Congress of Racial Equality
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The Congress of Racial Equality or CORE is a U.S. civil rights organization that played a pivotal role in the Civil Rights Movement of the 20th century. Membership in CORE is stated to be open to "anyone who believes that 'all people are created equal' and is willing to work towards the ultimate goal of true equality throughout the world."
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[edit] Foundation
CORE was founded in Chicago in 1942 by James L. Farmer, Jr., George Houser and Bernice Fisher. Bayard Rustin, while not a father of the organization, was "an uncle to CORE", Farmer and Houser later said. CORE evolved out of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation. The Congress of Racial Equality sought to apply the principles of nonviolence as a tactic against segregation. The group's inspiration was Krishnalal Shridharani's book War Without Violence (1939, Harcourt Brace), which outlined Gandhi's step-by-step procedures for organizing people and mounting a nonviolent campaign. Shridharani, a popular writer and journalist as well as a vibrant and theatrical speaker, had been a protege of Gandhi and had been jailed in the Salt March. Gandhi had, in turn, been influenced by the writings of Henry David Thoreau. Mohandas Gandhi was then still engaged in non-violent resistance against British rule in India. The group believed that nonviolent civil disobedience could be used by African-Americans to challenge racial segregation in the South and eventually other parts of the United States.
[edit] Civil rights campaign
On April 9, 1947, CORE sent a group of eight white and eight black men on what was to be a two-week Journey of Reconciliation through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky in an effort to end segregation in interstate travel. The members of this group were arrested and jailed several times, but they received a great deal of publicity, and this marked the beginning of a long series of similar campaigns.
By the early 1960s, Farmer, who had taken a hiatus from leading the group, returned as its executive secretary and sought to repeat the 1947 journey, coining a new name for it: the Freedom Ride. On May 4, 1961, participants journeyed to the deep South, this time including women as well as men and testing segregated bus terminals as well. The riders were met with severe violence and garnered national attention, sparking a summer of similar rides by other Civil Rights leaders and thousands of ordinary citizens.
The Congress of Racial Equality also organized Freedom Rides in the Deep South. In Birmingham, Alabama, one of the buses was fire-bombed and passengers were beaten by a white mob. By 1961 CORE had 53 chapters throughout the United States. Two years later, the organization helped organize the famous March on Washington On 28 August 1963, more than 200,000 people marched peacefully to the Lincoln Memorial to demand equal justice for all citizens under the law. At the end of the march Martin Luther King made his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.
In 1966 Floyd McKissick replaced James Farmer as National Director of CORE. The following year, CORE, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) organised its Freedom Summer campaign. Its main objective was to attempt to end the political disenfranchisement of African Americans in the Deep South. Volunteers from the three organizations decided to concentrate its efforts in Mississippi. In 1962 only 6.7 percent of African Americans in the state were registered to vote, the lowest percentage in the country. This involved the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Party (MFDP). Over 80,000 people joined the party and 68 delegates attended the Democratic Party Convention in Atlantic City and challenged the attendance of the all-white Mississippi representation.
CORE, SNCC and NAACP also established 30 Freedom Schools in towns throughout Mississippi. Volunteers taught in the schools and the curriculum now included black history, the philosophy of the civil rights movement. During the summer of 1964 over 3,000 students attended these schools and the experiment provided a model for future educational programs such as Head Start.
Freedom Schools were often targets of white mobs. So also were the homes of local African Americans involved in the campaign. That summer 30 black homes and 37 black churches were firebombed. Over 80 volunteers were beaten by white mobs or racist police officers and three men, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan on 21 June 1964. These deaths created nation-wide publicity for the campaign. [2]
[edit] Internal disagreements
CORE leadership had strong disagreements with the Deacons for Defense and Justice over the Deacons' threat to use violent tactics to protect CORE workers from racist organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan, in Louisiana during the 1960s. By the mid-1960s, however, Farmer was growing disenchanted with the emerging militancy and black nationalist sentiments within CORE, and he resigned in 1966.
[edit] CORE since 1968
Since 1968, CORE has been led by National Chairman, Roy Innis. Initially Innis, headed the organization in a strong campaign of Black Nationalism. However, subsequent political developments within the organization led it more towards the right. CORE supported the presidential candidacy of Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972. Recently, on same sex marriage and Black health in the U.S.- "When you say to society at large that you have to accept, not only accept our lifestyle, but promote it and put it on the same plane and equate it with traditional marriage, that's where we draw the line and we say 'no.' That's not something that is a civil right. That is not something that is a human right," said Niger Innis, national spokesman for CORE, and son of Roy Innis.[3]. Niger Innis is on the board of the conservative Project 21 organization. An HIV/AIDS advocacy, education and prevention program for Black Women was dismantled.
In 1966, James Farmer one of the founders of CORE, said in a Village Voice interview: "this organization has become fraudulent and now existed only to serve the Innis Dynasty".[1]
[edit] Notes
[edit] Bibliography
- August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942-1968 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975)
[edit] External links
- Congress of Racial Equality
- "You Don't Have to Ride Jim Crow!" Web site for documentary of Journey of Reconciliation.
- Chris Mooney, Mother Jones, May/June 2005, "Black Gold?" - CORE, ExxonMobil, and "eco-imperialism"
