Lyndon Johnson biographer Robert Caro tells Dave Davies about how how civil rights leaders of the era regarded Johnson:

They come in suspicious, you know. Johnson always wanted to meet with people one-on-one. … A friend of his said, ‘One-on-one he’s the greatest salesman who ever lived.’ So a group of civil rights leaders — Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, James Farmer — want to meet with him. One of his secretaries says, ‘Should I schedule them as a group?’ And he says to her, ‘No, one at a time,’ and each one has the same reaction. … I think it’s Roy Qilkins who says this: that ‘[I] went in there suspicious and then Johnson pulled up almost knee-to-knee me and leaned into my face and told me how much he wanted civil rights and for the first time I had real hope that this bill was going to pass.’”

Image of LBJ and Martin Luther King, Jr. via Anglonautes

We are off today, but in case you missed it here is Friday’s StoryCorps from Evander Holyfield’s brother, Bernard. He recounts a painful memory from their childhood in the 1960s.

Journalist Eugene Patterson, a former editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has died at 89. He was most well-known for his writing about the Civil Rights Movement, and his most famous column — “A Flower for the Graves” — was published in the wake the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, which killed four little girls on September 15, 1963.

The column via Poynter:

We — who go on electing politicians who heat the kettles of hate.

We — who raise no hand to silence the mean and little men who have their nigger jokes.

We — who stand aside in imagined rectitude and let the mad dogs that run in every society slide their leashes from our hand, and spring.

We — the heirs of a proud South, who protest its worth and demand it recognition — we are the ones who have ducked the difficult, skirted the uncomfortable, caviled at the challenge, resented the necessary, rationalized the unacceptable, and created the day surely when these children would die.

Today there are more African-Americans under correctional control, — in prison or jail, on probation or parole – than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. There are millions of African-Americans now cycling in and out of prisons and jails or under correctional control. In major American cities today, more than half of working-age African-American men or either under correctional control or branded felons and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives.

—  legal scholar Michelle Alexander. On Monday’s Fresh Air, Alexander talks about how the mass incarceration of African-Americans in the War on Drugs has undermined many of the gains of the Civil Rights movement.

During the years before the Civil Rights movement got underway, segregated American cities helped give birth to a touring circuit that provided employment for hundreds of black musicians and eventually brought about the birth of rock and roll. On today’s Fresh Air, music historian Ed Ward takes a look at the Chitlin’ Circuit.

In all my courses, I really have to teach the basic messages of my life … that the rewards, the satisfactions, are not in being partner or making a million dollars, but in recognizing evils, recognizing injustices and standing up and speaking out about them even in absolutely losing situations where you know it’s not going to bring about any change — that there are intangible rewards to the spirit that make that worthwhile.

— Civil rights advocate and legal scholar Derrick Bell on Fresh Air in 1992. He was the first tenured black professor at Harvard Law School and his 1973 book about race and American law remains a staple at American law schools. Bell died last week from carcinoid cancer. 

Civil Rights leader James Farmer Jr. spoke to Terry Gross in 1985 about why he got involved in CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality): “At that time, I was a pacifist — a conscientious objector from World War II — and as a pacifist, I was concerned with finding non-violent solutions to violent conflict situations domestically. But my primary interest was, of course, race. And therefore, I was driven to study Gandhi, an architect of the technique which he called satyagraha, meaning soul force. We have come to call it non-violent direct action, or non-violent resistance.” [complete interview here]

Despite being backed by recent federal rulings declaring it unconstitutional to segregate bus riders, the Freedom Riders met with obstinate resistance, even by hatred and violence — as in Birmingham and Montgomery, Ala., where white supremacists attacked bus depots themselves. Local police often refused to intervene, but still the Freedom Riders kept to their pledge of nonviolence — and their efforts transformed the civil rights movement.

From @PBS: Meet the Freedom Riders

Tomorrow on Fresh Air: Historian Raymond Arsenault discusses his book Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice

shaclackclack:

Day 25: Freedom Riders were civil rights activists that rode interstate buses into the segregated southern United States to test the United States Supreme Court decision Boynton v. Virginia (of 1960). The first Freedom Ride left Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961, and was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans on May 17.

Friday: To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Riders, we talk about 1961 and the struggle for racial justice with history professor Raymond Arsenault. We also replay an interview from the 1980s with James Farmer Jr, the civil rights leader and co-founder of CORE.

All you have to do is look at the rise of Jim Crow and the ability of Southern state governments to segregate, to discriminate, to imprison without trial, to beat to death, to lynch — without anyone ever being brought to justice. It was only possible because the Court had very slowly chipped away at [the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and the Fourteenth Amendment.]

— Lawrence Goldstone, explaining how the Supreme Court’s rulings between 1875 and 1903 suppressed the civil rights movement in the latter half of the 19th century and impacted the treatment of African-Americans in Southern states for decades,

51 Years Ago Today: On Feb. 1, 1960, four N.C. A&T students began a series of sit-ins at a white-only lunch counter in Woolworth’s, Greensboro, N.C.

More on Freedom Riders, the Woolworth’s sit-in, the SNCC, and the Greensboro Four.