Roy Wilkins: “The Clock Will Not Be Turned Back”

Impact

Wilkins’s remarks are important because they reveal how the civil rights movement’s leaders sought to invoke the nation’s founding ideals of equality and liberty and use the cold war context as leverage in their efforts to secure meaningful change for African Americans. This tactic was particularly astute, given the fact that segregationists sought to portray the civil rights movement as part of an un-American Communist-orchestrated conspiracy. Attempts to use the cold war as leverage worked particularly effectively during the presidency of John F. Kennedy (1961–1963); Kennedy understood that his desire to strengthen America’s position vis-à-vis the Soviet Union was threatened by high-profile incidents of discrimination against black Americans and the failure to make significant progress on civil rights. Ultimately, civil rights leaders’ ability to portray their movement as firmly within the mainstream of American democracy and committed to patriotic values (rather than as a radical or subversive threat to them), along with the use of nonviolent protests rooted in Christian teaching, contributed to making the civil rights movement “respectable,” thereby helping it win a significant measure of public (and political) support in the North.

In the short term, Faubus’s opposition to school desegregation and his defiant stand against the federal government proved fruitful. Indeed, in August 1958, a year after the initial crisis, the governor persuaded a special session of the state legislature to grant him the power to close any school that had been ordered to integrate by the federal authorities. After he ordered that all of Little Rock’s schools be shut down, voters in the affected school district endorsed his decision in a referendum by 19,470 votes to 7,561. Faubus’s hard-line policy on segregation contributed to his election victory that November, making him only the second governor in the state’s history to win a third consecutive term in office.

In the longer term, however, such tactics played into the hands of the civil rights movement. The failure of the Brown decision to lead quickly to comprehensive desegregation and the strength of Massive Resistance helped convince civil rights leaders and organizations that new tactics were required to complement litigation (which often proved both expensive and time-consuming). By the early 1960s, nonviolent direct action—including sit-ins by blacks demanding service at segregated restaurants and other public facilities, mass marches, and voter registration drives—became increasingly prominent. The proliferation of direct action and the stubborn and violent response of many white southerners (encouraged by political leaders who were pledged to Massive Resistance) helped to pressure the federal government to take decisive action. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed Jim Crow segregation, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which led to the enfranchisement of millions of African Americans, resulted from civil rights campaigns (in Birmingham and Selma, respectively) in which black southerners and their allies took to the streets to demand equal rights, only to be met with violence by the white authorities. As for school desegregation, it would not be until the late 1960s—following a series of assertive Supreme Court rulings and threats by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to withhold federal funding from segregated school districts—that meaningful integration took place in the South.