Long before Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks took center stage, black men and women, acting mostly as individuals but numbering in the thousands, waged guerrilla warfare on the infrastructure of Jim Crow.  During World War Ii they violated law and custom, sitting where they pleased in buses, trains, stations, restaurants, and movie houses, waiting to be dragged off by conductors, drivers, owners, and police officers.  “Every colored person seems to be conscious of a stepping up of bad feeling between white and colored,” a Charleston, South Carolina, public school teacher observed in 1943.  “Many of us walk long distances every day rather than get on a bus.”  The amount of time and print spent by intelligence agencies on so-called subversive activity in black America validated the conclusion reached by an army officer based on the letters and reports reaching his desk:  “The threats to the nation were ‘first Negroes, second Japs, third Nazis’ – in just that order!”

 

Capitalizing on the gains made earlier, in the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, the civil rights movement revolutionized black consciousness and mobilized the black community in ways that captured the imagination of much of the world.  Extraordinary changes – some of them symbolic, some of them substantive – transformed the South.  The civil rights movement struck down the legal barriers of segregation and disenfranchisement, dismantling a racial caste system that had been evolving, sometimes fitfully, over some four centuries.  The achievements were impressive and far-reaching, with striking gains in educational achievement, in clerical and professional positions, in skilled labor, in political representation, and in the entertainment and sports industries.  Affirmative action opened positions hitherto reserved for whites, significantly expanding the black middle class.  Politically, from 1960 to 1980 the number of black registered voters in the South more than tripled.

 

But there were limits, significant limits.  Although the civil rights movement left its mark on the South, the changes were slow to develop, often taking on a dramatic importance that was misleading.  In much of the rural South, an unwritten code perpetuated what was once enshrined in law and Jim Crow signs.  The signs all but disappeared, relics to display in the new civil rights museums, but the attributes that had sustained Jim Crow were not so easily altered.  Whites found it difficult, in some places impossible, to learn new ways, to shake off the old protocol, to give up that easily the grim determination to command black lives and labor.  Charles Sherrod arrived in southwest Georgia in 1961 as part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was later elected to the city council of Albany.  In 1985 he looked back over the past two decades to assess the changes.  “Those people who shot at us and blew up churches and all that 20 years ago,” he declared, “they haven’t gone anywhere.  The attitudes are still there.  Their behavior has changed because we have got a little power.  They won’t do anything they can’t get away with.”

 

In much of the South, progress remained slow, conforming to day-to-day realities.  For economic sustenance, many blacks remained dependent on whites.  Abandoning accommodation for confrontation could prove to be a costly decision.  Teachers lost their jobs, families were denied credit, mortgages were foreclosed, and challenges to white supremacy, whatever form they took, individual or collective, faced a violent response.  Power still lay with the whites, and every black family had to weigh carefully any decision to challenge the racial protocol.  “The name of the game is survival,” one black activist explained.  “Their whole livelihood depends on the white system.  Civil rights, drinking water from a public fountain, eating in restaurants, going to bathrooms – all that is secondary to survival.”

 

For many blacks, their optimism about redeeming America was frustrated and disappointed.  “The practical cost of change for the nation up to this point has been cheap,” Martin Luther King Jr. conceded.  “The limited reforms have been obtained at bargain rates.  There are no expenses, and no taxes are required, for Negroes to share lunch counters, libraries, parks, hotels, and other facilities with whites...  Even the more significant changes involved in voter registration required neither large monetary nor psychological sacrifice.  Spectacular and turbulent events that dramatized the demand created an erroneous impression that a heavy burden was involved.”

 

What the civil rights movement left undone threatened to make the changes more symbolic than real.  But to advance into areas hitherto untouched by the movement entailed costs and demanded far-reaching economic changes.  That would not be easy to achieve.  Many Americans, as a matter of high principle, rejected racism; they were repelled by the scenes of violence in the South over integrating a public bus, a toilet, a drinking fountain, or a lunch counter.  None of these changes, though, carried the emotional weight of new taxes, the sanctity of the neighborhood school, the racial composition of the neighborhood, or a competitive job that paid decent wages.