. I'm not sure it really matters that much to what I'm about to say but the idea of some teenagers from some private school in middle America mocking someone whose family has been on this land far longer than their families have with chants about stopping immigration is ludicrous. Also, no adults with these kids, who I assume are integral to their education about co-existing with other people who don't share the same skin color and privilege, spoke up and stopped this nonsense.

You think we've solved racial inequality in this country? Start by doing your own part next time you see something like that happening in front of you. And then remember it's the tip of the iceberg. We are challenged with this issue on a daily basis. 

During the Sanitation Workers' Strike in 1968 in Memphis, protesters carried and wore signs that read "I AM A MAN!" to affirm that the participants in the march in the late 1960 should be treated as men and not boys, which was (and still is I imagine in some places and for some people) a derogatory term leveled towards African-American men. The image at the top of this post is from a mural on Memphis' main street; the image at the bottom is from inside the National Civil Rights Museum. I imagine keeping this idea in mind would serve everyone well who ever gets into the kind of confrontation that happened on the National Mall on Friday.

At 2 p.m. today I'll be rooting for Bradley Beal and the Wizards to take down the Detroit Pistons and move into ninth place in the Eastern Conference. I also hope everyone in Capital One Arena pays attention to every message honoring Dr. King during the game. Go Wizards! I'll be back next year with a better post. I promise.

April 4, 1968

Today is the annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. As I have done each year the Washington Wizards have played at home on this holiday since I started writing this blog, today I am publishing a post dedicated to the memory of Dr. King. Each year I have done this I have strived to write about a site I have visited that is related to today's holiday. Last year, I ran out of sites that I'd seen in person so I wrote a quick history of the civil rights movement. This year, I am back to writing about places I've visited.

In the early evening of April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was standing outside room 306 on the front balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.  Across the street from the motel in a boarding house, James Earl Ray, an escaped convict with multiple convictions, was aiming his 30-06 Remington rifle right at him. He fired and hit Dr. King in the neck with a single shot. About an hour later, at 7:05 that evening, Dr. King was pronounced dead at St. Joseph's Hospital in Memphis. Just like that, the most visible leader of the civil rights movement since the mid-1950s was gone.

The Lorraine Motel is still standing today, although not as a waystop for travelers passing through Memphis but instead as the National Civil Rights Museum. I visited Memphis for the second time earlier this month and the Museum was the number one spot on my list to visit. Yes, I missed it the first time I was in town, likely because I was focused on my own agenda of taking in as much musical history as possible and not really paying attention to more important subjects above and beyond my own needs. There's a lesson there, I think.

The museum is spread over a number of buildings: the original Lorraine Motel to the south and a series of (now) interconnected buildings to the north, including the boarding house where Ray fired the shot that killed Dr. King. The exhibits in the Lorraine Motel building cover the beginning of the slave trade; then address the Jim Crow era in the United States after the Civil War; then finish with the civil rights movement up to April 4, 1968. Across the street, the exhibits focus on the assassination of Dr. King and the aftermath; the aftermath here meaning both what happened right after the assassination and the position of minorities and women in American society since that time.

The Museum is an uncomfortable place to be and deservedly so. If I wasn't uncomfortable then I would really start to question my basic humanity. There are many many exhibits that made me realize just how cruel we as humans can be to people who are so little different than we are.

The unease starts in the first room after passing through the rotating exhibit space right after buying your ticket, a room dedicated to the slave trade that occurred almost as soon as Europeans arrived in West Africa in the 1400s. The facts and stories are chilling. It was the largest forced migration in the history of the world; an estimated 12.5 million Africans were involuntarily removed from their homes and transported across the Atlantic Ocean as property. By the year 1820, nearly 4 Africans arrived in the new world as property for every one European.

It doesn't stop at numbers. There is a cross sectional diagram of a cargo ship showing the tiny space that the people were transported in. The space allocated to their human cargo is staggering, a condition made all the more obvious by a full scale mockup of a section of the hold in the Museum. There's no space whatsoever for people to move to even extend their limbs just a bit. The sounds of the ship's wood creaking, people coughing and chains clinking piped into the room emphasize the point while I'm sure not conveying even a small degree of how awful it was. The terrazzo floor of the first room explains how these conditions "seasoned" the slaves, making them used to abuse and disease, presumably making them more valuable for having survived the ocean voyage, as if it was actually a market-facing strategy to increase the value of the products being offered. 

The Civil War, which raged from 1861 to 1865, was supposed to have fixed all that, right? No way. As I wrote last year in my post, the Federal Government pretty much turned a blind eye to what the states in the Union were doing with their laws after the withdrawal of Union troops from the former Confederate states in 1877. How did they think that was going to go, assuming they thought about it much at all?

The response was for each state to adopt lots of rules. I don't mean things like poll taxes and literacy tests to votes with "grandfathered" exceptions that allowed all illiterate whites to vote like I wrote about last year. I mean laws and codes that were so specific in some cases as to be excessively picky and petty. Prohibitions on children of different races playing together. Bans on different races playing pool or billiards (not just one or the other; no loopholes here) together. Restrictions on white and non-white marching bands playing in the same parades. Just unbelievably specific codes to prevent any notion of equality. 

And it wasn't just the South. If there's one message that hit home loud and clear for me in the National Civil Rights Museum it was that this was (and is) an American problem, not a problem that only existed (and exists) in the former Confederate states. California passed a law in 1906 that prohibited intermarriage between whites and blacks and whites and mulattos (their word, not mine). And there is a lynching map of the United States that shows every known lynching in the country including occurrences in California, New Mexico, Idaho and, well, every state actually. I think we tend to think today of places like California and Oregon as places of acceptance and integration. I think we are likely fooling ourselves if we think there's no more work to be done everywhere, including those places.

There are a lot of historical artifacts and a lot of stories throughout the Museum. Some, like the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott and the lunch counter sit-ins in multiple locations, will likely be familiar to most people. Stories of people being beaten unconscious by angry mobs of white people for no other reason than supporting a non-white's right to ride a bus across state lines are despicable but obviously true.

But there are a lot of stories that I just didn't know about. In addition to making me understand the national nature of the civil rights struggle, the Museum also made me realize how hard it was to overcome laws and actions everywhere. By that I don't mean every state, I mean every county, every campus, every town and every street. Rescinding oppressive laws or rules wasn't going to help. The people that fought to try to erase a little of the institutionalized inequality did it bit by bit and inch by inch. I can't imagine how frustrating and discouraging it must have been to engage in that struggle every hour, day, week and month.

The first portion of the Museum ends at a spot between the original Lorraine Motel rooms 306 and 307, which were two of the rooms rented by Dr. King's party. Each room is reconstructed to show what it would have looked like at the time but more importantly, it allows you to see the boarding house across the street where Ray fired his rifle. It's the small second floor, white painted window in the building right above the tunnel to which is the gateway to the Museum's second half.

The view from where Dr. King would have been standing to where Ray fired his rifle.

The opposite view: from Ray's vantage-point towards the Lorraine Motel. The wreath marks room 306.

There is far more to see in the first half of the Museum than in the series of buildings which include the boarding house Ray was using as his assassin's perch. But the second half of the place has some essential exhibits. The first rooms are focused on Ray's flight and capture and the circumstances leading up to the assassination, including some very obvious coverage by the local media and police about just where Dr. King would be staying. I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist (call me naïve and I'll probably agree with you) but it kind of makes it easy for someone to kill someone else if you let the whole world know where the target of a murder is going to be when he or she is in town, right?

Dr. Martin Luther King was 39 years old on April 4, 1968. It seems amazing to me that he was that young considering the leadership role he played in the civil rights movement for more than a decade. Within one week of his death President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Fair Housing Act, which prohibited the sale, rental or financing of housing on the basis of race, religion, national origin or sex. The Fair Housing Act was the last significant piece of civil rights legislation ever passed. I'm not sure if our government thought that was enough or what, but it certainly didn't fix everything. We still haven't fixed everything. We are still talking about a lot of these same issues today and leadership, if you can call it that, at the top isn't helping one bit.

If you are a first time visitor to Memphis, I'd encourage you to add the Museum to your must see list. Even if you think you have no interest or are cynical about what's inside. There's surely something in there that must touch the humanity in all of us. If you do, give it some time; we spent a little more than three hours in the place (with a stop for lunch between the two parts) and we didn't read everything in there by any stretch of the imagination. 

Wizards - Bucks today at 2. Go Wizards!

The Lorraine Motel's reconstructed room 307.

A Brief History Of The Civil Rights Movement

As suggested by the title, this post was intended to be brief. Some of you may feel the result is otherwise. But it's important stuff. Read on. Please. I learned a thing or two by writing this; perhaps you will by reading it.

Today is the annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday to celebrate the birthday of the civil rights leader who helped secure passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Each year for the past three years I have written a blog post about Dr. King to coincide with a matinee game over at Verizon Center featuring my beloved Washington Wizards and some other team. So far, each of these blog posts have featured a trip report of sorts either to a memorial to Dr. King or a place where something significant in the Civil Rights Movement happened.

Traditionally, the NBA has passed over Washington on years of presidential inaugurations so honestly I didn't think I'd be writing something about Dr. King this year. But in a surprise move (probably because the holiday is just about as far away from inauguration day as possible this time around), there's a game. And because I didn't expect this to happen, I didn't make an effort to take a trip to somewhere related to Dr. King's life. Therefore I've decided to do something different this year.

I have to admit that I am not very well educated on the Civil Rights Movement. I was never taught about it in either high school or college (I suppose there might have been opportunities to learn in college that I either passed over or ignored) and it took place in cities and towns in the southeast of the United States which I would say I am generally pretty unfamiliar with. So as a way of starting to get my head around the history of the movement (and considering I'm unprepared to write about somewhere I've been in the last year that is relevant), I thought I'd write about the timeline of the Movement and highlight some of the significant events that led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. If it educates some other folks, well that's just a bonus.

I am focused here on the Civil Rights Movement that occurred mostly in the south of the United States and was focused primarily on the rights of black people in that area of our country. In the interest of space and keeping a narrow focus to this blog post, I am deliberately excluding the racial discrimination against Chinese, native Americans, Japanese, Mexicans and all sorts of other ethnic groups during this period of time. It is not intended to minimize the plight of those people at the hands of white America. I'm just not focused on that today.

Most accounts of the Civil Rights Movement consider a period from 1954 to 1964. I'm going to start with the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and end with the Civil Rights of 1964 because I think the history way back to the end of the Civil War is useful context. 

1866: Civil Rights Act of 1866

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was the first legislation passed by Congress that conferred equal rights to all people born in the United States "without regard to race, color or previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude." For the first time in history, all people of any color born in the U.S. were American citizens.

For those of you like me, I suspect some of you are thinking "weren't all the slaves freed by the Emancipation Proclamation issued by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 and the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1864?" The answer is yes and no. The Executive Order that was the Emancipation Proclamation merely freed slaves in the states under rebellion, which the Union had relatively little power to enforce. And the Thirteenth Amendment technically abolished slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime. But it didn't truly free former slaves because it didn't make them citizens.

Interestingly, Lincoln's vice president and successor Andrew Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 TWICE!!! Congress passed it by a 2/3 majority, overriding Johnson's vetoes.

1868: Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution codified many of the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 into our Constitution but also added specific language that prevented states from denying equal protection under the law to any citizen. There was no substantive change from the Civil Rights Act of 1866 here other than incorporating some rights guaranteed under that Act into the Constitution.

1870: Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

The Civil War ended on April 9, 1865 when the Army of Northern Virginia led by Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union forces commanded by Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia. Five years later, acts and Amendments to the U.S. Constitution conferred citizenship on black Americans and former slaves but nothing had been enacted to guarantee voting rights for all Americans. The Fifteenth Amendment took care of that. 

Well, sort of. First of all, it only guaranteed voting rights for men; women wouldn't receive the right to vote until 1920 (!!!). And after the Amendment was passed, the Federal Government sort of stopped paying attention to this issue. And that last point is significant.

1877: Union Troops Withdraw from Confederate States

From the end of the Civil War to 1877, the United States had maintained federal troops in former Confederate state capitals to enforce the policies of Reconstruction enacted by the Federal Government following the defeat of the rebellious states in the War. in 1877 with the election of Rutherford Hayes, all that ended. From that point on, little oversight was provided to the former Confederate states, which meant that life could return to the way it used to be to the extent that the states had control over it. And it turned out they had a lot of control.

The March Against Fear, Mississippi, 1966.

1890: Constitution of the State of Mississippi

Following the defeat of the Confederacy, the constitutions of the individual states participating in the rebellion were re-written in 1868 to ban slavery and enact equal rights for all citizens regardless of race or former slave status. With the withdrawal of Federal troops in 1877 and Washington no longer really paying attention to what the states were doing down south, Mississippi decided to take action in 1890 and re-write their constitution.

The 1890 Constitution enacted by the State of Mississippi didn't restore slavery; they couldn't really since it was prohibited by the United States Constitution. But it did impose two measures that would almost prohibit voting by former slaves: a literacy test and a poll tax.

The literacy test imposed by the 1890 Mississippi Constitution required all citizens demonstrate they could read. But not really. There were various methods of proving literacy including requiring a potential voter to read or interpret part of the 1890 Constitution. Now at that time, there were many people in the state both black and white who would be unable to demonstrate literacy on this basis but the State added a "grandfather" provision which waived the test in cases where someone's grandfather had previously voted in an election. And only whites had voted previously. Convenient, right?

If you were a former slave who managed to pass the literacy test, all you had to do to vote was pay a poll tax, which is a fee to register to vote. In 1890s Mississippi, the poll tax was $2; that's about $55 today. If you can get over the fact that you shouldn't have to pay to get at a right guaranteed by the United States Constitution, how do you as a former slave come up with $55? Remember when former slaves were freed, they weren't provided with any property or money. In most cases they had absolutely nothing to their name and no skills other than farming on a plantation which in most cases forced them into lives of sharecropping under terms and conditions imposed by their former masters. In other words, $55 would be extremely hard to come by.

In 1892, there were 76,742 eligible black voters in the State of Mississippi and 58% of the state's population was black. After literacy tests and poll taxes, there were 8,615 black voters. The new constitution had ensured that the white minority in Mississippi would do as they please despite the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the recent amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Following Mississippi's lead, the other former Confederate states enacted similar constitutions over the next 18 years.

1909-1950: Nothing

As near as I can tell after Georgia re-wrote their constitution in 1908, nothing at all substantive to change the rights of black people in the United States happened for the next 43 years. That's not to say that there were not efforts to do so. But the white people in power in the south and Washington either saw to it that change was stamped out or just ignored the issue completely. I'm positive this is an oversimplification of the truth but I'm also confident it's not far off.

It is difficult for me to imagine what life must have been like in the United States for someone who was not white in the late nineteenth and first two thirds of the twentieth centuries. Indeed I cannot even relate very well to what that is like today. But consider this: the Equal Justice Initiative estimates that between 1877 and 1950 more than 4,000 black men, women and children were "hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned, and beaten to death by white mobs." Just because of the color of their skin. That's horrific.

1951: Walkout at Moton High School

In 1896, the United States Supreme Court ruled that educational facilities segregated by race were constitutional provided the facilities were equal in accommodate. Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia was built as an all black high school in 1939. By 1951, the school served twice as many students as it was designed for and lacked both a cafeteria and gymnasium. 

On April 23, 1951, 16 year old Barbara Rose Johns led a walkout to protest the conditions the students of the school were subjected to. The walkout ultimately led to a lawsuit filed by the NAACP and which was rejected by the State Court of Virginia on the basis that the State was making efforts to integrate schools. The verdict was appealed to the United States Supreme Court and was ultimately rolled up into a landmark decision later on that same decade.

1954: Brown v. Board of Education

In 1951, a class action lawsuit was filed by 13 parents of black students in Topeka, Kansas, maintaining that the "separate but equal" educational facilities afforded to their children were anything but based on, among other things, the distance their children had to travel to get to their school. The District Court in Kansas ruled in favor of the Board of Education, citing an 1896 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregated public schools in the State of Louisiana were constitutional. The plaintiffs, led by parent Oliver Brown, pursued the case all the way to the nation's Supreme Court.

When being heard by the chief justices of the land, the NAACP, whose lawyers led by Thurgood Marshall were trying the case, combined Brown v. Board of Education with several other similar cases. The Court ruled 9-0 in favor of the plaintiffs and established a ruling that separate but equal educational facilities were in fact unconstitutional and all state constitutions, such as those established between 1890 and 1908, requiring or permitting such separation were in violation of federal law.

Oddly enough, there were a number of references to the optics of this case to the rest of the world in the Court's ruling. Ironic that our country, which places similar pressures of human rights on other nations today, just 62 years ago felt the same sort of shame from elsewhere in the world.

1956: Montgomery Bus Boycott
Brown v. Board of Education closed the book on the legal status of separate but equal public educational facilities, but it neither enforced anything nor did it address other aspects of society such as public accommodations like public transportation or private businesses or public entities segregating their facilities on the basis of race. 1956 was the year a small step was made toward de-segregating publicly operated bus systems.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, secretary of the Montgomery (Alabama) Chapter of the NAACP, was ordered by a bus driver to give up her seat for a white passenger while sitting in the Whites Only section of a bus. Parks refused. Four days later she was arrested and drew national attention to the issue, which did nothing to solve the actual issue. That took more action.

Eventually the ordinance requiring segregation of buses in Montgomery was ultimately repealed, but only after a 381 day boycott of the Montgomery bus system by an estimated 90% of the black population in the city. Money talked here I suppose but ultimately it led to the right result and segregation never went back into effect.

Four years later, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Boynton v. Virginia that segregation based on race on buses or in associated facilities was unconstitutional. After that, the states couldn't ever maintain that separate but equal was legal.

1958: Dockum Drug Store Sit-In

By 1958, racial segregation in public school facilities had been declared illegal throughout the land (doesn't mean they were desegregated; just that they had been ruled unconstitutional) and the bus system in at least one southern city had been desegregated. But many stores that served both white and black customers still insisted on maintaining accommodations by race that were separate but anything but equal.

In July 1958, the NAACP staged a series of sit-ins at the lunch counter of a Dockum Drug Store in Wichita, Kansas. These sit-ins consisted of black customers sitting at the whites only section the store and requesting lunch service, something that had always been refused. The sit-ins worked and after three weeks the store changed its policy of segregation.

The Wichita sit-in by all accounts was relatively successful and it was followed by others. The most significant of these was at a Woolworth's store in Greensboro, North Carolina. Not only did it take Woolworth's six months to change their policy of desegregated lunch counters, but the event drew national attention, based on photographs like the one above which shows white citizens dumping food and liquids on the heads of the protesters who were doing nothing more than just siting there. I can't imagine what these people were thinking that the hatred of someone with a different skin color eating at the same lunch counter as them would cause them to behave like that.

1963: Birmingham Campaign and the March on Washington

In the fall of 2015, I visited Birmingham, Alabama to spend about an hour walking around Kelly Ingram Park (formerly West Park), site of a series of demonstrations by black school children which drew a brutal police response that was covered through national media and television. The actions by the school children were in response to the segregation policies of stores and businesses in downtown Birmingham. Since I've already written about these events in last year's MLK Day post, I'll refer you there for the full details. But significantly, the media coverage of the police response spurred discussion of passage of a Civil Rights Act in congress. 

Just three and a half months later, Civil Rights leaders including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. organized the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, an event intended to highlight the voting inequality that existed in parts of the country through laws that were designed to restrict the rights of black citizens to vote. It was during this March that Dr. King delivered his famous "I Have A Dream" speech from the steps in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The full text of that speech, along with other thoughts of mine, can be found in my blog post on this holiday two years ago.

1964: Civil Rights Act of 1964

On July 2, 1964, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted into law. It had been called for by President John F. Kennedy in his civil rights speech of June 11, 1963. By the time the Act became law, Kennedy had been assassinated and Lyndon B. Johnson, his Vice President, was in the Oval Office.

The Act outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. The effect of the Act was that it would (eventually) end the unequal application of voter registration laws and racial segregation in schools, the workplace and other public accommodations, including in stores like Woolworth's.

The 1866 Civil Rights Act conferred citizenship upon all persons born in the United States but didn't make discrimination against any segment of that population illegal. The 1964 Act took this one step further. And it "only" took us 98 years, which at that point was more than half our nation's history. Incredibly, about 30% of both the House and Senate voted against the Act; in the 11 former Confederate states, 95% of the Congressmen and Senators voted against it.

Now after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it's not like everything was A-OK after that. There was still immediate work to do like registering thousands upon thousands of American citizens that had been intimidated into not voting or just denied voting rights entirely. And all of that would not be easy. But beyond that there was a lot of future work to do and there likely still is today, especially if the folks running the executive and legislative branches of our government starting Friday are as bad as their rhetoric sometimes is.

I know I skipped some things which are really important, particularly the hatred and violence that black high school and college students faced in Arkansas and Mississippi in breaking racial barriers and the Freedom Rides throughout the south. The stories of the vile mistreatment particularly of school age girls just trying to attend school are heartbreaking. I hope any boy or girl (now man or woman) who participated in the intimidation of a little girl attending school in those early days of school integration understands how wrong they were. Doesn't change anything I guess. I can't imagine how scared and how brave those first kids to break the race barrier at public schools were. 

I don't understand the work that remains. How could I? The logic of a white man writing a brief history of the Civil Rights Movement to help himself understand some (and I do mean like a tiny fraction) of the events in black history that led to the passage of the 1964 Act is a little silly. I did it to educate myself more, which I consider a small step towards more understanding. I know we still have a lot of work to do. I believe it is important to continue to talk about our nation's embarrassing past so we don't repeat it through forgetfulness. That's why I write about this subject on this day. 

Go Wizards! Let's make it 12 in a row at home today. 

Children's Crusade

Today is the third Monday of January. That means it is the annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. For me (since 2016 is not a presidential inauguration year), that means a half day of work and a Wizards home game later today, which makes this one of my absolute favorite days of the year. Next year, it won't be quite the same; for some reason the NBA avoids Washington on the MLK holiday on inauguration years so there will be no game here next year unless there's a change of strategy on the league's part. I'll mourn the loss of a 2017 home game when Hillary is being sworn in as the first female president of the United States.

This holiday also means it's time for me to write a post offering a glimpse into some site related to Dr. King's life or legacy. I've said it before and I'll say it again: there's a reason the NBA makes an effort to schedule afternoon games on this day and it really has nothing to do with basketball. This day is for remembering something we should never forget. Last year I made a trip to the Lincoln Memorial, site of Dr. King's famous "I Have A Dream" speech given in August 1963. That post followed a column the previous year about my trip to the memorial to Dr. King erected on the National Mall. Unfortunately, those two posts pretty much killed my list of local significant sites, so this year, I traveled to Birmingham, Alabama to find out more about the Civil Rights Movement. Things were a lot more serious down there than they were here in Washington.

The beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States can be traced back to April 1951 at R. R. Moton High School in Prince Edward County, Virginia when the students at the segregated all-black high school walked out of class to protest the overcrowded and inadequate conditions which existed in their school. That act, and the subsequent two week strike by the students, ultimately led to the United States Supreme Court ruling on the Brown v. Board of Education case that segregation based on race in public schools was unconstitutional. Subsequent rulings by the Supreme Court required segregation be phased out over time, but with no specific schedule. And it only applied to public schools.

Statue of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Kelly Ingram (formerly West) Park.

12 years after that initial Moton High School walk out, life was not a whole lot different when it came to race relations in most of the south,  despite a series of sit-ins at lunch counters and other locations; Freedom Rides; some significant integration of schools; and what could be called a successful bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1963, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) led by president Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. along with local leader Fred Shuttlesworth selected Birmingham, Alabama for the site of what they called Project "C", a series of non-violent protests and sit-ins designed to force an end to segregation in Birmingham, a city at that time was perhaps the most segregated city in the nation. "C" by the way stood for Confrontation.

Project "C" followed an effort in Birmingham begun in late 1962 to boycott local downtown businesses which supported segregation. The boycott (or "selective buying campaign" since boycotts were illegal in Birmingham) had already drawn reactions. The City Commission of Birmingham cut back funding for a surplus food program used mostly by low income black residents in the city and Police Commissioner "Bull" Connor started issuing threats to cancel business licenses for stores that removed "Whites Only" or "Colored Only" signs from their storefronts.

One of the keys to the success of Project "C" was Bull Connor, who had historically reacted to non-violent or passive protests with alarming violence. The hope was that the expected police violence would draw national media attention and that mass arrests would fill the city's jail system and shut down the city's law enforcement's ability to function. But by April of 1963, Project "C" was not having the results desired by Dr. King and other leaders and the program was costing more money than planned, in part due to Connor quadrupling the bail requirement for arrested protesters, which included Dr. King. Project "C" was not working.

Sculpture of Parker High School student Walter Gadsden being attacked by police dogs based on a photograph published in the New York Times.

Local SCLC leadership was desperate. This desperation led them to make a controversial but critical decision in April 1963 to enlist the help of children in their protest effort. The decision was widely condemned by everyone from Robert Kennedy to Malcolm X and Dr. King initially remained silent on the decision. But the logic presented by SCLC organizer James Bevel that students would present a more united front while also not hurting their families through loss of income caused by their arrests were compelling and the campaign proceeded. The effort over a few days in May of 1963 would later be referred to as the Children's Crusade by Newsweek magazine.

On May 2, 1963, more than 1,000 students skipped school and gathered at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in downtown Birmingham. The plan was to march downtown to meet with the mayor and demand integration of selected downtown buildings. The reaction from the city and Commissioner Connor was to arrest everyone. Everyone. All of them. They used police cars and fire trucks to block the streets in the path of the marchers and used paddy wagons and school buses to haul the students to jail. By the end of the day, 1,200 students filled the 900 person capacity Birmingham jails.

The next day proved to be the turning point. That morning, another 1,000 children turned up at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to march. At that point there was no sense arresting any more students because the city had no place to put them. So as the protesters made their way into West Park across the street from the church, the police department tried a different strategy, using high pressure water hoses set on maximum power to repel and disperse the children. When bystanders observing the police using water hoses started fighting back by throwing rocks at the police, Connor ordered police to use the department's German shepherds to stop the attack.

It was a disaster and by the end of the day, the damage was done. Photographs and television footage of water hoses knocking children off their feet and rolling them down city streets or of dogs attacking high school students and bystanders were seen nationwide. Calls for the passage of a Civil Rights Bill were heard in congress. An editorial in the New York Times called the behavior of the police department "a national disgrace". And Oregon senator Wayne Morse compared Birmingham to South Africa. Birmingham was on the national radar in just the way Dr. King and the other Civil Rights leaders had hoped.

Hoses turned on children. I can't imagine how strong these kids were under this sort of assault.

While I'm making this sound like an unequivocal victory and a quick happy ending, it was not. Far from it. Desegregation happened slowly in Birmingham even though the integration of public schools began with the start of the new school year in September 1963. Even the protests and arrests didn't end on May 3, the first day the hoses and dogs were set on protesters. But there's no question that the acts of those two days under the direction of Dr. King and other local leaders made change happen quicker than it would have otherwise. The New York Times was right: racial segregation (and not just the behavior of the police that day) was a national disgrace.

Today, West Park still exists in downtown Birmingham, although now it's called Kelly Ingram Park, and it, along with the adjacent Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (which turned out to be closed for renovation), was my destination this past fall during a trip to Alabama to watch cars go round and round in circles. The Park now serves as a memorial to those two days in May 1963 which turned the tide of racial segregation in the city. It's pretty powerful despite the fact that it likely comes nowhere close to representing the chaos and horror those two days.

The memorial in the Kelly Ingram Park is a series of sculptures and interpretive signage describing the two days of arrests and protects in the Park and the events leading up to them. Just how devious and sinister the white leaders of Birmingham were is pretty obvious in reading the signs which dot the sidewalks around the Park. But the sculptures are the more visceral storytellers. The prejudice of the city's police force is on full display in a sculpture where a police officer is holding a young black man while also loosing his German shepherd on the man. And the sidewalk which runs through a sculpture of dogs leaping at stomach and eye level forces you to come face to face with something akin to what the protesters did on May 3. Although honestly, it's not dangerous at all any more.

But the most chilling sculpture for me in the Park is the firehose being trained on two what look like junior high school students. You can actually stand behind the controls of the hose and understand the view that the police had, one teenage boy on his hands and knees after withstanding a blast of water and a girl of similar age trying to turn her back and protect herself against the pressure. I can't imagine how these men continued to use these hoses after seeing helpless kids doing nothing other than being black being knocked down and hurt. God help us if we ever do anything like this again.

I don't know as much as I should about the Civil Rights Movement. It was a clearly a complicated, frustratingly slow and heartbreaking process to get some people in this country the basic rights which should be afforded to everyone. Every time I write on of these posts I learn a little bit more and so I intend to keep doing it on this holiday when the Wizards play at home, with a focus on events centered on Dr. King. Project "C" was an important step towards the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and may have been a sort of tipping point. After the events of May 2 and 3, 1963, most of the nation could no longer ignore what was going on. A visit to the former West Park makes that pretty clear.

Sculpture with police dogs straining at their leashes on either side of the path.

I Have A Dream

Today is the annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. Later today, I'll be sitting in Verizon Center watching my beloved Washington Wizards destroy (I'm hoping here, but probably not unrealistically) the visiting Philadelphia 76ers. It's the second year in a row the Wizards have played the 76ers on this day. It should be a sure victory (I mean the Sixers are barely an NBA team at this point) preceded by a half day of work and a lunch with beer followed by more beer and some pool at a place I once loved but now just gets a once a year visit. Today's full itinerary will be the same as last year's agenda, which I documented in a post last January on this blog.

Today is not about basketball. The games today really take a back seat to remembering the legacy of Dr. King and what he and everyone else involved in the civil rights movement achieved. It's sad that we had to go through the civil rights movement at all, especially considering the United States prides itself so boastfully on equality and freedom. There should never have been separate rules for different races in the first place. While I am sure some folks in this country are proud of the progress that has been made, the events in Ferguson, Missouri and other places in the last few months have proved we have a long way to go here. Now is not time for rest. It's amazing that we are still talking about something which is a basic human right. I mean it's the 21st century, for crying out loud.

Last year, I visited the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on the National Mall and wrote about it in this blog as a way of commemorating this day and spending time to remember and broadcast a little something about Dr. King's life so that hopefully others may benefit from what I wrote and be reminded of what work is still left to be done. This year, I've decided to make the same commitment. By visiting the Lincoln Memorial.

On August 28, 1963, Dr. King stood on the top step of the podium to the Lincoln Memorial and delivered what is surely his most famous speech, the I Have A Dream speech, as part of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The March, which had been contemplated by a number of civil rights leaders since the 1940s, was intended to bring attention to the fact that despite black men having been granted voting rights for 100 years, there were still laws in the United States in the 1960s that institutionalized racial discrimination and fostered economic inequality between races in parts of this country. The March was also intended to lend vocal and visible endorsement to civil rights legislation proposed by President John F. Kennedy in June of 1963.

By most estimates, the March attracted a quarter of a million people. It is credited with being instrumental in passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. The Voting Rights Act prohibited racial discrimination in voting. Yes, we had to pass laws to make these things happen.

The speech itself was voted the top American speech of the 20th century in a poll of scholars of public address (who knew there was such a thing?). It references Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution and the Emancipation Proclamation and it is truly powerful. My family didn't live in the United States in 1963 but I like to think it would have made me ashamed to be a white American that year. Maybe that's presumptuous or arrogant of me to make such a statement but it sort of shames me even today. I can't believe the country that I love so much was so disrespectful and ignorant just 50 years ago.

Today, the spot where Dr. King stood and gave his speech on August 28, 1963 is commemorated with an engraving in the stone step and you can look out over the reflecting pool towards the Washington Monument and decide for yourself if we have really made all the progress in race relations that we should have made since that day over 50 years ago. I'm hoping your answer is no. Remember. That's all I ask for whoever reads this post today or in the future. And don't forget. Ever.

If you have 17 minutes and 28 seconds to spare today, I encourage you to watch Dr. King's speech that day. If you do not, the full text of the speech is below.

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation. 

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. 

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. 

In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check -- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children. 

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges. 

But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. 

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. They have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone. 

As we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied, as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating "For Whites Only". We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. 

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. 

Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. 

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. 

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal." 

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. 

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. 

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. 

I have a dream today. 

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. 

I have a dream today. 

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. 

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day. 

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring." 

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! 

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! 

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California! 

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia! 

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee! 

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring. 

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

The view of the reflecting pool and Washington Monument on August 28. 1963...

…and today.