Founded in 1941, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was a national organization committed to combating racism and racial discrimination through nonviolent direct action.
Structurally, CORE was a democratically-run federation of local interracial chapters dedicated to nonviolence and social justice. But unlike the NAACP, CORE was not a mass- membership organization that anyone could join simply by signing up and paying dues. CORE members were expected to undergo training in nonviolence and participate in chapter activities. In some chapters, new members were placed on probationary status before becoming full voting-members — and chapters could expel members for cause after due process.
By the late 1950s, CORE was active in both the South and the North. While there were many similarities between CORE as it existed North and South, there were also some noticeable differences.
[In this context, 'North' refers to all areas outside of the former Confederate slave-states.]
Issues
In the South, Jim Crow dejure 'white-only' racial segregation was universal and overt in schools, housing, employment, public accommodations, services, courts and law-enforcement. It was publicly praised and defended by the white power-structure, and maintained by rigid custom, explicit segregation laws, cops, courts, economic power, mob violence, and white terrorism.
In the North, defacto racial segregation and discrimination were largely (though not entirely) semi-covert. Most whites in positions of power denied that widespread racial discrimination existed under their authority. Yet most of them were simultaneously enabling and enforcing racial inequality through legal subterfuge, financial manipulation, public policies, social pressure, and police suppression of 'malcontents,' 'troublemakers,' and 'subversives.'
Prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a few northern states did have civil rights laws related to public accommodations and services. But in a pattern of malign-neglect, those laws were little enforced — except in cases where organizations like CORE called public attention to violations.
Strategies and Tactics
In the North, CORE chapters opposed northern style racism with public education, extensive negotiation, and nonviolent direct action tactics such as small-scale picket lines, sit-ins, boycotts, civil disobedience, and occasional mass marches against segregated schools.
Their initial hope was to persuade those engaged in discrimination and segregation to change their behavior. While moral suasion did have some limited success, it proved ineffective in eliminating widespread systemic patterns that were deeply rooted in bigotry, greed, and political power. CORE then shifted to more militant protests designed to pressure businesses, bureaucrats, and politicians to alter their behavior by mobilizing community opinion and disrupting business-as-usual.
CORE chapters and student groups in the South also tried education and negotiation. But white business owners and government officials either refused even to meet with them at all or adamantly rejected any meaningful change. CORE tried the same small-group, sit-in tactics used in the North with some limited success in Upper South college towns. But by 1961 in the Deep South, racial polarization, police suppression, and white violence had become so intense that in most places those tactics were ineffective and prohibitively dangerous — unless they were part of a broad mass movement with widespread support and participation by the Black community.
CORE chapters and projects in the South then began focusing their efforts on community organizing around three goals:
In cooperation with other Civil Rights organizations, in both the North and the South, CORE also worked to build mass political support for enacting new federal civil rights laws — and enforcing the federal laws already on the books.
Organization & Participation
In the North, most CORE chapters were in medium and large urban areas and defined themselves geographically (Baltimore CORE, Brooklyn CORE, etc). Others were student chapters on college campuses (Columbia CORE, UCLA 'Bruin' CORE, etc). But in the South, most CORE chapters and projects were in rural areas, towns, and small cities, plus one large urban area — New Orleans.
All CORE chapters were autonomous and self-supported by member dues and donations from the public, but CORE community organizing projects in the South were funded and directed by CORE national and regional offices.
Both North and South, most CORE members who were active in chapters had day jobs or school classes and did civil rights work part time on the side. For the most part, those CORE chapters existed and worked in communities and on campuses as activist fringe groups outside of mainstream life.
In the South however, CORE organizing projects were staffed by full-time CORE organizers and volunteers who were deeply embedded in — and responsible to — Black communities that were directly engaged in the freedom struggle and who housed, fed, and protected the CORE workers from terrorist violence.
Violence and Danger
For everyone involved in the Freedom Movement, one profound difference between South and North was the level of danger faced by participants and activists. In the North, there was harassment and hands-on physical violence from white racists, but rarely (if ever) bombings, lynchings, or assassinations. In the North, arrests were mostly for misdemeanors, and police brutality was usually (though not always) of the club-upside-the-head and boot-on-the-neck variety.
In the rural areas and small towns of the South, the danger was an order of magnitude greater. Spontaneous attacks, beatings, mob violence, shootings, lynchings, assassinations, and terrorist bombings might be inflicted on anyone at any moment. There was round-the-clock surveillance by law enforcement, constant harassment by the cops, and frequent arrests on trumped up charges including phony felonies. In addition to jail, nonviolent protesters faced police clubs, tear gas, attack dogs — and the ever present potential of hair-trigger lethal force.
Nonviolence and Interracialism
Faced with white violence and police repression, there was broad support in southern Black communities for both nonviolent protest tactics and strategies, and also armed self-defense against white terrorists (though not against heavily-armed police). Out-numbered, out-gunned, and out-moneyed, it was clear that aggressive violence would inevitably result in savage police repression, movement-destroying prison sentences, and swift retaliation against the Black community as a whole by the White Citizens Council and Ku Klux Klan. Equally important, they also understood the soul-destroying effects that hate and violence inflicted on those who embraced or engaged in it. And Black parents were determined to prevent their children from going down that road.
In northern urban Black communities, however, there was far less support for nonviolent protest strategies and tactics. While most northern Blacks respected and appreciated the efforts of nonviolent CORE activists, few were willing to join them — and some (particularly young males) dismissed nonviolence as ineffective, disparaged those who engaged in it as unmanly, and condemned it as a form of submission to white power.
Along with nonviolence, interracialism — Blacks and whites working together — was a CORE fundamental principle. In the North, CORE chapters were racially integrated (though by the late 1960s some inner-city chapters were moving in a Black-nationalist direction).
In the South, through conviction or intimidation, very few white southerners dared take a public anti-racist stand by joining or working with a Freedom Movement organization. So by necessity, most CORE chapters in the South were entirely (or almost entirely) Black. CORE staff on organizing projects were mostly Black with a few whites, mostly from the North. During the summers of 1964 and 1965, a number of mostly northern white volunteers worked on summer projects.
White Attitudes
Among the white population in the South, there was scant support for either integration or Black voting rights. The majority of whites fervently believed in and fiercely defended the "southern way of life."
Among those southern whites who did support the Civil Rights Movement — or who were open to at least some form of racial-justice reform — most remained silent out of fear of economic retaliation by the White Citizens Councils and violent terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan. Even the slightest, most minimal gesture by a southern white such as giving water to Freedom Riders choking on smoke from a burning bus or inviting a northern white civil rights worker to share a meal, might result in being forced to flee their home and relocate out of state.
In the North, however, organizations such as CORE and the NAACP were able to mobilize significant white support for ending southern segregation and denial of voting rights. That northern white support helped pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act which targeted the Jim Crow system.
But a significant portion of those white northerners were noticeably less supportive of CORE's efforts to address northern-style systemic racism because doing so challenged their vested economic, political, and social interests in ways that ensuring voting rights and ending overt 'white-only' segregation in the South did not. It was insufficient support from northern whites — and a significant degree of outright opposition — that doomed the Civil Rights Act of 1966 because (among other matters) it targeted northern style housing and school segregation.
Outcomes
Over time, with great effort and sacrifice, Southern Freedom Movement organizations successfully used nonviolent protests and community organizing strategies to win passage of federal laws and influence judicial rulings that eventually overturned local segregation laws, altered government policies and procedures, and dismantled the legal foundation of southern Jim Crow.
But addressing northern style defacto discrimination required forcing landlords, private businesses, and large banks and corporations to alter racist practices that were highly profitable. And in many instances it also meant overcoming resistance from predominantly white trade unions.
Unlike southern Dixiecrats, those in the North who profited from racism fiercely denied that they were perpetuating segregation and discrimination or that their actions held any racist intent. Government policies that favored whites and disadvantaged nonwhites were disguised as racially neutral. For the most part, the northern mass media that had (at times) reported on the realities of the southern Jim Crow system remained silent on the realities of northern segregation and discrimination. And much of the northern media echoed the, "no racism here," claims of white politicians, government bureaucracies, and corporate officers.
In some instances, CORE's nonviolent actions and political organizing in the North had success in forcing specific reforms by individual businesses and local governments. But CORE and other nonviolent direct-action organizations were less successful in achieving broad, systemic, changes to entrenched northern style segregation and discrimination. By the late 1960s, CORE's lack of visible success in northern urban areas, combined with the rise of Black nationalism and widespread urban uprisings resulted in many CORE chapters withering away or transforming themselves.
In the South, as national civil rights laws and federal court decisions began to slowly dismantle southern-style dejure segregation and discrimination, the efforts of CORE activists, chapters and projects evolved towards political and electoral organizing, community development, and economic empowerment efforts that required new organizations and organizational forms.