[Founded in 1942, CORE pioneered the strategy and tactics of nonviolent direct action for racial justice in America. CORE and the NAACP, SCLC, and SNCC were the four national organizations that led the Mid-20th Century Civil Rights Movement.Until the end of the 1960s, CORE was a federation of autonomous chapters, most of which were active in the North. This overview covers CORE from its founding up through the end of the '60s with a primary emphasis on its activities in the South. Note that in this context, the term "North" refers to all the states outside of the former slave-states of the South.]
Contents:
CORE: Founding, 1941-1946
CORE: Journey of Reconciliation, 1947
CORE: Hanging On, 1948-1954
CORE: Southern Beginnings, 1955-1959
CORE: Sit-Ins, 1960
CORE: Freedom Rides, 1961
CORE: Nonviolent Direct Action in the South: 1962-1963
CORE: Voter Registration & Community Organizing, 1963-1966
CORE: South and North Compared
CORE: NYC World Fair Stall-in & Protests, 1964
CORE: Freedom Summer, 1964
CORE: Mississippi & Louisiana 1965-1967
CORE: Meredith March & Black Power 1966
CORE: In Decline, 1966-1968
In the Fall of 1941, students at the University of Chicago and young activists with the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FoR) coalesce into a small study group committed to racial equality and determined to struggle for it. Most of them have come of political age in the 1930s — the Depression era of economic privation and fierce civil rights, anti-lynching, and labor struggles. They are pacifists and Conscientious Objectors at a time when war is raging across Europe and Asia and the U.S. is rapidly arming itself. They believe that the strategies and tactics of nonviolent resistance can, and must, be used to oppose racial discrimination and injustice in America.
"All of us were afire with the ideas of Gandhian nonviolence" — Bernice Fisher.
"[Racism] must be challenged directly, without violence or hatred, yet without compromise." — George Houser. [1]
Among them is James Farmer, 21 years old and an FoR staff member. Farmer drafts a memo to FoR head A.J. Muste proposing the formation of a new national civil rights organization dedicated to using Gandhian nonviolence against American racism — a radical departure from the lawsuits, lobbying, and self-help strategies favored by existing organizations such as the NAACP and Urban League.
[It must have] "a distinctive and radical approach. It must strive ... not to make housing in ghettos more tolerable, but to destroy residential segregation; not to make Jim Crow facilities the equal of others, but to abolish Jim Crow; not to make racial discrimination more bearable, but to wipe it out. ... We must effectively repudiate every form of racism. We must forge the instrumentalities through which that nationwide repudiation can be effected. We must not stop until racial brotherhood is established in the United States as a fact, as well as an ideal." — James Farmer, February, 1942. [2]
In the Spring of 1942, Farmer presents his proposal to the FoR National Council. While many council members are supportive, others oppose it because in they see boycotts, sit-ins, and other disruptive protests as 'coercive' — and therefore neither 'loving' nor 'nonviolent' as they define those concepts. Farmer responds, "If our efforts to change minds and hearts through negotiation fail, we have only two alternatives: (1) to walk away and allow the objectionable policy to continue, or (2) to apply pressure. Only the latter option is acceptable to us."
The Fellowship agrees to continue paying Farmer his minuscule salary while he attempts to organize his proposed group on a trial basis in Chicago. But it's to be organizationally independent of the Fellowship. By April of 1942, Farmer has pulled together an active committee including Bernice Fisher, Joe Guinn, George Houser, Homer Jack, James Robinson, and others. In June, a conference of delegates from nine Midwest cities forms a national organization.
Initially, they name their organization 'Committee Of Racial Equality.' Some years later they change it to 'Congress Of Racial Equality' (CORE). They choose "Of" rather than "On" because:
"The organization, in its structure, its methods, and its very being, would reflect the objective it sought. Like a seed, a real core, it would germinate and radiate its equality in wider and wider circles until it encompassed the whole nation." — James Farmer, April, 1942. [2]
The conference adopts a Statement of Purpose proclaiming that: "It is false to speak of a 'Negro problem.' Rather there is a human problem that can be only be eliminated by the joint efforts of all who believe in the brotherhood of man." And it declares that, "CORE has one method — interracial, nonviolent direct action." It further decrees that CORE members are expected to be active in CORE's work (in other words, no 'paper members').
The conference also adopts a CORE Action Discipline that requires CORE members to understand and adhere to nonviolence and lays out the steps and processes to be followed. Over time, the Action Discipline evolves into the CORE Rules for Action.
Rather than a mass-membership organization like the NAACP, they establish CORE as a small band of trained, dedicated, and self-disciplined activists. In the later words of an Urban League leader, "The Urban League is the State Department of civil rights; the NAACP is the War Department; and CORE is the marines" [2] (CORE members, of course, do not welcome being equated with or characterized as a military organization.)
CORE is initially structured as a loose federation of independent locals (later referred to as 'chapters') who adhere to the CORE Statement and Discipline. According to George Houser, "We do not aim for a strong national organization, but for a federation of strong local groups." Farmer is elected national Chairman and Fisher national Secretary-Treasurer. [1]
Chicago CORE and the other chapters begin implementing their strategy of fighting racism with nonviolent direct action. Illinois has a civil rights law prohibiting race-based discrimination and segregation by private businesses that serve the public — a law that is ignored and evaded. CORE forces a University of Chicago barbershop to serve all students regardless of race, and uses sit-ins to end the 'white-only' polices of a nearby coffee shop and a large restaurant. Though small in scope, these early direct action efforts teach CORE leaders important lessons as they develop and refine their strategies and tactics.
Though the newly-formed CORE achieves some victories it also endures defeats — the large White City roller-rink, for example. Originally built in a white working class neighborhood, by the mid 1940s it is in the heart of Chicago's Southside Black ghetto. Yet it continues to illegally bar Blacks from skating. After it rejects CORE's negotiation efforts, Chicago CORE tries nonviolent direct action, but they do not have the numbers it would take to disrupt the huge operation. They then file legal charges against it under the Illinois civil rights law and they prove their case in court. But a racist and corrupt State Attorney seizes control of their case and torpedoes it. White City is allowed to continue its illegal discrimination. CORE leaders conclude that they can neither trust nor rely on a corrupt legal system.
By 1947, the half-dozen or so chapters of 1942 have grown to more than a dozen. Over time, some chapters survive, others dissolve, and new ones are formed. A majority of chapters are in Midwest cities (Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Oberlin, Detroit, Kansas City) with a few in the East (New York, Syracuse, Baltimore), and a few in the West (Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco). Though affiliated with CORE, some chapters use names other than 'CORE.' The large chapter in Columbus OH, for example, is known as the 'Vanguard League.' In Baltimore it's the 'Interracial Fellowship.' [For simplicity's sake, this article refers to all affiliated chapters as 'CORE.']
In states where racial discrimination in public accommodations is illegal by state law, the fledgling CORE chapters have both successes and failures in desegregating dining and recreation facilities. But against racial practices that are not prohibited by state civil rights laws such as employment discrimination, they make little progress. And against northern-style defacto school and housing segregation no progress at all.
Main Article: CORE Journey of Reconciliation
The former slave states of the Confederacy are America's bastion of white supremacy. To seriously address American racism, the anti-racist activists of CORE know they have to find some way to confront it in the South. There are no civil rights laws in the South. Instead, the legal system requires and mandates racial segregation and discrimination. Southern race laws are vigorously enforced by police and courts. In the South, integration is a crime punishable by arrest, prison, and terrorist violence.
In 1946, the Supreme Court rules in the Morgan case that racial segregation in inter-state transportation is unconstitutional. Their ruling is ignored throughout the Upper and Deep South — buses, trains, and depots remain thoroughly segregated.
Bayard Rustin and George Houser are active with both CORE and FoR. In 1942, Rustin had been beaten and detained by police in Nashville TN for refusing to move to the back of an interstate bus. In 1947, they organize an integrated bus journey through the Upper South to confront state and local authorities with the Morgan ruling. They call it a Journey of Reconciliation. They line up lawyers, raise funds, contact local Afro-American leaders, and organize meetings in the southern communities they intend to visit.
Though the Journey of Reconciliation garners publicity, it fails to establish that nonwhites can safely implement the Morgan ruling in the Upper South. It does, however, strengthen the CORE national office as an entity that can — at times — engage in actions on its own behalf rather than being limited to only supporting the chapters.
The 1947 Journey of Reconciliation raises CORE's profile among both civil rights activists and advocates of nonviolence. Membership grows, and the number of chapters rises to 20 by 1950. For the most part, their nonviolent strategies and tactics target segregation and discrimination in dining and recreation facilities. But while some chapters are vibrant and active, others are less so, and some are nearly dormant.
After 1950, however, membership and chapter growth stalls. Much of this decline can be attributed to McCarthyism, the anti-communist 'Red Scare' hysteria against so-called 'subversives' that poisons and paralyzes America political life. McCarthyite political denunciations and persecutions create a culture of mass intimidation where questioning authority, dissent in any form, or any kind of public protest, is viewed by many as suspected treason — or at the very least as 'Un-American.'
Many white political leaders — particularly in the South — view advocacy for racial desegregation or nonwhite voting rights to be the very definition of 'communist treason.' So too do many white religious leaders, business owners, publishers, and politicians, all of whom proclaim that demanding civil rights for nonwhite Americans is a vile plot to subvert America and destroy the "Southern Way of Life." They view the NAACP as a vile threat that must be crushed — and if they are aware of the small, fledgling CORE they see it as even worse.
To defenders of the Jim Crow racial order, Truman's 1948 executive orders desegregating the military and ending racial discrimination in the Civil Service are examples of 'communist subversion.' So too are Supreme Court decisions striking down racially-restrictive residential covenants, prohibiting white-only primaries, forcing colleges to admit nonwhites, and barring segregation in interstate travel. And those decisions are also seen as unacceptable federal subjugation of "states rights."
While the NAACP and the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) are the main African American targets of anti-communist venom, some is directed against CORE chapters where they exist. And across the nation, people of all races and all walks of life fear that any association with 'subversive' and radical groups like the NAACP, CRC and CORE might endanger their livelihoods or social standing.
At the same time though, in some northern states civil rights protests, court rulings, state laws, and basic business economics are (very slowly) putting an end to explicit, white-only segregation policies and practices in public accommodations and services. But in states without civil rights laws, CORE education campaigns, picket lines, sit-ins, and boycotts, prove ineffective. And since state laws and rulings do not address entrenched forms of housing and school segregation, covert employment discrimination, or racially-motivated police brutality, CORE chapters have no clear strategy for waging effective nonviolent resistance against these forms of systemic racism.
Structural weakness and internal dissension also contribute to CORE's decline. Most chapters are too small to hire staff. They rely on one or more key individuals for the hard, time-consuming, nuts-and-bolts work required to organize the protests, events, and meetings that the less involved members participate in. When those key activists fall away, or move, or refocus their energies on a different organization or issue, the chapter withers and declines — or entirely ceases to exist.
After the Journey of Reconciliation, CORE's national officers see the need for national programs and staff. They want to hire field staff to organize new chapters, strengthen existing ones, and revive chapters that have fallen into decline or become moribund. But chapter leaders oppose structural changes intended to strengthen the national office and increase its funding because they see their local autonomy as essential for maintaining democracy.
Individual CORE members pay their dues to their local chapter, but few chapters share that income with the national office as they are required to do. Most don't even allow the national office to send fund appeals to their members. So national CORE barely survives on a small trickle of individual donations. And without a part-time fundraiser they are unable to increase that income.
Ideological disagreements over nonviolent strategies and tactics also roil the chapters and annual convention. There is general agreement that efforts must always be made to change racist practices and policies through persuasion and negotiation. But what if those responsible for discrimination and segregation are not won over? Most CORE members and leaders view disruptive nonviolent tactics such as blocking an entrance, occupying tables in a sit-in, picketing or boycotting, as justified and necessary to the CORE mission of combating racial discrimination. But as was the case with FoR leaders when CORE was founded, others see those tactics as coercive — and thus antithetical to nonviolent reconciliation.
CORE convention delegates also fiercely debate whether civil disobedience — willfully breaking a law — is ever acceptable. When the Journey of Reconciliation riders disobeyed local segregation ordinances they were obeying a federal court ruling, which some CORE leaders rationalize as not really committing civil disobedience. But in 1948, A. Philip Randolph calls on Black men to refuse to be drafted or pay their income tax if President Truman fails to desegregate the military. Delegates to the annual CORE convention split over whether to support or participate in Randolph's action, finally approving it by a narrow vote.
By 1954, the number of CORE chapters has declined to a nadir of only ten — Baltimore, New York, and Washington in the East; Chicago, Cincinnati, Columbia, Evanston, Omaha, and St. Louis in the heartland, and Pasadena in the West. Membership is down, though by how much is difficult to determine because some chapters do not update or share their member lists with the national office.
The Supreme Court's 1954 Brown school segregation decision begins to (ever so slowly) awaken northern whites to the evils of segregation and shift some of their attitudes on race. And the 1955-1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott and its leader Dr. King begin to popularize and spread awareness of nonviolent resistance as a strategy/tactic for social change.
Interest in CORE begins to increase.
With most chapters still moribund or ineffective, CORE leaders at the New York national office pull together a National Action Committee (NAC) in 1956, "... to act on immediate situations as they arise." Initially, it is composed of CORE founders and long-time leaders James and Lula Farmer, George Houser, James Robinson, Charles Oldham, and Leroy Carter, In 1957, CORE convention delegates ratify the NAC as a new national leadership group, authorizing it, "... to initiate and develop action programs and projects in the name of the national organization." James Robinson is appointed Executive Secretary. [1]
By 1957, school desegregation efforts in Nashville and Little Rock bring increased national attention to civil rights and segregation. CORE's national income triples to $12,000 (equal to $130,000 in 2024 dollars). A few organizers and staff are hired. By 1958, CORE has the resources to print a quantity of two brochures, This is CORE and the CORE Rules for Action.
A fund appeal letter co-signed by Dr. King is sent to almost 100,000 prospective donors. By 1959, CORE has doubled its national donor base from 4500 to over 9000, CORE chapters in the North are becoming more active, and the organization takes its first steps into the South.
The South is central to the civil rights struggle. The Brown decision and the school integration battles that follow, the southern bus boycotts in Baton Rouge Montgomery, and Tallahassee, CORE efforts to promote and support the bus boycotts in the North, and the rising influence of Dr. King, all spark increased interest in nonviolent resistance. Which opens opportunities for CORE in southern Black communities.
Bayard Rustin, long associated with CORE, joins Dr. King in Montgomery to advise on nonviolent tactics and strategies and aid the bus boycott with his organizing skills. By the mid 1950s, CORE has two chapters on the edge of the South in Baltimore MD and Washington DC.
National CORE leaders begin to focus on forming chapters in the Jim Crow states of the former Confederacy. One of the first is a CORE chapter in Nashville TN. Anna Holden, a southern white woman and professor at Fisk University (an HCBU), plays a leading role in forming the new chapter. In response to the Brown decision, Tennessee is the first state in the South to admit a tiny handful of Black children to a few formerly all-white grade schools. First in Clinton in 1956 and then in Nashville in 1957. White supremacists mobilize violent anti-integration mobs and engage in acts of terrorism to intimidate Black parents, children, and school boards. The Nashville CORE chapter tries to counter them by supporting Black families and politically opposing mob violence.
In 1957, James McCain — an NAACP leader from Sumter SC (Clarendon County) — is hired as CORE's first southern field secretary. He organizes CORE chapters in Sumter, Columbia, and Rock Hill SC. In 1958, two pamphlets written by Holden (A First Step Toward School Integration and Chronology of Events, Nashville School Desegregation) are used nationwide by CORE for fundraising and recruitment. But then Holden leaves Nashville for a teaching position in Michigan where she remains active in CORE leadership. As is often the case with small local groups, after the departure of a key leader the Nashville chapter wanes.
The CORE constitution requires that chapters be interracial. But except for Nashville, southern CORE chapters are all-Black because southern whites who might wish to work with CORE face economic retaliation from the White Citizens Councils and violent terrorism from the Ku Klux Klan. Recognizing this reality, CORE removes the interracial requirement from the CORE constitution. Whites are still welcome in CORE, but most of the southern chapters are all-Black or nearly so. On the other hand, whites form the majority of chapter members in areas like the West where the Black population is small, and also in campus chapters at overwhelmingly-white universities and colleges.
In the late-1950s, southern CORE chapters are primarily composed of adults with families to support, but anyone who defies white-only segregation risks violent terrorism against their homes and children. Small-scale, nonviolent direct action sit-ins and picket lines against segregation and discrimination are the foundation tactics of northern CORE chapters. Yet in the South, segregation is mandated by law, and anyone who defies it with nonviolent protests is immediately arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to lengthy incarceration. So in Upper South states like Tennessee, CORE focuses on supporting court-mandated school desegregation. In Deep South states like South Carolina, CORE tries to implement the weak voting-rights provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 by engaging in voter-registration efforts — with little success.
Summer interracial workshops are a CORE organizing strategy in the late 1950s. These workshops draw volunteers from different chapters to spend the summer in a specific city — Washington DC and Miami FL, for example — for intensive training in nonviolent strategies and tactics; and direct action sit-ins and protests against segregation to put theory into practice. The workshops seek to involve local participants and partner with a local CORE chapter if there is one (or leave an active CORE chapter behind at the end of the summer if there isn't one). The volunteers then take their training and experience back to their home communities to strengthen their chapters and form new ones.
Though Florida is a Jim Crow southern state, in terms of racial attitudes and customs the Miami metropolitan area is more akin to a border-state city where at least a few whites are willing to support integration and organizations like CORE. In the Fall of 1959, the small Miami CORE chapter and the Miami Interracial Action Institute begin lunch-counter sit-ins at two local department stores. Rather than serve Black customers, the stores temporarily close down their lunch counters, but the effort does result in a new, primarily student-based CORE chapter in Tallahassee, home of Florida A&M and Florida State.
CORE: South and North Compared
Main Articles: CORE & the Sit-Ins
Sit Ins: The Students Report CORE pamphlet
Tallahassee Students Gassed & Arrested
By 1959, young Black men and women in the South are no longer willing to endure lives circumscribed by the laws and customs of Jim Crow. The courtroom strategy of the NAACP is taking too long and has achieved too little. Something has to be done and someone has to do it. If their elders won't — can they? Will they?
As the last days of the last Jim Crow decade count down, CORE has just 8 active chapters in the South (two in Florida, six in South Carolina). SCLC has between 30-40 affiliates across a region that spans Texas to Maryland, some of them active, others moribund. The NAACP, the oldest and largest of the organizations, has 200+ southern branches and around 170 Youth groups, but they are all under ruthless attack by the White Citizens Council and state governments — they're on the defensive and fighting just to survive.
In dorms and church basements, small groups of Black students begin to study and debate the strategies and tactics of Nonviolent Resistance. Under cover of church, YMCA, and educational conferences, students from different schools meet. And argue. And dream. And plan. Can Gandhi's strategies be applied to the segregated South? Can the nonviolent tactics of the Montgomery Bus Boycott be adapted to opposing segregation in commercial establishments? Is it too dangerous? How will being arrested affect education and future careers? Can they do it? Will they do it? Beneath the notice of the white power-structure they begin to build phone trees and networks.
Among their elders, some too are equally restless. On January 24, 1960, A. Philip Randolph issues A Call for Immediate Mass Action at a huge mass meeting in Carnegie Hall. Eight days later, on February 1st, 1960, four Black students sit down at a Greensboro NC lunch counter and ask for a cup of coffee. Though it's not the first lunch counter sit-in, not even the first in the heart of the solidly segregated South, it IS the one that sparks a prairie fire of defiance that explodes across the South.
Suddenly there is enormous demand for explanations of — and training in — nonviolent strategies and tactics. Nationally, CORE has a field staff of just three. SCLC is understaffed and unprepared. And the NAACP has deep reservations about direct action of any kind — and in some instances outright opposition.
In the few southern communities where CORE has active chapters such as Tallahassee FL and Rock Hill SC, they swing into action with the local student sit-ins. National CORE dispatches field secretaries James McCain and Gordon Carey to the Carolinas. Elsewhere, though, young students new to activism have to rely on CORE and SCLC direct action literature (if they have any) or just vague, inaccurate, and in some cases wildly distorted newspaper accounts for tactical advice.
Though widespread across the entire South, since they are student-based most of the sit-ins only occur in college towns.
The sit-ins generate publicity and an increased awareness of nonviolent direct action that CORE uses to leverage fundraising which allows it to increase its field and office staff. In the later half of 1960, a strategic decision is made to concentrate CORE field workers in Rock Hill SC to support the ongoing sit-in campaign and in New Orleans LA where a vigorous new CORE chapter is formed.
"If we are to really crack the Deep South, then we must have concerted and continued action in South Carolina since that is where most of our strength lies at present, ... [and if] we are successful in New Orleans, this will be one of the first times that interracial direct action has penetrated so far into the Deep South on a consistent planned basis. What happens in New Orleans can be meaningful to the entire South." — Gordon Carey. [1]
CORE is the first national organization to begin mobilizing support in the North for southern sit-ins. It's small central office calls for protests outside Woolworth, Kress, and other chain stores.
"We set up our original picket line at a Woolworth store in the heart of Harlem on the second Saturday after the Greensboro sit-in. Within a half hour the store was cleared of customers. Hardly anybody on this busy thoroughfare crossed our picket lines. I looked in through the glass doors and could see that the employees looked puzzled at the store's emptiness on such a busy Saturday afternoon," — Martin Smolin, CORE. (Columbia University). [7]
CORE leaders Marvin Carey and Jim Peck try to open negotiations with chain store executives but have scant success. Regardless of how corporate executives might personally feel about segregation, small and sporadic racial-justice boycotts by northern civil rights supporters cannot compare to the massive white boycotts in the South that the White Citizens Councils would mount against any chain that agreed to integrate their lunch counters.
The sit-in support effort does however revitalize existing CORE chapters and stimulate formation of new ones in communities and on college campuses. It also triggers a significant increase in donations that allow CORE to begin hiring additional staff.
Main Article: CORE Freedom Rides
In the Upper South, white power structures respond to the sit-ins with arrests and sporadic violence from white supremacists, yet some lunch counters and other facilities are desegregated in some locales. But those hard won victories are few. In Deep South, sit-in movements are ruthlessly quashed by police repression and savage mob violence.
By early 1961, the Rock Hill SC sit-in movement has run into a stone wall of racist resistance. To re-energize the movement, CORE organizer Tom Gaither proposes a "Freedom Ride," similar to the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, through Rock Hill and the Deep South. The CORE national office agrees to coordinate the ride.
On May 4, 1961, CORE Director James Farmer leads 13 Freedom Riders (7 Black, 6 white) out of Washington on Greyhound and Trailways buses with an itinerary traveling through Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, with a final stop and large rally in New Orleans, Louisiana.
The riders endure mob violence, police harassment, a firebombed bus, mass arrest, and prison time. New Freedom Riders from CORE, SNCC, and SCLC come forth to continue the rides. From June through August, more than 60 additional freedom rides criss-cross the South (map). The majority of them are organized by CORE chapters in the North.
By the end of the summer, more than 300 riders have been jailed, most of them in Mississippi. Under intense public pressure, the Kennedy administration finally orders the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to issue and enforce a desegregation order that finally implements the 1946 Morgan and 1960 Boynton rulings.
The courage of the Riders so inspires hope in Black communities across the South that for years thereafter all civil rights activists are referred to as "Freedom Riders."
As the heat of blast furnace-fire hardens iron into steel, so does the gut-wrenching courage it takes to willingly face mob violence and dank jail cells forge college students into life-long social justice activists. And serving time in Mississippi's worst prisons welds bonds of commitment and shared determination that are never broken. Out of Mississippi's Parchman prison and county jails step young men and women whose names become CORE, SNCC, and SCLC legends in the coming years of struggle. And those three organizations become seen as the direct action and community-organizing wing of the movement in comparison to the litigation & legislation wing led by the NAACP and Urban League.
Before the Freedom Rides, CORE and its leader James Farmer are little known to the general public, but the rides propel them into the public spotlight. CORE quickly becomes the largest and most important direct action civil rights organization outside of the South, with active chapters in almost every major Northern city and many college campuses. And in the South, new CORE chapters are formed in the Carolinas, Florida, and Louisiana.
Main Articles: CORE Direct Action in the South
Following the Freedom Rides, CORE expands its southern direct action campaigns. Among notable efforts are the Route 40 and Freedom Highways projects in Maryland, Virginia, and further south; mass action campaigns against segregation in Durham and Greensboro NC; the Mailman's March and protests in Gadsden AL, and fierce confrontations in Plaquemine LA. The arrest of CORE field secretary Mary Hamilton in Gadsden leads to a Supreme Court victory that protects the rights of court defendants to this day.
Desegregate
Route 40 Project.
1961-62
Freedom Highways Project. 1962-1963
Mass Action in Durham NC. 1963
Mass Action in Greensboro NC. 1963
The Mailman's March AL. 1963
Savage Repression in Gadsden AL
Man-Hunt in Plaquemine LA. 1963
Main Articles: CORE Organizing in Mississippi
Canton Project, (Madison County)
Meridian Project (Lauderdale County)
Funds from the Voter Education Project (VEP) become available in mid-1962. CORE and SNCC significantly enlarge their field staff and increase both the size and number of their voter-registration/community-organizing projects in the South.
CORE in the South starts to shift its main focus from direct action against Jim Crow segregation to winning a fair share of political power for Black communities through voting-rights, voter-registration, and political organizing. It expands existing projects and establishes new ones in Louisiana, Mississippi, the Carolinas, and some of the Black-majority counties in the Florida Panhandle.
Since both CORE and SNCC are already operating in Mississippi, CORE takes responsibility for the state's 4th Congressional District.
CORE in Louisiana expands outward from its New Orleans and Baton Rouge bases to cities in the northern and central portions of the state — Shreveport, Monroe, Alexandria, Jonesboro, and others.
CORE activists also establish a number of projects in heavily Black counties of the North Florida Panhandle — Escambia, Okaloosa, Bay, Jackson, Gadsden, Leon, Jefferson, Madison, and Suwanee.
Main Article: CORE & the New York World's Fair
The hugely expensive New York World's Fair of 1964-1965 is a major (and massive) cultural event. It is also an expression of American triumphalism that takes place in a racial/political context defined by the Civil Rights Movement's challenge to white-supremacy and an intense White Backlash by defenders of the old order.
When the fair opens in April of 1964, CORE mounts significant and controversial protests against both the Fair and entrenched systemic racism and discrimination in New York — and America.
Main Articles: CORE & Freedom Summer
Mississippi Freedom Summer Documents
Lynching of Chaney, Schwerner, & Goodman
CORE Louisiana Summer Task Forces & Projects Documents
CORE North Florida Citizenship Education Project Documents
In 1962, SNCC, CORE, NAACP, and SCLC, form the COFO organizing coalition in Mississippi. CORE takes responsibility for Mississippi's 4th Congressional District.
In 1964, COFO organizes the Mississippi Summer Project to bring northern volunteers — mostly students, mostly white — into the state to support voting rights and community organizing. Commonly referred to as "Freedom Summer," the concept grows to encompass multiple organizations including legal, medical, religious, and social support groups, and expands across state lines into Louisiana and Florida.
By the end of Freedom Summer, CORE has organizing presences in Mississippi's 4th congressional district, Louisiana, and North Florida.
Freedom Summer ends in August of 1964. Some of the summer projects fade away, but others continue on into 1965. Most of the volunteers return to the North where many of them engage in political activism around racial-justice and other issues. But a number of them remain in the South working in the county or town they had been assigned, or they become CORE or SNCC staff members assigned wherever needed. In the summer of 1965, some of the 1964 volunteers return to work in the communities they had grown to love the previous year.
Yet across the South, defiance of the Civil Rights Act by segregationists, racial incitement and demagoguery by Dixiecrat politicians, police repression, economic retaliation and displacement by the White Citizens Councils, and terrorist violence by the Ku Klux Klan, continues unabated. So CORE projects in Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, and the Carolinas, soldier on, determined to end Jim Crow and win voting rights for nonwhite Americans.
Jonesboro LA & Deacons for Defense and Justice
Main Article: Deacons of Defense & Justice
The CORE project in Jonesboro Louisiana endures police surveillance, harassment and retaliatory arrests. It also faces constant threats of violence, cross-burnings, church bombings and rural-road ambushes. A caravan of more than 25 Klan trucks and cars filled with armed men whose identities are concealed by white hoods, parades through the "Quarters," Jonesboro's main Black neighborhood. Black men in the community organize themselves to defend both their homes and the nonviolent CORE workers against KKK violence — with guns if necessary. They legally incorporate themselves as the Deacons for Defense and Justice.
CORE and the Deacons and work closely with each other. CORE's role is community organizing, voter registration, and nonviolent direct action against the Jim Crow "southern way of life." The Deacon's role is to defend the community and civil rights workers from white terrorism and mob violence. Knowing that they and their families have at least some protection from Klan retaliation emboldens young nonviolent protesters and in December of 1964 they win their first victory by forcing the library to desegregate in accordance with the Civil Rights Act.
The Deacon's model of disciplined self-defense in partnership with CORE organizers is welcomed in many Black communities that are besieged by Klan violence. Deacons chapters spread to other Louisiana towns and into Mississippi as well.
Bogalusa LA
Main Article: Confronting the Klan in Bogalusa With Nonviolence & Self-Defense
Bogalusa Louisiana is a company-town controlled by the Crown-Zellerbach corporation (today the Georgia-Pacific conglomerate). Both company and town have a long history of union-busting, racial violence and Black resistance. It sits next to the Pearl River border with Mississippi — a bi-state region colloquially known as "Klan Nation."
At the request of Bogalusa's Black community, in January of 1965 CORE assigns organizers to work with Black youth to test compliance with the Civil Rights Act. Whites heckle, abuse, and assault the teenage Black girls and boys who defy segregation day after day in the downtown business district. The local Klan renames itself the, "Anti-Communist Christian Association," and threatens to lynch the two CORE organizers. Black military-veterans come together as a chapter of the Deacons for Defense and Justice to defend their community and the outside civil rights workers. CORE sends in more staff organizers and also volunteers from the UC Berkeley CORE chapter across the Bay from Crown-Zellerbach's San Francisco California headquarters.
For months, nonviolent protesters in "Bloody Bogalusa" defy Jim Crow segregation and the white mobs and cops who assault them while the armed Deacons defend the community and the protesters from the KKK. CORE leader James Farmer leads dangerous mass marches. The Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) deploys nurses and doctors as emergency medics to what has become a freedom battle zone.
The Klansmen and mob members knew that Bogalusa cops and sheriffs won't arrest them for assaulting demonstrators, CORE organizers, or news reporters. (Nonviolent protesters, of course, are arrested on the slightest excuse.) A lawsuit forces the county to hire two Black sheriffs — the first ever. A white racist shoots both of them, killing deputy O'Neal Moore and maiming David Rogers. The terrorist assassin is apprehended in another state and identified as a member of the White Citizens Council and Ku Klux Klan. The state of Louisiana never brings him to trial. The state does, however, use an obscure technicality to deny O'Neal's widow her survivor's benefits.
Finally, after more than six months of rampaging white mobs, KKK terrorism, racist police brutality, and collusion on the part of local and state government, the Department of Justice in Washington bestirs itself to at long last enforce the Civil Rights Acts, federal court orders, and the U.S. Constitution. The Bogalusa police are enjoined from aiding and abetting the Klan. Facing some actual risk of fines — or maybe even jail — the white mobs abruptly evaporate from the streets while overt, public, Klan violence is largely (though not entirely) suppressed.
Selma and the Voting Rights Act
Main Articles:
Selma & The March to
Montgomery
Passage of the Voting Rights
Act
As 1964 comes to an end, Dr. King and SCLC reinforce the voting-rights campaign in Selma Alabama that SNCC has been organizing since early 1963. In early January 1965, the injunction that has stymied the campaign since July of '64 is broken. The reinvigorated Selma Voting Rights Campaign commences mass marches and hundreds of Black citizens line up at the Dallas County courthouse on registration days. Hundreds, then thousands, of students and adults are arrested. Those who try to become registered voters endure firings, evictions, and violence. The mass action campaign spreads to surrounding Alabama counties.
CORE has little presence in Alabama and most of its attention and resources are focused on Bogalusa, but some CORE activists participate in the Selma protests and CORE chapters in the North mobilize financial and political support for Bogalusa, Selma, and a national voting rights bill. In August, the Voting Rights Act (VRA) is finally enacted into law. At first, federal enforcement is slow, timid, and inadequate in the face of fierce Dixiecrat resistance. But over time, as enforcement strengthens, the VRA takes hold and, arguably, becomes the most effective and important civil rights legislation ever enacted.
In 1965, less than 7% of Mississippi Blacks are registered, by 1988 it's almost 75% (compared to 80% for whites). Similar enormous increases occur in other southern states. The number of Latino and Native American voters across the country also increase dramatically. Many observers credit the large blocs of Black and Latino voters in Virginia, Florida, New Mexico, and Colorado for President Obama's 2008 and 2012 victories. Without the Voting Rights Act, those citizens would have been denied the right to vote.
Main Article: Meredith Mississippi March and Black Power
By 1966, CORE is in turmoil. The community rage revealed by the urban ghetto uprisings, internal racial tensions, and rising Black nationalism, challenge CORE's two founding principles of nonviolence and interracialism. In January of 1966, James Farmer, who has led CORE since the 1940s and is its best known leader, resigns. He is replaced by North Carolina CORE leader Floyd McKissick.
SNCC too is experiencing similar problems, and in May of 1966, John Lewis who had been Chairman since 1963, is replaced by SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Ture]. And for its part, SCLC is struggling to shift its focus towards poverty and economic justice.
While enforcement of the VRA eventually dismantles most of the legal and procedural barriers that were used for generations to prevent nonwhite Americans from voting, in the Deep South of 1966 people of color who try to vote still face police harassment and arrest on trumped up charges, economic retaliation organized by the White Citizens Councils, and violent terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan.
On June 5th, 1966, James Meredith who famously integrated 'Ol Miss in 1962 commences a March Against Fear with two goals: To "...challenge all-pervasive fear that dominates the day to day life of the Negro United States, especially in the South, and particularly in Mississippi;" and to "...encourage the 450,000 unregistered Negroes in Mississippi to go to the polls and register."
On June 6th, Meredith crosses the Tennessee-Mississippi state line. A few hours later he is shot and severely wounded by a white-supremacist. Renaming it the Meredith Mississippi March Against Fear, CORE, SNCC, SCLC, and local MFDP and NAACP activists take up his march to Jackson MS. For more than 200 miles, the Deacons for Defense guard them from KKK terrorists.
As is true for the broader Civil Rights Movement, the march is internally riven by debates and tensions around goals, white-participation and Black nationalism, nonviolence versus self-defense, and then the call for Black Power. Floyd McKissick and most CORE staff members strongly support the call for Black Power.
I liked the expression Black Power, and it was not the first time it had been used. It wasn't the first time that Stokely had used it. I had used the expression, and many other people had used it. ... Black Power is a movement dedicated to the exercise of American democracy in its highest tradition; it is a drive to mobilize the Black communities of this country in a monumental effort to remove the basic causes of alienation, frustration, despair, low self-esteem and hopelessness. ... I think it scared people because they did not understand, they could not subtract violence from power. They could only see power as having a violent instrument accompanying it. In the last analysis, it was a question of how Black Power would be defined. And it was never really defined." — Floyd McKissick, CORE. [11]
On June 23rd, the Meredith March crosses into Madison County which is 70% Black and has been a CORE stronghold since 1963 when CORE began organizing in Canton. Almost a year after the VRA, Blacks now make up almost half of all registered voters. But since no local elections have yet taken place, all elected and appointed government officials in both city and county are still white — and they are determined to maintain White Power by any means necessary.
A huge posse of heavily-armed local and state lawmen surround and savagely attack the marchers, clubbing down men, women, and children with rifle butts and billy clubs. Both regular CS tear gas and a more powerful military-grade CN war gas, is fired into the throng. Crowd control is not their objective — their purpose is to punish the Meredith March for challenging the "southern way of life" and defying white-supremacy.
A year earlier, when Alabama Troopers savagely attacked voting rights marchers in Selma, the media and the national political establishment reacted with shock and determination. But now in the new political context shaped by the "white backlash," violent urban uprisings, media-hyped hysteria over Black Power, and the Freedom Movement's efforts to address issues related to economic justice and northern-style segregation, the media response to the Canton assault is minimal and ambivalent. So too is that of the federal political establishment in Washington. Attorney General Katzenbach "regrets" the use of tear gas, but assures the public that he is "confident" Mississippi authorities will "protect the civil rights" of Afro-Americans in their state. The Freedom Movement does not share his confidence.
Countering White Power with Black Power, the Madison County Movement and CORE/COFO activists respond with thousand-strong nonviolent mass marches and a renewed boycott of white-owned stores that cripples Canton's downtown economy. For the first time since Reconstruction, white political leaders are forced to meet and negotiate with Movement leaders and recognize Afro-American demands and interests through negotiation, compromise, and accommodation. It's a victory that eventually (and inevitably) leads to Blacks being elected to office, wearing badges and judicial robes, and holding power-wielding positions in government offices — power-sharing rather than racial domination.
On June 26, the Meredith March Against Fear arrives at the state capital in Jackson.
The ragged band that had begun as one mystical prophet in Memphis, that became 100 in Hernando, that became 1,000 after the baptism of spite in Philadelphia and tear gas in Canton, had become 15,000 Sunday afternoon, — Jack Newfield, Village Voice.
For the first time in history, Black citizens defiantly mount a political protest on the grounds of the Mississippi Capitol building without being arrested or violently suppressed. Thousands of Black Mississippians defy generations of intimidation to participate in what becomes the largest protest in the state's history. There are no objective or reliable estimates for march size. Estimates range from 12,000 to 20,000. It's clear, though, that the march represents a massive, overwhelming rejection of Mississippi's racial order. And to white Mississippians it's a stunning repudiation of the oft-repeated assertion that other than a few outsiders and malcontents the state's, "Nigrahs are happy and content with the way things are."
In the aftermath of the March, local freedom movements in places like Batesville, Greenwood, Neshoba, and Canton are re-energized and new movements erupt in Grenada and Yazoo City. While widespread white terrorism continues in Mississippi for some time, 1966 marks the beginning of its eventual decline. And as the Freedom Movement had so often shown before, the Meredith March proves yet again that courage is contagious.
With passage of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts in 1964 and 1965, CORE's initial goals of ending Jim Crow Segregation and winning nonwhite voting rights are on the road to being met.
But within CORE there is no clarity on how the strategies of interracialism, and nonviolent direct action can address the new issues now coming to the fore — police racism and brutality, defacto segregation in education and housing, systemic ghetto poverty, employment discrimination, and other forms of race-based economic injustice.
Given the stark economic and numeric disparity between Blacks and whites, the Freedom Movement in general has always heavily relied on whites for funding, but by 1966 white donations are in steep decline. In January of 1966, CORE's national office receives $44,500 in donations and funding (equal to $441,000 in 2024 dollars), in February that falls to $19,900, and by April it's down to $7500. Staff are laid off. The Southern Regional office in New Orleans shuts down. At both the local and national levels, CORE is struggling with diminishing activity, declining membership, dire financial crisis, and severe internal divisions.
CORE is not alone. SNCC fundraising is also in drastic decline and they too are cutting staff. Dr. King's speaking engagements and personal appeals barely keep SCLC's head above water at a time when they are greatly expanding their activity in first Chicago and then in mid-summer Grenada MS.
The reasons for the drastic decline in white financial support are complex:
Violent urban uprisings (Harlem and Watts, Detroit, Newark, and dozens of others) frighten and alienate many white liberals. The MFDP's rejection of the phony "compromise" at the 1964 Atlantic City Democratic Party convention, followed by CORE and SNCC's opposition to the Vietnam War, alienate significant segments of the Democratic Party establishment and their labor and foundation allies. And the Movement's turn towards addressing northern racism and economic issues is unpalatable to many individuals, institutions, and labor unions that had previously contributed to campaigns against southern segregation and denial of voting rights.
The Vietnam War also impacts CORE, SNCC, and SCLC as student and ex-student activists begin shifting their participation and fund-raising towards opposing the war and the military draft. So too do some northern religious and community activists.
The Vietnam War fractures organizational alliances. Some NAACP and religious leaders express support for the war while urging President Johnson to continue enacting racial-justice legislation, issuing reform-oriented executive policies and programs, and appointing Black leaders to federal positions and judgeships. But many CORE and SNCC activists and leaders fiercely oppose the war and the draft as a racist effort to maintain white colonial rule over nonwhite people in Southeast Asia.
Between those poles are those who hesitate to break with anti-communist orthodoxy, yet fear that the war will divert money and attention away from domestic poverty and racial reform efforts — fears that are well founded. Despite his exuberant hubris, LBJ discovers that he cannot have a Great Society and War on Poverty while at the same time waging an expanding imperialist war to preserve colonialism. In the end, he chooses war — which is his undoing.
From its founding, CORE has always been internally contentious, but in the late '60s at both the national and chapter levels it's torn apart by tensions over goals, strategies, and tactics — interracialism and integration, nationalism, the role of whites, Black Power, nonviolence, self-defense and retaliatory violence. These conflicts drain energy and muddle purpose, causing chapters to lose members. Many CORE chapters fade away entirely. Some change their focus, name, and affiliation. Others retain the CORE name but take their own path. A few try to carry on the CORE tradition.
In the South, lack of funds forces painful cuts to organizing projects. While some CORE organizing projects continue to be active locally, they no longer have full-time CORE staff or active support from the national organization. At the same time, the now rapidly growing number of Black voters creates alluring new electoral opportunities for activists and organizers as candidates and political staff.
And nationally, the federal War on Poverty opens up well-paying community service and government jobs to local movement leaders and activists who had previously been restricted to menial, low-paid work — but to get and keep those jobs they have to cut their ties with controversial, activist organizations like CORE.
CORE's national office withers and its national leadership splinters. McKissick resigns due to health issues and he is replaced by Harlem CORE leader Roy Innis. By 1969, CORE is a shadow of its former self. Under National Director Innis it is restructured as a strong national office leading a much reduced number of chapters — primarily in the Northeast — around an explicitly Black Nationalist program.
Web: Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
Books: Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
1. CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, by Meier & Rudwick------------------------------ CORE/SCLC/SNCC organizational p.o.v. continuum with "movement" "we" pov. When the movement came to town. fluid work with what/who was present.
2. Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement, by James Farmer
3. Journey of Reconciliation, Spartacus International
4. Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), MLK Research & Education Institute (Stanford Univ.)
5. Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972, Adam Fairclough
6. The CORE Way, Helen Buckler. Survey Graphic, February 1946.
7. Sit Ins: The Students Report
8. A Civil Rights Activist Revisits the Sixties Movement at UNO, Raphael Cassimere. 2003.
9. Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, by Martin Luther King.
10. Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement, by Henry Hampton & Steven Fayer.
11. Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt, by Hasan Jeffries.
12. Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), by Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell.
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