“People in Action: Virginia's Black Belt”
Author: King, Martin Luther, Jr.
Date: April 14, 1962
Location: New York, N.Y.
Genre: Published Article
Topic: Brown v. Board of Education
Martin Luther King, Jr. - Travels
Nonviolence
Voter registration
Details
Continuing his People to People tour, King made multiple stops in Virginia in late March 1962. In the following New York Amsterdam News article, King praises the local movement’s perseverance despite efforts by the state to maintain segregation. Although King asserts that these obstacles can be eradicated by the executive and legislative branches of government, the “major responsibility of securing our full freedom depends upon the Negro himself.” King cautions that if African Americans do not “rise up by the hundreds and the thousands, community by community, and demand their rights through nonviolence and creative protest” the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution will remain out of reach.
I did not realize until our “People to People” tour swung through the Black Belt of Virginia last week that the South gave to our nation nine of its first twelve Presidents. Seven of them were Virginians.1 How strange it is, that this southern Commonwealth has failed so miserably in giving moral leadership to the South. The idea of “massive resistance” was spawned not in Georgia or Alabama—but in the heart of the Southside Virginia, commonly known as the Black Belt.2
This section of Virginia is the bulwark of Harry Byrd’s political dynasty that holds Virginia’s liberal bent in a strangle-hold. The anti-NAACP laws, the infamous trespass ordinances aimed at thwarting the Sit-Ins, the Pupil Placement laws—all children of “massive resistance,” had their origin and loudest support from this same Negro majority section of Virginia that makes up most of the Fourth U.S. Congressional District.3
What a pity that this state of such early historical distinction has missed an opportunity for real greatness in one of her nation’s most critical hours!
Led Backwards
It may well have been that the severe social change that is taking place in the South today might have been considerably accelerated had not Virginia, “the mother of Presidents” led the South backward into “massive resistance.”
It is refreshing, however, to observe even from this brief vantage point of the struggle’s history, that social crises at times produce their greatest need. The nonviolent thrust of the Negro community in the South and Virginia has met “massive resistance” with “massive insistence.”
This is a part of the aim of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference “People to People” program. I am convinced, as I have said many times, that the salvation of the Negro is not in Washington, D.C.
The Supreme Court, The Justice Department, the President of the United States, and the Congress can aid immeasurably in the emancipation process of the Negro, but the major responsibility of securing our full freedom depends upon the Negro himself.4
Our constitutional guarantees will not be realized until Negroes rise up by the hundreds and the thousands, community by community, and demand their rights through nonviolence and creative protest.
As our SCLC task force traveled over the Black Belt of Virginia last week, I could see the potential of this.5 In just two days, we touched the lives of nearly 10,000 people. We could see the deep hope and yearning for freedom in the eyes of thousands of Negroes and the sincere commitment to human equality in many whites.
100,000 Potential
The Black Belt of Virginia has a potential of 100,000 voters in the Negro community but there are barely 17,000 registered at the present. The Fourth District is similar to many parts of Mississippi with many Negroes who are tied to the land as sharecroppers. Economic suppression is the rule rather than the exception and the poll tax requirement adds to the burden of general apathy in Negro voter registration. It is towards this enormous task in Virginia’s Black Belt that our “People to People” tour was directed.
As I indicated in an earlier column, the “People to People” program is aimed at the recruitment of our Freedom Corps and Nonviolent Army in the Negro majority areas of every southern state.6
Mississippi was our initial tour and then Virginia.
We joined Fourth District leaders in Petersburg on the first day of our visit and spent the afternoon literally knocking on doors in the First Ward in a voter registration canvass.
We could discern from the response of the occupants of the more than eighty homes visited, that many of our people just need the information as to what they must know and exactly where they must go and what they must do.7
In Lynchburg the same evening, up in the western half of the state, along with Ralph Abernathy and Wyatt Tee Walker, we recruited 118 volunteers to work in voter registration. I was overwhelmed by a nine-year-old white lad, Chuck Moran, who came forward and said he wanted to help in this struggle. The example of this tender spirit triggered the response of many of the others who joined the Freedom Corps that night.8
Nine a.m. the next day, we saw first-hand the tragedy of Prince Edward County. This is the Virginia county that closed down its public schools rather than comply with the Supreme Court Decision of 1954.9 This is the third year that there has been no public schools for any child white or black.
We could see the obvious lines of strain and weariness in the face of Prince Edward’s peerless leader, the Rev. L. Francis Griffin.
He has refused the compromise of a half loaf of freedom and the parents and children have backed him unanimously in this position.10 Think of it! Closed schools in Virginia, the mother of Presidents.
A New Breed
Virginia State College afforded us another thrill. This was a homecoming for Mrs. Dorothy Cotton, Director of the Citizenship Schools, who accompanied us.11 The students jam-packed Virginia Hall auditorium (capacity 2500) in a voluntary assembly that a college official said was the first such occasion in history.
It evidences a new breed and a new generation in our Negro community with this kind of enthusiasm and interest.
We rounded out our Virginia tour by attending the trials of 62 Sit-Inners in Hopewell, Virginia and visiting two rural communities in Dinwiddie County, just south of Petersburg.12
More than 400 people talked with us informally and expressed their interest in the freedom struggle.
The last public meeting held at Petersburg’s First Baptist Church was a standing room only affair where 158 joined our Freedom Corps to work in voter registration.
As we winged our way back to Atlanta, it came to me that the tremendous response we had found in Virginia held promise of changing the political climate in Virginia, and perhaps—perhaps, Virginia might once again produce a president.
1. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, William Harrison, John Tyler, and Zachary Taylor were all born in Virginia, while Andrew Jackson and James Polk were born in South and North Carolina, respectively.
2. Senator Harry Flood Byrd (D-Va.) coined the term “massive resistance” when he suggested in a 25 February 1956 statement that Southern refusal to accept the 1954 Brown decision would lead the “rest of the country” to “realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South.”
3. In September 1956 Virginia governor Thomas Stanley signed several laws aimed at thwarting the Brown decision and preserving legal segregation within the state. Some of the laws were specifically aimed at the NAACP, the predominant civil rights organization in Virginia, by requiring the group to register with the state and report membership and finances. Stanley’s plan also prohibited the use of state funds for integrated schools and made available tuition grants for students affected by public school closures to enroll in private schools. Taking advantage of the Supreme Court’s failure to set a specific timetable for school integration, the Virginia legislature passed the pupil placement law, allowing a three-member board to assign students to public schools and authorize any student transfers between schools. Additionally, the law gave the governor power to close any schools ordered to integrate. By mid-1960, when Virginia’s Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the admission of four African American students into white schools in Norfolk, no African Americans had been transferred to white schools under the pupil placement law. In response to the 1960 sit-in movement, Virginia governor James Almond signed into law three anti-trespassing laws.
4. In articles published in The Nation, King discusses how executive power could assist the movement (King, “Equality Now,” 4 February 1961, and King, “Fumbling on the New Frontier,” 3 March 1962, pp. 139–150 and pp. 412–419 in this volume, respectively).
5. The SCLC task force included King, Ralph Abernathy, former Virginia pastor Wyatt Tee Walker, field secretaries Bernard Scott Lee and Herbert Coulton, and SCLC’s educational consultant and former Virginia resident Dorothy Cotton.
6. See King, “People in Action: Pathos and Hope,” 3 March 1962, p. 420 in this volume.
7. One homeowner greeted King saying, “‘Come on in, but don’t start talking ’till I get the neighbors here!’” (SCLC, Press release, “Martin Luther King, Jr. moves into Virginia,” 30 March 1962).
8. An estimated 2,400 people attended the mass meeting at E. C. Glass High School to hear King speak. Of the 118 voter registration volunteers, more than twenty were white. The mass meeting raised $1,626 (SCLC, Press release, “Martin Luther King, Jr. moves into Virginia”). For a photograph of King and Moran, see p. 100 in this volume.
9. In response to a 1959 federal court order to integrate its public schools, Prince Edward County officials voted to withdraw all funding from public education, effectively closing down its schools. Aided by state grants, most of the white students attended segregated private schools organized by the Prince Edward School Foundation. Under the leadership of Reverend L. Francis Griffin, the Prince Edward County Christian Association established “activity centers” to keep more than 600 African Americans off the streets. Three hundred black students transferred to schools outside the county, while approximately 800 students received no formal education (Claude Sitton, “Prince Edward County Adamant on Refusing School Integration,” New York Times, 17 April 1961).
10. Leslie Francis Griffin (1917–1980) was the pastor of First Baptist Church in Farmville, Virginia. In 1959 and 1961, he turned down several proposals from Prince Edward County school board officials to reopen a few closed schools on a segregated basis. After a federal district judge postponed orders to desegregate Prince Edward County public schools on 3 October, King sent Griffin a telegram of support, saying: “America will never be able to calculate what your leadership will mean in the future to public education” (King to Griffin, 5 October 1962). A week later, a federal judge said Prince Edward County could not keep the schools closed but did not issue any further orders to allow time for an appeal. On 25 May 1964, in Griffin v. Prince Edward School Board (377 U.S. 218 [1964]), the Supreme Court ordered the public schools to reopen on an integrated basis.
11. A graduate of Virginia State College in 1954, Cotton was also the secretary of the Petersburg Improvement Association. She moved to Atlanta and joined the staff of SCLC in September 1960.
12. The demonstrators, arrested between August 1960 and January 1961 on charges of trespassing, were convicted; the adults were sentenced to thirty days in jail and the juveniles to probation. King attended the trial of Hopewell resident Curtis Harris, who was charged with contempt for refusing to answer questions regarding his integration activities before the Virginia Legislative Committee on Offenses against the Administration of Justice. Harris was found guilty of contempt but was not fined or sentenced. Harris’s attorney, Len Holt, wrote that King’s presence, as well as that of other black ministers, “was a substantial factor” in the victory (Holt to King, 3 April 1962).
Source: New York Amsterdam News, 14 April 1962.