"Power concedes nothing without a demand," Frederick Douglass wrote in 1857. "It never did, and it never will." Blacks in Tallahassee discovered the truth of Douglass' words as they struggled against an entrenched system of racism to achieve access to political, social, and economic power. Blacks fought against discrimination in every way they could, often as individuals, but most effectively through organizations, alliances, and coalitions. / After a successful bus boycott in the spring of 1956, the black community launched an attack on Jim Crow laws that left most Tallahassee whites dumbfounded and converted a few to their cause. Using the church as their meeting ground and Christian ethics as their armor, blacks struggled to teach whites that segregation was inconsistent with their shared religious values. Blacks in Tallahassee clung to the hope that this ethically-based moral suasion would disarm segregation proponents, even after it became clear that whites would use every legal and extralegal tactic to preserve segregation. / By 1963, blacks turned to a more militant phase of protest, but until the civil rights bill was passed in the summer of 1964, the strength of white resistance--buttressed by the force of the legal and political community--was able to force blacks to accept token concessions and pledges of improvement. But the passage of the civil rights bill was no panacea for black grievances. Tallahassee dragged its feet to avoid compliance with the law. Yet clearly and inexorably, change did occur. The civil rights bill had ended forever any real question over the legality of integrated public facilities and conveyances and set a tone of inevitability in the long and bitter struggle for equal rights. / But the civil rights movement was more than just a legal revolution; it transformed relations between blacks and whites on every level of human activity. In Tallahassee, the actions of individuals in the large and small contexts of life determined how and at what level the city adjusted to an integrated society. How Tallahassee finally emerged from a rigidly closed society to a more open one is the story of how one Deep South community dealt with the burden of history and embraced the challenge of the future. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 46-03, Section: A, page: 0778. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1984.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_75516 |
| Contributors | RABBY, GLENDA ALICE., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 344 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
Page generated in 0.0017 seconds