“Two Cities—One White, the Other Black”

This chapter looks at Black struggles for equal rights during the 1960s and 1970s, first assessing the impact of the Vietnam War on Blacks, with Muhammad Ali drawing the link between the war and the denial of civil rights to Blacks. The chapter looks closely at the sit-in movement that started in the 1940s and spread across the country, followed by convoys of buses in Freedom Rides marked by White mob violence, beatings, and hundreds of arrests. Activists from the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee launched a “Freedom Summer” campaign in 1964 to register Black voters in Deep South states; the fierce White resistance included the murders of more than twenty Black and White volunteers. The chapter then shifts focus to Detroit, as the city became progressively more Black with the flight of several hundred thousand Whites from city to suburbs. The racial segregation of Black children in Detroit schools, while the suburban schools were virtually all-White, led to an NAACP lawsuit that resulted in a judicial order for large-scale busing between Detroit and its suburbs. This case, Milliken v. Bradley, ended in 1974 with a 5–4 Supreme Court decision that banned busing across school district lines, with a passionate dissent by Justice Thurgood Marshall; that year also saw violent White resistance to a busing order in Boston.

Incarceration as Liberation

This chapter details the inward-facing purposes of civil disobedience by revisiting the student-led campaign of “jail, no bail” pioneered by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). It argues that accepting arrest was a practice of “comparative freedom,” through which activists reframed the experience of incarceration as one of liberation. The point of “jail, no bail”—withholding bail money and voluntarily staying in jail—was not to signal fidelity to law, stabilize state authority, or contain the unruly potential of dissent. Rather, through “jail, no bail” student activists transformed an experience defined by fear, stigma, and vulnerability into an enactment of courage, dignity, and freedom. Accepting arrest was thus a means of withholding collective and individual cooperation from illegitimate power, and thereby refusing the rituals of submission and domination that defined Jim Crow.

“This Is an Illegitimate Delegation”

This chapter focuses on a protest at the US embassy in which women of color, particularly Wynta Boynes of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and Esther Urista of La Raza Unida, protested that the US delegation to the intergovernmental conference was insufficiently representative of US women. The episode signals the ways in which, in the wake of the US civil rights movement, race had emerged as the principal gauge of representation and identification. US delegation leaders claimed the confrontation as a victory, indicating that it demonstrated a “free and uninhibited exchange” and offered “an impressive and persuasive example of U.S. participatory democracy at work.