| Chapter : | Introduction |
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In 1916, Roddy and Church joined with other Memphians to organize the Lincoln League, which held voter registration drives, chose slates of candidates, and encouraged Blacks to vote. After violence broke out in the city in 1917, Roddy and Church held a meeting to organize a local branch of the NAACP, with fifty-three members; Roddy was elected the first president of the branch and Church was elected to the national board of directors. After the Depression and the resurgence of the Democratic Party under Roosevelt, Crump drove progressive leaders such as Bob Church and J. B. Martin out of town, while organizations such as the NAACP were taken over by conservative leaders. Fortuitously, a group of young, Northern-educated militants would emerge in the 1950s to hasten the demise of the Crump Machine and to initiate a political and civil rights movement.
Gaining Civil Rights, Political Power, and Economic Leverage: 1950 to 2000
The second half of the twentieth century was characterized by tremendous social, political, and economic changes, as Black Memphians desegregated public facilities; created businesses; obtained corporate positions; and won election to local, state, and national offices. Three important events in the national civil rights movement fueled the desegregation movement in Memphis: the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, and the 1960 student sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina. In the 1950s, a group of activist Memphis lawyers—H. T. Lockard, A. W. Willis, B. L. Hooks, R. B. Sugarmon, and S. A. Wilbun—with tactical support from the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP, waged a relentless legal battle to desegregate public schools, libraries, parks, and buses.
As the cases moved slowly through the courts, impatient college and high school students initiated a sit-in at the Memphis Public Library, in 1960, that led to a city-wide direct action campaign of rallies, marches, boycotts, and demonstrations.