Danver Steven L. (Edited). Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History: An Encyclopedia (ENG)
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in north Georgia. He told a newspaper reporter shortly after the violence in Athens
that he had been slightly wounded in one leg by buckshot fired during the standoff
at the j ail. He also said he was “through with politics,” and planned to return to
railroad work.
—Mark S. Joy
Further Reading
“Defeated Sheriff Out of Politics.” St. Petersburg Times, August 12, 1946, 2.
McMinn County, Tennessee and Its People, 1819–1997. Waynesville, N C: McMinn
County Heritage Book Committee, 1997.
Political Corruption
The citizens involved in the Battle of Athens were revolting against the control of
McMinn County by the political machine controlled by state senator Paul Cantrell
and county sheriff Pat Mansfield. A political machine is an informal organization
designed to keep a particular party, or party faction, in power. While many would
associate political machines with the large urban machines such as Tammany Hall
in 19th-century New York, or the Daley machine in 20th-century Chicago, rural
county machines were not u ncommon, and were often tied in s ome fashion to a
statewide machine or the machine that dominated a nearby city.
Ma chines gained an d exercised their power in a variety of ways. Money was
often raised through demanding kickbacks from employees or those who did busi-
ness with the city, state, or county government involved. In many cases, the
“bosses” of these machines became wealthy, but often much of the money brought
in by the machine was in turn used to provide services and do favors for voters, so
that their support could be counted upon at election time. In Tennessee, the exis-
tence of the poll tax made it easier for machines to control the vote. Many eligible
voters never voted because of the poll tax, so the machine did not have t o over-
come so many legitimate votes.
After the Civil War, the Republican Party controlled McMinn County political
offices until the 1930s. Because of the widespread popularity of President Franklin
D. Roosevelt, in the 1936 election, a McMinn County Democrat, Paul Cantrell,
was elected sheriff, riding into office on Roosevelt’s coattails. Cantrell was from
a wealthy family in Etowah, another small town in McMinn County. With the sup-
port of E. H. Crump, a political boss who controlled a statewide political machine,
Cantrell began building a Democratic political machine in McMinn County.
Cantrell was reelected to the sheriff’s o ffice in 1938 and 1940. In 1 942, he ran
888 Battle of Athens (1946)
for the Tennessee State Senate and won, while his deputy, Pat Mansfield, was
elected sheriff in McMinn County.
There had been widespread charges of voter fraud in McMinn County for sev-
eral year s. Responding to compla ints from local voters, the U .S. Department of
Justice had conducted investigations of electoral irregularities in 1940, 1942, and
1944. None of these investigations led to any corrective action, however.
It appears that the machine in McMinn County functioned more through the
exercise of sheer force and intimidation rather than by providing favors or services
for voters as some machines did. Rather than cu rry the voters’ favor so that they
would vote for the machine’s candidates, the machine simply manipulated the vote
and used various types of voter fraud to insure the election of their slate of candi-
dates. The machine raised cash through the fees paid to the sheriff for each arrest
made, and through kickbacks from people involved in illegal activities such a s
moon shining and prostitution.
After the Battle of Athens destroyed the Cantrell-Mansfield machine, McMinn
County adopted a commission-county manager form of government, where an
elected commission operates the county government and hires a professional man-
ager to be the executive leader.
—Mark S. Joy
Further Reading
Brownell, Blaine A., and Warren E. Sickle, eds. Bosses and Reformers: Urban Politics in
America, 1880–1920. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1973.
Snider, C lyde F., and Neil F. Garvey. “Rural Local Government: County and Township
Government in 1946.” American Political Science Review 41, no. 6 (December 1947):
1130–1141.
Battle of Athens (1946) 889
Civil Rights Movement
(1953–1968)
Some trace the civil rights movement to Massachusetts’s banning of slavery in
1783 or the outlawing of the slave trade in 1808. Perhaps the establishment of
Sierra Leone in 1820 and Nat Turner’s 1831risingareearlycivilrightsefforts.
Maybe the Compromis e o f 1850 or the 1857 Dred Scott decision o r the Civil
War is a better starting point. Reconstruction saw three constitutional amendments
and the anti-Klan laws; that seems a strong civil rights effort. But all this faded by
1883’s overturning of the 1875 Civil Rights Act and the 1896 decision in Plessy v.
Ferguson that separate but equal was valid law. If the civil rights movement began
at any of these times , it ended in 1896. Blac ks entered th e era Rayford Logan
called the nadir, with race riots and lynching, and by the 1920s, the return of the
Klan. The laws permitted—mandated—racial segregation, disfranchisement,
discrimination in economic opportunity, and mass violence. In combination, the
19th-century discrimination was called Jim Crow.
Resistance did not end, of course. This was also the time that the National Asso-
ciation for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) began working, the time
when returned black veterans sparked the New Negro demand for respect, a rejection
of the subordinate status of the Booker Washington accommodation years. The civil
rights movement was a counter to the 19th-century enactment through the South of
racially discriminatory laws and the rise of race violence, the nadir of black rights.
Through the Jim Crow era, however, civil rights groups, especially the NAACP,
lobbied and sued to ameliorate the hardship of discriminated against blacks.
The Great Migration from the South to northern cities brought racial conflict to
the fore as blacks competed with ethnic whites and other lower-class whites in
cities dominated by white elites. In the South, Jim Crow remained intact into the
1950s. In the North, segregation and discrimination were more a matter of custom
than of law, and the plight of blacks was less severe, but blacks were treated as sec-
ond class in all respects in the North as well as in the South.
The reemergence of the civil rights movement came in the 1930s, when the
NAACP and other groups won occasional legal victories, but the modern civil
rights movement is better birthed by World War II, when A. Philip Randolph
threatened a massive “March on Washington” and convinced President Franklin
891
Roosevelt to issue an executive order establishing the Fair Employment Practices
Committee and banning discrimination in war contracts. Blacks in Harlem and
Detroit were revitalized enough to riot in 1943 against white discrimination.
After World War II, blacks rejected second-class citizenship. Jackie Robinson
debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. President Harry Truman, the strong-
est president on civil rights to his time a nd stronger than most who came after,
issued executive orders banning segregation in the civil service and military on
July 26, 1948. Executive Order 9981 desegregated the military. And, almost by
accident, the 1952 immigration reform law eliminated racial and ethnic disqualifi-
cations for citizenship.
The civil rights movement of the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s is also
known as the Second Reconstruction because it finished the busin ess left undone
after t he failure of the firs t Reconstruction (1865–1876). Blacks attempted civil
disobedience, marches, protests, nonviolent resistance, boycotts, an d freedom
rides. Newspaper, radio, and television increasingly covered the movement.
Simultaneously, the NAACP continued its pressure to overturn segregation
through the courts.
892 Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968)
Despite the potential for arrest or even violence, many women participated in the civil
rights movement. This woman was arrested during a protest concerning unfair hiring
practices at a Birmingham, Alabama, department store in 1963. (Bob Adelman/Corbis)
Activists in civil rights organizations prefer the “Southern Freedom Movement”
because that label better expresses the goals of freedom, respect, dignity, and
equality than the civil rights label that restricts the movement to legal goals.
Brown v. Board of Education
The turning point for the movement came in 1954. The NAACP and the separate
NAACP legal defense fund began working on Briggs v. Elliot, a school desegrega-
tion case from Charleston, South Carolina, in the late 1940s. The case reached the
Supreme Court in 1952, and the Court agreed to hear it and other cases from Del-
aware, the District of Columbia, Virginia, and Kansas under the collective title of
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The NAACP team arguing the case
included Thurgood Marshall. Th e court heard sociological evidence, including a
report about the “doll test” of Kenneth Bancroft Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark.
The husband and wife social psychologists gave children a white doll and a black
one, asking which they preferred. Usually black children preferred the white doll
because they saw it as having more positive characteristics. The unanimous Brown
decision specifically cited the doll test in ruling that separate was inherently
unequal.
The Warren Court announced the Brown decision on May 17, 1954. Plessy was
history. Now each school system was vulnerable to challenge and federal court
order to desegregate. Or so t he story went, for historians and lay people alike.
Technically Plessy did not apply to schools but to transportation. The case Brown
actual ly overt urned was Cummings v. Richmond County Board of Education,
which in 1899 applied separate but equal to schools.
Brown culminated the legislative campaign, at least on the part of the activists.
While government fought for and against new laws, the civil rights movement
emphasized mass action such as the freedom rides and sit-ins from 1955 through
1966. A subsequent implementation ruling on Brown in 1955 allowed desegrega-
tion to proceed “with all deliberate speed,” and t he delay allowed opposition to
form, then firm.
Opposition and Growth
Southerners who refused to accept Brown organized to resist. In Indianola, Missis-
sippi, 14 whites gathered on July 11, 1954, under the leadership of Robert “Tut”
Patterson, plantation manager and former “Ole Miss” football player. The councils
formed in part in reaction to the grassroots Regional Council of Negro Leadership,
formed in all-black Mound Bayou, Mississippi, in 1951 by Dr. T. R. M. Howard.
In Mississippi first, then quickly through the South, White Citizens Councils
(WCCs) used e conomic pressure and propaganda about alleged horrors resulting
from desegregation. Business, religious, and civil leaders led the WCCs, which
Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968) 893
was, unlike the secretive Klan, open about its business and lacking in stigma. The
WCCs eschewed violence for economic pressure. Louisiana citizens council lead-
ers included William Rainach, state senator and future gubernatorial candidate.
Also members were future U.S. representative Joe D. Waggonner Jr. and Judge
Leander Perez, political boss of two parishes south of New Orleans. There was
overlap in membership. The WCCs sometimes set up “council schools” for white
children only. Some segregation academies remain in existence, albeit under other
sponsorship and integrated.
The councils, often known as the Uptown KKK, faded in the 1960s as desegre-
gation accelerated, and by the 1970s, they were l argely gone. As blacks gained
power and whites came to accept desegregation, business leaders chose to sever
ties with overtly racist organizations because failing to do so would mean lost
business.
Senator Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia originated massive resistance to obfus-
cate and delay and thereby defeat imple mentation of Brown. Byrd was governor
from 1926 to 1930 and head of Virginia’s “Byrd Machine,” the most powerful of
Virginia’s political organizations. Virginia’s governor’s calls for a wait-and-see
attitude was overwhelmed by Byrd’s call for massive resistance. In keeping with
Byrd’s call, the state studied the problem and, in 1955, called for modification of
school attendance laws , tuition grants for private schools, and assignment by
school boards of students to particular schools. The governo r rejected loca l con-
trol, and a Virginia constitutional modification incorporated massive resistance.
Anti-Brown for ces also revived interposition, which claimed a state right as a
sovereign entity to interpose itself between an unconstitutional federal require-
ment and the local authority. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower used troops
in Little Rock, Arkansas, the Virginia governor obtained authority to close any
school under control by federal troops and refused state funding to any school that
chose to integrate. Even after the Supreme Court ruled massive resistance uncon-
stitutional, the governor blustered noncompliance before eventually complying.
In 1956, most southern congressmen signed the Southern Manifesto calling for
massive resistance to the desegregation rulings. A galvanizing episode was the
death of Emmet Till, a 14-year-old Chicagoan. While visiting relatives near
Money, Mississippi, in August 1955, Till “flirted” with the wife of Roy Bryant,
owner of Money’s country store, and on August 27, Till disappeared. When his
body was finally found, it was attached to a factory fan on the bottom of the river.
Till had been beaten and shot in the head. Brya nt and his half-brother, J. W.
Milam, were tried for murder, acquitted by an all-white jury, and sold their story
of the murder to Look magazine for $4,000. The murder and trial were the first
of what would be many sensational and violent incidents to receive national media
coverage and arouse common citizens to support the movement.
894 Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968)
In 1955, the civil rights movement would shift from the courts to the streets—or
more precisely, the buses, as Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white
person in Montgomery, Alabama, as a city ordinance required. When Rosa Parks
refused to give a white person her seat, she g ave the local civil rights leadership
the test case they had been seeking. The local civil rights community called a boy-
cott of the system. The leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association
(MIA) to oversee the bus boycott and asked Reverend Martin L uther King of
Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to head the MIA. Th e yearl ong effort led to the
November 13, 1956, Supreme Court ruling decreeing that segregated buses
violated the U.S. Constitution.
After a lengthy boycott by Montgomery’s black community, the ordinance was
overturned. More importantly, Martin Luther King of the Southern Christian Lead-
ership Conference emerged as the head of the movement. That same year, the Inter-
state Commerce Commission outlawed segregation of interstate buses and trains.
Another successful bus boycott occurred in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1956–1957.
Overt resistance occurred in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 after the school
board sought to begin integration in compliance with Brown. When the nine stu-
dents, known as the “Little Rock Nine,” arrived at school, an angry white crowd
awaite d them. Governor Orval Fau bus ordered the state’s National Guard to pre-
vent the nine black students from attending Little Rock Central High School. After
a court order for desegregation, President Dwight Eisenhower became the first
president since Reconstruction to send troops into the South, sending in troops of
the 101st Airborne and federalizing the Arkansas National Guard. Little Rock’s
schools shut down. I n Little Rock, Daisy Bates owned and edited a newspaper
and served as president of the state NAACP. Bates remained supportive of the chil-
dren and was with them through the ordeal. With them, she was recipient of the
NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1958. The precedent of sending federal forces when
a governor refused to ensure peaceful integration would apply in Alabama and
Mississippi.
Another milestone occurred in 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina, when four
freshman students at the city’s black college, North Carolina Agricultural and
Technical College, staged the first successful sit-ins at a segregated lunch counter.
The first day, they sat until closing time at the F. W. Woolworth counter and were
not served. The next day, they brought 25 additional students to sit with them.
Within weeks, other cities were experiencing sit-ins, and within a year over a hun-
dred southern and northern cities experienced sit-ins. By the end of 1960, the
sit-ins had occurred in all southern and border states as well as Nevada, Ohio,
and Illinois. Beyond lunch counters, demonstrations targeted theaters, museums,
beaches, libraries, and other public venues. Students pledged no bail and forced
their jailers to bear the financial burden.
Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968) 895
Although Greensboro was first, Nashville was probably the fastest in getting
results, and it was best organized and most highly disciplined. Students at Shaw
University in Raleigh, North Carolina, formed their own organization, the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Stores began to desegregate, even
in advance of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The sit-in was not new; it copied a
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) tactic in the 1940s protests against segrega-
tion in the Midwest. At that time, it failed to garner national press. The same year,
Congress passed a weak voting rights act over a southern filibuster.
The first Citizenship Schools began in the Sea Islands of South Carolina in the
1950s. Septima Clarke, Esau Jenkins, and Bernice Robinson had the assistance
of the Highlander Folk School in teaching literacy to blacks. They tripled the black
voters on St. John Island. In the 1960s, the SCLC took the program to other parts
of the South. It would be important in voter registration efforts after enactment
of voting rights legislation.
And in 1961, CORE revived another old tactic to test the ICC desegregation rul-
ings. In May, Freedom Riders, including black and white, female and male, SNCC
members, boarded two buses in Washington, D.C., determined to travel through
the Deep South to New Orleans and celebrate Brown’s seventh anniversary there.
Along the way, they would use white waiting rooms and dining areas. To get there,
they had to ride through South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. They were beaten
in an Alabama bus terminal, and one of their buses was firebombed. Three hundred
and six went to jail in Jackson, Mississippi, while nine were arrested and released
in Anniston, Alabama. Among the riders was John Siegenthaler, a representative
of the Justice Department sent by Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
In September 1962, James Meredith, a 28-year-old air force veteran, brought a
court order when he sought to enroll at the University of Mississippi. The univer-
sity, the city, and the governor, Ross Barnett, united in defiance. Barnett said never
to integration. On the day Meredith first attempted to enroll, President John
Kennedy addressed the nation via television. As he spoke, the campus erupted in
violence. Kennedy sent in fed eral troops and marshals to e nd the rioting that
ensued. Federal troops calmed the riots only after two people were dead and over
300 injured. Federal marshals remained on site to guarantee Meredith enrolled and
had safe movement on the campus. He graduated in August of the next year thanks
to previously earned credits. H is time on campus was uneventful. Two years
before, Clyde Kennard tried to enter the University of Southern Mississippi. Tried
in state court, he received seven years for being a racial agitator, serving three
before being released.
The Supre me Court ruled in 1962 that segregation was ill egal in all forms of
transportation facilities, terminals, stations, and the like, and the Department of
Defense desegregated its reserves but exempted the National Guard because it
896 Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968)
was under state control. In June 1963, Vivian Malone and James Hood attempted
to attend class at the Un iversit y of Alabama. Governor George Wallace had won
election on the slogan “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation for-
ever.” He had no intention of letting the students attend the university. He blocked
the door to the administration building. Kennedy federalized the Alabama
National Guard and had 100 Guardsmen serve as escort for the students. The guard
commander, General Henry Grah am, ordered Wallace to step aside, allowing the
students to enroll. That evening Kennedy, announced on national television th at
he wanted strong civil rights legislation, breaking with his earlier casual commit-
ment to civil rights. The legislation would pass only in 1964.
The next day, in Jackson, Mississippi, the field secretary for the NAACP,
Medgar Evers, led a protest against the city’s segregation syste m. That evening,
in his driveway, he was shot in the back. Klansman Byron De La Beckwith was
arrested, tried, and acquitted by an all-white jury. In 1994, an assistant district
attorney reopened the case and the retrial resulted in conviction.
In 1963, Cambridge, Maryland, became a center of civil rights activity, with
protests and demonstrations and riots that led to martial law and eventually an agree-
ment to desegregate if the voters chose to amend the charter. Although King wanted
the charter to pass, black voters stayed home, and the charter failed after activist
Gloria Richardson argued that voting on rights is an immoral abuse of power.
In August 1963 the March on Washington took place, where King delivered his
“I Have a Dream” speech. A. Philip Randolph headed the March on Washington
organization. Bayard Rustin handled travel, staff, finances, publicity, accommoda-
tions, and logistics. Rustin had been a key player in nonviolent protest since the
1940s. The march organizers hoped for 100,000 attendees. What they got was over
250,000. Black and white, female and male, they called on Kennedy and Congress
to give them access to education employment, housing, and public facilities equal
to those enjoyed by whites.
The civil rights movement included performers and athletes. Mahali a Jackson
was a gospel singer who began in storefronts but soon had national and then
international fame. She became an activist at the urging of King, and she sang at
the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom at the Lincoln Memorial on the third
anniversary of Brown as well as a t the March on Washington just before King’s
“I Have a Dream” speech. Other activist performers included Olatunji, Abbey
Lincoln, and Coleman Hawkins, who came together to record Max Roach’s
Freedom Now Suite in 1960. Roy Campanella and Willie Mays were veterans of
the Negro Baseball Leagues who became major leaguers after Jackie Robinson
broke the color line.
In 1963, the SCLC initiated “Project C” in Birmingham, Alabama. The “C” was
for confrontation, nonviolent direct action including boycotts, appeals, rallies, and
Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968) 897