The Civil Rights Act turns 50

BY ADAM PARKER

It is perhaps fitting that 1964 was a leap year, for the world lurched forward with terrific force.

And from our vantage point on this Martin Luther King Day in 2014, it is helpful to recall that tumultuous moment 50 years ago in our nation’s history — and in the world — that created gusts so forceful that advocates for justice were spun every which way. One of those gusts blew through Congress and produced the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Lyndon B. Johnson assumed the presidency after John F. Kennedy’s assassination and immediately began pushing his predecessor’s legislative agenda, which included civil rights and anti-poverty measures.

The Beatles came to America in 1964. The Vietnam War heated up. Barry Goldwater became a prominent political figure symbolizing a new, reactionary Republican Party. Nelson Mandela was tried and imprisoned with a life sentence, prompting early anti-apartheid protests in the United States, especially among civil rights leaders.

Malcolm X delivered his “The Ballet or the Bullet” speech, then was kicked out of the Nation of Islam. Sidney Poitier won an Oscar for his role in “Lilies of the Field.”

That June, three civil rights workers — Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney — who were in Mississippi for “Freedom Summer,” assisting a large-scale voter registration campaign spearheaded by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, were murdered by Klansmen and a deputy sheriff.

In August, the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City dismissed Fannie Lou Hamer and other activists calling on the convention to replace the all-white Mississippi delegation.

At the end of that month, Philadelphia was wracked by racial violence. In October, Martin Luther King won the Nobel Peace Prize.

That year, some African countries fighting for independence from colonial rule and its legacy made headway, fueling an African-centric strain within the U.S. civil rights movement that was closely associated with Black Power.

The Civil Rights Act, originally part of Kennedy’s legislative agenda, had been debated furiously in Congress for months, opposed with heated rhetoric by Goldwater, Strom Thurmond, Robert Byrd and others, reintroduced in a new form that spring and finally signed into law in July.

It outlawed voter literacy tests, ended discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex and national origin, and desegregated all “public accommodations” engaged in commercial activity, but it did not guarantee enforcement. Activists at the time certainly welcomed it, but some wondered if it was a toothless victory. It would take time, and court challenges, for the law to serve any practical purpose.

But eventually it did, and historians today consider it a watershed piece of legislation that helped transform American society. The Civil Rights Act effectively consigned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which had declared “separate but equal” constitutional, to the trash heap of history. Yet de facto segregation remained a problem for many years, in housing, employment and other areas of American life.

“For many people, the act itself was symbolic; its execution became the real challenge,” said Bobby Donaldson, professor of African-American history at the University of South Carolina. “For a lot of people it was an affirmation of some of these earlier struggles, and that was the goal.”

It helped galvanize activists who called on the federal government to enforce the law, Donaldson said. The country, especially the South, saw an uptick in picketing and demonstrations. The movement had “turned the page,” Donaldson said.

At the same time, entrenched segregationists such as Alabama’s George Wallace pushed back hard. Wallace was running for the Democratic nomination that year in opposition to Johnson, appealing to the old guard with ardent talk about “states’ rights,” Donaldson said.

So the Civil Rights Act was both a sign of success that raised expectations and a reminder “that this battle was not easily won, and the outcome was still quite uncertain,” he said.

Because passage of the act initially did little to right nearly three centuries of wrongs, it could hardly arrest the political momentum among black activists who were already calling for something much more consequential than integration and equality. They wanted power.

The shift in the civil rights movement from an emphasis on nonviolent civil disobedience to an emphasis on Black Power came in August 1964 as a consequence of the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.

The call to unseat the Mississippi delegation by members of the newly formed Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was gaining support on the convention floor when Johnson stepped in.

Already concerned that passage of the Civil Rights Act had caused the Democratic Party to lose the South once and for all, Johnson did not much like the idea of stirring the pot at the convention.  He interrupted a live television feed of Fannie Lou Hamer’s impassioned testimony to the credentials committee to deliver an inconsequential message to the American people, but the tactic backfired. The TV stations aired Hamer’s full address later that day.

So Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale, doing Johnson’s bidding, forced a “compromise”: the MFDP would get two at-large (non-voting) seats.

The “solution” was announced to the press before the civil rights activists had an opportunity to discuss the proposal. Mainstream civil and labor rights leaders Roy Wilkins, Andrew Young, Walter Reuther and Martin Luther King Jr. pressured the protestors to accept the arrangement.

“We didn’t come all this way for no two seats, ’cause all of us is tired,” Hamer declared.

The Freedom Democrats felt betrayed. Rather than acknowledge the boxes of evidence pointing to fraudulent electioneering that the activists brought with them to Atlantic City, Johnson and his party opted to appease the seated Mississippi delegation in exchange for its votes.

“As far as I’m concerned, this was the turning point of the civil rights movement,” wrote John Lewis, then SNCC chairman, in his memoir. “Until then, despite every setback and disappointment and obstacle we had faced over the years, the belief still prevailed that the system would work, the system would listen, the system would respond. Now, for the first time, we had made our way to the very center of the system. We had played by the rules, done everything we were supposed to do, had played the game exactly as required, had arrived at the doorstep and found the door slammed in our face.”

What transpired next had been percolating for a while, but it was this rejection of the MFDP at the Democratic Convention that prompted the radicalization of the mainstream civil rights movement and the sense among its black participants that power was not something one asked for politely. It had to be seized, or developed from within.

In a sense, it was the Civil Rights Act itself that set the stage for the second half of the 1960s.

“It was the catalyst for the next phase of the movement,” Donaldson said. “It was also a sign that the battle was only half won.”

Deona Smith, a 44-year-old black entrepreneur who runs a marketing and advertising company in Charleston, said the law has had “a lasting positive legacy.”

“At the same time it has not lived up to all of its promises,” Smith said, citing disproportionately high incarceration and unemployment rates among blacks. “It’s a double-edged sword. While I want to praise, to celebrate my people and their progress, I can’t get too excited when the vast majority is still hurting.”

Smith said she has been called the N-word while crossing Lower King Street. She has been followed while perusing the merchandise in the shops there.

“I want to be able to tell my son (that) if you work hard, go to school, do everything right, you can do whatever you want to do,” she said. But it’s not true. “As long as racism exists there are going to be barriers. It can be disheartening to know that regardless of how hard I’ve worked, how much I studied ... the American Dream might still escape me. There are people in our community who will always think I’m not good enough.”

And the social landscape of the country betrays a painful reality, she said.

“We’re still segregated.”

A City Up the Coast

BY ADAM PARKER

There’s a lovely town on the East Coast that’s attracting a lot of attention. Its dynamic downtown is located on a peninsula that juts into the waterways by the Atlantic Ocean.

Downtown, one finds a growing number of excellent restaurants, nice shopping, pedestrian-friendly streets, access to a beautiful commercial waterfront, a hopping nightlife, several hotels (including a couple of new ones under construction), historic buildings nicely restored or preserved, residential pockets that are quickly gentrifying and numerous independent coffee shops and bakeries.

The city has a famous lighthouse nearby, lots of boat traffic and an urban population that skews young. The area originally was populated by Native Americans, until it was settled by the British in the 1600s. Its fortunes declined significantly in the latter half of the 20th century, but it has made a remarkable comeback.

The local economy depends heavily on tourism, timber (surrounding rural areas are forested) and a smattering of other economic activity. Recently, the city has attracted entrepreneurs in the technology and design fields. Traditional businesses — insurance and finance, real estate and construction, healthcare, light manufacturing — employ the majority of working residents.

An active port has helped make this metropolitan area the economic stronghold of the state. In addition to all the commercial transport, cruise ships bring vacationers to town, docking at a rate of one big boat per week.

Outdoor recreation, on land and sea, is widely pursued by the people who live there. Hiking, hunting and fishing are favorite activities. Oysters are very popular.

Politically, this urban area leans left, but the rest of this mostly rural state tends to adhere to Republican or Libertarian principles.

In October, my family and I left Charleston for this other booming port city — Portland, Maine — to visit friends and explore the far reaches of New England, a place we’d never been before.

I was struck by the uncanny similarities of the two cities. Portland has many more good coffee shops than Charleston. Charleston has many more good bars than Portland. But otherwise, things were very much in alignment.

Developments

Our friend Jim Brady, a College of Charleston graduate and medal-winning sailor, is building a $10 million boutique hotel in the heart of downtown. He and his team are refurbishing the old Portland Press Herald building, putting to use newspaper lexicon and design. The Press Hotel will open in 2015, if all goes smoothly. It’s yet another sign that Portland is transforming into a real destination.

Jim also is working on a shoreline project. At the end of the peninsula, near the East End neighborhood and along the railroad tracks, a mixed-use development with water access will be built. It’s one of the last in a long series of big projects that has reclaimed and protected the working waterfront, once threatened by zoning rules that permitted the construction of buildings unrelated to marine activity, such as condominium towers.

We were there as the leaves were flaming color and the cool sea air carried messages of the upcoming season across the harbor, cityscape and farmland. A diverse mix of locals walked along Congress Street, one of the main commercial arteries. The ragged homeless were visible; so were the flannel-clad Portlanders and working people.

The city center includes many late 19th- and early 20th-century structures: brick warehouses converted to offices and shops, old mills likewise transformed, the gorgeous Baxter Building, an example of Romanesque Revival style and once the Portland Public Library, now home to the VIA Agency, an advertising and marketing firm where Jim’s wife Julia Brady works. (She gave us a tour of the very cool interior, its design maintaining a playful library theme throughout.)

The Portland Museum of Art, which houses some good Winslow Homers and special exhibitions, is just down the street.

But we spent most of our time out and about, tooling around the harbor, noshing on a large variety of ultra-fresh oysters at Eventide Oyster Co. and exploring the lay of the land.

Outdoors

Julia, an avid sportswoman who, like her husband, once sailed competitively, showed us the Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area, accessible by driving past Brunswick to Bath, then down the length of one of those peninsulas that characterize the Maine coast. On the way we stopped for breakfast at a rustic outpost a little past Phippsburg called North Creek Farm, its proprietors both farmers and café operators. Colorful roosters had free reign of the outside eating area. Vegetables grew in rows behind the building. The food was delicious.

A short distance farther, down Small Pointe Road, we reached a parking area and the entrance to a pleasant trail through the woods and along the Sprague River that led to one of Maine’s most magnificent beaches — sandy, generous, sparkling. Ocean mist floated up the river basin. Low tide revealed graceful patterns beneath our feet. Small islands sat off shore. Only a few people milled about, breathing expansively.

This hike was relatively easy-going, but not all of them are. Maine, like South Carolina, is an outdoor adventurer’s paradise. On land, there are innumerable opportunities for hiking, camping, hunting and wintertime cross-country skiing. On the water, too, choices abound. The word “rugged” comes to mind quickly when experiencing this northern state with the fractured granite coast and three main regions — lowlands, uplands and mountains. Looking for moose? Go no farther. Hungry for blueberries? Maine grows about a quarter of the country’slowbush crop. And then there are those lobsters.

One night for dinner, we prepared a feast at the Brady home in Yarmouth that included one very fresh medium-sized lobster for my wife (I shared some). When I set the creature into the hot water, it kicked hard. And once it was cooked, the flesh was the most succulent I’ve ever tasted.

It’s wonderful that these lobsters are popular and abundant enough to export all around the world and down the east coast to Charleston. But there is really nothing like eating one just extracted from the waters of Maine.

On another afternoon we decided to go apple picking at Thompson’s Orchard, near New Gloucester. The generous groves contained several apple varieties, including Red Delicious, Fuji and Cortland. We loaded wheelbarrows, collecting the fruit with clasping pickers mounted to the end of long poles.

This was an especially good day for the kids, who broke a rule by climbing into one or two of the trees, then celebrated their bounty at home by making apple pie, the dessert that followed our lobster. Thompson’s doughnuts and cider deserve a shoutout: We bought plain and chocolate, washing them down with newly pressed juice. Heavenly.

Good eats

Back in the city, we trolled for good coffee in the early afternoon and alcoholic beverages in the late afternoon. Jim took us to a newly opened membership bar, slick and modern, with practiced mixologists unafraid to shake things up to a tasty froth.

We ate dinner one night at a restaurant called Grace, which occupied a converted neo-gothic church building and specialized in seasonal, local fare. The open kitchen was located at the altar; a huge bar sat in the middle of the nave and another above the narthex. An enormous ventilation system dominated the chancel, its fat ducts leading up and away into the apse.

It was slightly disconcerting to sip cocktails and gorge on roasted fish and caramelized green beans in a space originally meant for worship, one ritual substituting another. But it was also kind of cool.

Portland is quite a foodie’s paradise, it turns out, what with all the fresh seafood, emphasis on organic and seasonal produce and slew of excellent restaurants. Kind of like Charleston.

And that coastline is a sight to behold. No wonder Winslow Homer painted it so much. The sea crashing on the jagged granite, the foam and rush and wind, the sun’s sparkle, the fog’s translucent embrace, the boat horns in the distance, the energetic maritime commerce, the lobster hawkers — it’s all part and parcel of 3,500 miles of tidal shoreline. That’s more than California, more than North Carolina, more than Texas.

We left Maine to catch a flight out of Boston. Driving south, we stopped in Kennebunkport, a charming old fishing village positioned along the navigable part of the Kennebunk River. We meandered about, admiring the scenery and shops, before eating an early lunch at the Clam Shack.

Yum: fried clams, fresh lobster and french fries. It was a nice way to wrap up our first excursion to Maine. It left us hungry for more.