Encyclopedia of SociologyVol._4

raucousness. Many ‘‘Christian’’ nations founded in the late middle ages were only inches deep as surface monopolies atop an impious base.

What of the myth of religious demise? Martin (1969) was among the first to find religion in the midst of putative nonreligion, in this case in ‘‘highly secularized’’ Great Britain. In fact, Martin called for dropping the term ‘‘secularization’’ because of the confusion it had elicited, though ten years later he adopted the semantic fashion by publishing A General Theory of Secularization (1978).

Stark has also been a relentless critic of the second myth, and he has had company. His book with Finke, The Churching of America (Finke and Stark 1992), uses actual and reconstructed church membership data to argue that the real ‘‘winners’’ over the past two centuries have been conservative churches while liberal (and more secular) churches have been the ‘‘losers.’’ Critics note that the work is not without problems; for example, its thesis refers to rates of growth and decline rather than absolute size, and it assumes that membership is a reliable measure of general religiosity over time (Demerath 1992).

Many other scholars have noted the continued vitality of religion in America. Warner’s ‘‘new paradigm’’ (1993) provides a systematic description of how the American case may differ from the European scene that spawned secularization theory. Meanwhile, Stark has taken his methods and ‘‘market’’ model of religion abroad. He and the economist Iannaccone (1994) developed a nonmonopolistic, ‘‘supply-side’’ interpretation of European religion, arguing that its death and secularization have been greatly exaggerated. This argument has had both supporters (Davie 1994; Swatos 1997) and detractors (Bruce 1995; Dobbelaere 1993; Wilson 1998).

Meanwhile, the dispute over secularization is not restricted to the West. In fact, the Western version of the debate is comparatively innocuous because it is confined largely to scholars removed from political conflicts and because the politics of religion has generally been laid to rest except in a few cases, such as the tragic violence in Northern Ireland and the anticlimactic decision of Sweden to sever state ties with the Lutheran Church as of 2000. Once one leaves the West, however (Demerath 2000), assessments of secularization and secularity have become volatile public issues exacerbated by

the ideological conflict between forthright proand antisecularists.

Moving from Poland and eastern Europe through the remains of the Soviet Union to Afghanistan, from the Balkans through Turkey and into Iran, from Algeria through Egypt to Israel, from Pakistan through India to Sri Lanka, and from Indonesia through China to Japan, one sees countries whose national identities are being defined by a prolonged conflict over secularization ( Juergensmeyer 1993). In each case, the struggle involves less one religious group versus another than religion generally versus secular alternatives.

In addition to what might be termed a ‘‘bot- tom-up’’ process of seeping secularization, there are instances of a ‘‘top-down’’ coercive scenario, and the two are not mutually exclusive. The former Soviet Union, Turkey, and China illustrate the latter process through political systems headed by Lenin, Ataturk, and Mao Tse-Tung and their followers, respectively. This structurally imposed secularization had cultural effects as specifically defined state rituals became common alternatives to traditional religious ceremonies. However, in all these countries, traditional religion remains in evidence in the private sphere and occasionally bursts into the public arena.

Although there are examples of externally coerced secularization (e.g., the U.S. insistence on Japan’s abolishing ‘‘State Shinto’’ after World War II), secularization generally takes a far less direct form. Consider India as a case in point. Over the centuries, the south Asian subcontinent has given the world Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, but from the early sixteenth century until the mid-twentieth century, it was dominated by outside rulers representing first Islam in the Moghul period and then Christianity under the British ‘‘raj.’’ When independence was won in 1947, the partitioning of Pakistan and India created two states, one Muslim and the other dominantly Hindu. The religious resorting involved a massive crossmigration as long-time residents of each area moved to the other so that they could live among their coreligionists. The violence that ensued is estimated to have left from 250,000 to 500,000 people dead.

Religious conflict has continued in both areas, but in each case, it is not simply one religion against another but also religion versus secularity.

After independence, India instituted a national government that followed the Western model of a secular and thus religiously neutral state. However, after a half century, a series of violent conflicts between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs have left a cloud over India’s state secularity. In the 1990s, the dominant and secularist Congress Party lost its voting plurality to the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Momentum is gathering on behalf of a Hindu state that would reflect the country’s Hindu majority. Nor is the movement confined to right-wing religious zealots. A number of India’s most prominent intellectuals have entered the fray and produced a series of strident exchanges (Nandy 1990; Madan 1998 Beteille 1994). For many people, the commitment to state secularity has ebbed; paradoxically, secularism has been secularized.

FINDING A MUDDLED GROUND

Today it is common to hear that secularization has been categorically ‘‘disproved’’ and that anyone who still uses the term is more of an ideological antediluvian than an au currant scholar. Yet one must be wary of throwing out the baby with a bathwater both drawn and drained by the critics themselves. And certainly one must always be suspicious of prophets who predict the vindication of their own ideology. Most of the early visionaries of secularization and a disproportionate number of the theorists who have followed have been personally nonreligious, if not necessarily antireligious. At the same time, the ranks of the antisecularizationists have included a number of theorists with personal religious loyalties. Although a scholarly discipline should provide methods to avoid or transcend these biases, history indicates otherwise.

A full review of the empirical literature on the secularization debate is beyond the scope of this article, and it is not feasible to conduct an investigation that would constitute a critical test. However, this is not an issue that can be settled empirically. Statistical arguments will be irrelevant until a series of pressing ideological and conceptual issues are confronted.

One must decide what to test before deciding how to test it. Because the two great myths attributed to the secularizationists by their critics are

by their nature overblown, they are not hard to puncture. Debating the matter at such mythical levels lends an all-or-nothing quality to the dispute: Insofar as the thesis fails to document a shift from all to nothing, it is suspect. However, no recent secularization theorists stake their claim in those terms.

It is not difficult to refute the first myth of secular dynamics concerning a seamless and universal religiosity in tribal settings and in the historical past. However, for the past to be more religious, it is not necessary for it to be either consistently or totally so. For a society to have been dominated by religion as political power, it need not have been more religious at the level of the individual and vice versa. Even at that level, of the individual, the past may be more religious in terms of personal piety and belief without necessarily being more religious in terms of formal institutional participation. Also, to say that one group or society’s past was more religious than its present is not necessarily to say that another’s must be the same. Finally, there are multiple pasts, none of which need be linear in their linkages.

Meanwhile, the second myth of secular dynamics is even easier for critics of secularization to deflate. The notion of religion’s actual death and disappearance has shifted from the sublime to the ridiculous, especially in the formulations of eighteenthand nineteenth-century figures, some of whom foresaw the end in their own lifetimes (Stark 1998). Somehow religion survived the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not to mention the twentieth. Again, however, it is not clear that this is either necessary or sufficient to disprove a more nuanced conception of secularization. Today it is common to reject the concept of secularization simply because religion persists, but mere persistence masks a host of questions concerning religion’s changing terms and circumstances.

The ‘‘secularization thesis’’ with a mythical beginning and a mythical end is erroneous, but it is a largely noninstructive error akin to ‘‘denying all climatology and the particular hypothesis of global warming because we have not yet been burned to a crisp and the nights do, after all, still get cooler’’ (Demerath 1998b, p. 9).

Clearly secularization as a textured social process remains a fruitful concept. In fact, once the focus shifts to a less extreme version, the consen-

sus widens considerably. Consider two recent remarks from arch critic Stark:

This refers to a decline in the social power of once-dominant religious institutions whereby other social institutions, especially political and educational institutions, have escaped from prior religious domination. If this were all that secularization means, there would be nothing to argue about. Everyone must agree that, in contemporary Europe, for example, Catholic bishops have less political power than they once possessed, and the same is true of Lutheran and Anglican bishops. . . . Nor are primary aspects of public life any longer suffused

with religious symbols, rhetoric, or ritual. (1998, pp. 4–5)

Of course, religion changes. Of course, there is more religious participation and even greater belief in the supernatural at some times and places than in others, just as religious organizations have more secular power in some times and places than in others. Of course, doctrines change—Aquinas was not Augustine, and both would find heresy in the work of Avery Dulles. But change does not equate with decline. (1998, p. 29)

These statements greatly narrow the gap between secularization’s advocates and one key antagonist. For many of the former, Stark’s first passage suggests a battlefield conversion, though it is not a new position for him (Stark and Bainbridge 1985). While the second remark is correct in that change and declension are not identical, the implied invitation to deconstruct the two should be welcomed.

There is little question that secularization has come to connote decline. Whether in its longrange mythical or short-term process form, secularization posits some variant of religious erosion, if not extinction. However, all these versions represent a myopic and one-sided perspective compared to the alternative that follows.

PARADOXES OF SECULARIZATION AND

SACRALIZATION

At a time when work on secularization might be expected to yield a consensually validated paradigm (Tschannen 1991), it is far closer to producing a new set of divisive paradoxes. Much of this

conflict results from the terms at issue. Both ‘‘secular’’ and ‘‘sacred’’ are mutually referential in that each makes a statement about the other. To be secular is to be nonsacred; to be sacred is to transcend and transform the secular. The same is true when one shifts from semantics to social processes. Just as an object must have been sacred for it be subsequently secularized, it must have been secular for it to be subsequently ‘‘sacralized.’’ Just as secularization marks a decline of the sacred, sacralization denotes an increase in the sacred in one form or another and at one level or another.

However, linking the processes of secularization and sacralization can have paradoxical results. The following eight propositions can serve as examples:

1.Religious revivals and ‘‘great awakenings’’ require previous eras of religious decline and secular ‘‘naps.’’ American religious history has been charted in terms of

its eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and possibly twentieth-century awakenings (McLoughlin 1978), but an opposite focus has equal merit (May 1949; Erikson 1966; Turner 1985). It is the combination of the two that establishes the basic rhythm of a country’s religious history.

2.Modernization may lead to both secularization and sacralization. The grand narrative of the secularization thesis is that religion beats a steady and linear retreat in the face of mounting modernization. There is considerable truth to this but also some half-truth. This is what Berger referred to in recanting some of his earlier writing on secularization (Berger 1997). Modernization often leads to forms of secularization, but those often spark

a sacralizing response—one that uses the means of modernity to protest the ends of modernity. This characterizes

‘‘fundamentalisms’’ everywhere, whether in the original Christian version in the United States or in the Islamic and Hindu variants around the global girdle of religious extremism. As was noted ear-

lier, many countries demonstrate religion’s continuing presence, but these countries also bear witness to the incursions of secularity as a perceived threat to religious interests. If either religion or secularity

were fully dominant in these settings, the conflicts would be obviated.

3.The rise of a vital ‘‘religious marketplace’’ is evidence of both secularization and sacralization. An increase in religious competition often reflects the decline of religion’s structural monopolies and/or cultural hegemonies. Religious dominations once taken for granted are now subject to doubt and dismissal, yet the new consumer’s mentality may involve more stained-glass window shopping than long-term buying (actually joining a church). The debate over changing patterns of religiosity turns on this point, as does a current dispute over the significance of religious ‘‘switching’’ in the United States (Demerath and Yang 1998a).

4.Because movements that go against the societal grain often create more friction than do trends that go with it, one must be careful not to mistake the sacred exceptions for the secular rule. It is tempting to interpret the flames of a small religious movement as being more important than the smoking embers of its larger and more secularized context. In the same spirit, one must be wary of confusing growth rates with size. Both have their place, but even small, conservative religious movements with high growth rates may be marginal to the larger population and culture. As an example, see the ‘‘winners’’ and ‘‘losers’’ cited by Finke and Stark (1992).

5.Sacred manifestations may reflect secular forces, and vice versa. The relationship between any form of behavior and the motivations behind it is problematic. Standard indicators of religiosity such as civil religious loyalty, church membership,

church attendance, and religious belief are all subject to myriad interpretations, not all of which are unambiguously sacred (Demerath 1998a; Haddaway et al. 1993). It may be more the case that the civil is religious than that the religious is civil: Church membership and attendance reflect a variety of sacred and secular meanings that vary across a population

and across time, and affirming a religious belief may be less a matter of cognitive conviction than of cultural affiliation and continuity. Even the various ‘‘fundamentalist’’ movements may not be as uniformly or fanatically ‘‘religious’’ as they are often portrayed. Many of their members have a predominantly secular agenda that religion legitimizes (Demerath 2000). Similarly, a withdrawal from conventional religious frameworks may coexist with a more privatized faith (see the ‘‘little voice’’ of the pseudonymous Sheila Larson in Bellah et al. 1985, p. 221). Finally, there are any number of conventionally secular commitments that take on sacred valences for their devotees (see below).

6.Moderate secularization can be a prophylactic against ultimate secularization. Changing social conditions require changing forms of the sacred. Hence, some degree of secularization may serve as a form of sacred adaptation. This has been a tactical assumption in the trajectory of liberal Protestantism over the last century as pastors and theologians have made concessions to their secularizing adherents (Berger 1967; Demerath 1992). This tactic has been challenged by advocates of strict doctrine and strict churches (Kelley 1972; Iannaccone 1994), but cleaving to strictness may have cost the churches far more defections than has the alternative.

7.Secularization and sacralization are engaged in a dialectical oscillation in which each is contingent on and responsive to the other. The presence of one does not necessarily involve the absence of the other. As was noted above, a secularization that goes too far is likely to elicit a sacralizing reaction. Similarly, sacralizing may exceed the bounds of pertinence, propriety, credibility, or convenience in a complex social context. Thus, lapsing and laicization of various sorts result in a secularizing adjustment. Without suggesting that secularization is always balanced by a corresponding sacralization to create a religious equilibrium, one can say that this mutual responsiveness is an important

reason why secularization, like a sense of the sacred itself, will always be with us.

8.Focusing on the fate of old forms of religion may deflect attention from new forms of the sacred. An obsession with secularization in the past may preclude an analysis of sacralization in the present and future. Just as conventional religion may not necessarily be sacred, new sources of the sacred are not necessarily religious. Today one hears a good deal of talk about a growing distinction between religion and spirituality and about profound sacred commitments in everything from socialism to sex. Just because they have attained cliché status does not mean that these concepts should be jettisoned as possibilities for deeper investigation.

These eight propositions lead to a series of issues beyond the scope of this article: Does every individual need a sense of a sacred commitment and a regimen that is self-consciously maintained and ritually reinforced? Does every collectivity and society require something similar that is shared among its members? If the answers to these questions are affirmative, what is the relation between the sacredness required and conventional religion on the one hand and more secular sources on the other? To what extent can the sacred reside in high and low culture, moral and ethical convictions, and movements on behalf of political causes, personal identities, and nationalist ambitions? Is it possible to investigate these matters without falling into tautology and teleology? Precisely because these questions are so old, it is time for freshly conceptualized and newly researched answers.

The alternation of secularization and sacralization is a crucial historical dynamic not just for religion but for culture as a whole. Secularization without sacralization is a nearly defining characteristic of putative postmodernity, with its loss of grand narratives and collective bearings. At the other extreme, sacralization without secularization is a similarly defining characteristic of stereotypic premodernity, where the sacred is static and unchallenged. However, it is in historical modernity that secularization and sacralization play off each other in both producing and responding to change. Whether causes or effects, these are critical processes in the world of time as opposed to timelessness.

SUMMARY

The importance of any scholarly issue is revealed in the debates it engenders. By this standard, secularization qualifies as very important indeed. As a matter that seems to defy either empirical or ideological consensus, it has become a kind of Gordian knot for social scientific scholarship on religion.

Clearly, it is possible to construct versions of secularization that are either outrageous or reasonable. It matters greatly how the concept is deployed. For some, it is a prophecy of religious demise, whether a tragic jeremiad or a triumphant anticipation. For others, it is a set of historically and sociologically specified processes that move less linearly and with less certainty through time. For still others, secularization converges with sacralization to form a stream of constantly shifting conceptions and locations of the sacred. Whichever option is at issue, the stakes are high, and the sight of scholars impaled upon them is not uncommon.

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N. J. DEMERATH III

SEGREGATION AND

DESEGREGATION

In the early years of the American colonies and the new republic of the United States, segregation was not only impractical but undesirable. To benefit from slavery, slave masters had to manage and control slaves; therefore, they had to work with them. Not all slaves were field hands or agricultural workers; some were domestic servants, and so the slave master and mistress had to share their private quarters with slaves. Thus, many white Americans, especially Southerners in the pre-Civil War South, accepted daily, intimate, personal, primary face-to-face contact with slaves as a necessity. They insisted, however, that all such contacts reflect proper social distance: slaves were always to be subservient, behavioral assimilation was allowed only to a point, and slaves were supposed to know the dominant-group culture, use it appropriately, and always recognize that they were not the equals of their masters. Although structural assimilation occurred at a primary level, it was not among equals.

With the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, some Americans seriously considered the idea of separating blacks and whites. As some blacks emigrated to poor urban areas in the South and as their numbers increased, some whites recognized that blacks were becoming a threat to the hard-won victories of higher-priced white labor

(Bonacich 1972). They recognized that the former mechanisms of deference and social distance would no longer allow whites to maintain the subordination of black men and women, and so they insisted on a system of separation. It was not enough to separate residentially; it was necessary to establish a caste system that would deny blacks equal access to most jobs, social and governmental services, schools and colleges, public accommodations, and the right to vote.

In both the South and the North, segregation was practiced long before it became embodied in law. It was a Supreme Court decision, however, that in 1896 established segregation as the law of the land. It was through the medium of statutes, therefore, that domination was ultimately exercised. In other words, it was the polity, not the economy, that suppressed the competition of black urban laborers and that established the shift from paternalistic to competitive race relations (Scott 1977; van den Berghe 1967).

Segregationist laws were passed as early as 1875 in Tennessee; they rapidly advanced throughout the South, and by the 1880s blacks were not only separated on all modes of transportation (Franklin 1947). However, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which guaranteed black Americans all the privileges and rights of citizenship, was an impediment to the policy of segregation. Consequently, the impediment was removed in 1883, when the Supreme Court declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. Soon after that decision, black Americans were banned from most Southern venues, from hotels and other places of public accommodation—restaurants, theaters, and places of public amusement. The process of limiting opportunities for blacks continued, and by 1885 most Southern states had enacted laws requiring separate schools for blacks and whites. Finally, on May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court in the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision made segregation the law of the land (Kromkowski 1991). Although the North and the South were elated, the implication of the decision and the way it was to be implemented would be considerably different in the two regions. As a result, the consequences and effects of segregation in the South would be different from those in the North.

If segregation had not legitimated the rights of Southern whites to degrade and control blacks,

blacks might have seen opportunities for independent growth in segregation. Segregation in the South meant biracialism, and biracialism meant the creation of black institutions that were to some extent administered and controlled by blacks. Although most blacks in the South worked for whites, they did not have to depend on them for all their basic services: They had separate schools, hospitals, and churches. Most blacks in the South became sharecroppers, working rented land. The land meant debt for the sharecropper, but it also meant a certain amount of daily independence. It is conceivable, therefore, that under a more positive set of circumstances blacks could have focused on the ‘‘equal requirement’’ of the Plessy ‘‘separate but equal’’ decision. However, because segregation became the detested symbol of injustice, Southern blacks insisted on destroying it.

As blacks struggled against segregation, they were beaten and murdered. Law enforcement participated in those affronts either by refusing to protect black people or by becoming the perpetrators of violence. Such actions reinforced the view of Southern blacks that segregation was the symbol of black inferiority. As blacks struggled to defend themselves, they learned that sheriffs and law enforcement officials, mayors, governors, the FBI, the federal government, the attorney general of the United States, and even the president participated in one way or another in the maintenance of a system of segregation that declared black people inferior and denied them equal access to the labor market and to educational opportunity.

Although Southern blacks were eventually successful in destroying the system of segregation in the South, blacks in the North, where the Plessy decision had been implemented differently, often failed. Because the major problem in the North was not segregation, the strategies of Southern blacks were inappropriate for the problems of Northern blacks and those who moved north. Desegregationist strategies were designed for problems such as residential segregation but not for problems such as poverty and differential access to occupational opportunities. This is why the Southern Christian Leadership Conference left the urban slums of Chicago in 1965, where the the real problems were, and attacked the issue of segregated housing in Cicero, Illinois, which for blacks at that time was insignificant.

Although Southern whites insisted on black inferiority, one should not assume that they therefore wanted to dispose of blacks. They needed blacks for at least two reasons: to establish their alleged superiority and to exploit black labor. Blacks had been their slaves, had worked their fields, had stablized and maintained their households, and had been a source of wealth and sometimes pleasure. Many Southern whites had even developed a degree of affection for blacks.

Northern whites were quite different in this regard. Some knew the value of black Americans, but their major goal was to make certain that blacks and whites remained apart. A biracial system was not required because occupational and economic discrimination kept blacks and whites apart. When and where necessary, whites would use restrictive real estate practices to keep the races separate. Whites in the North wanted blacks to stay completely to themselves unless there was some need for their labor. With the exception of hiring black women, whites did not really want to make competitive use of black labor. It seems that Northern whites wanted blacks to disappear, and so they pretended that they did not exist.

In the South, segregationist policies eventually led to a biracial system that produced unanticipated consequences. It actually laid the groundwork for the development of a black middle class composed of clergy, college administrators and professors, medical doctors, journalists, schoolteachers, artisans, and skilled craftspeople, all of whom had learned to be independent in their respective institutional settings. They were the decision makers and leaders of their people. They would train the new teachers, the new professionals, and even a new business elite. Their protégés would become the new entrepreneurs and open businesses of various kinds—barbershops, beauty shops, grocery stores, restaurants, and nightclubs. They would establish black banks, publish black newspapers, and establish professional societies. Many of the college graduates would become ministers and establish their own churches. In time, all these professionals would combine their resources and expertise and, using their two institutional bases, the school and the church, lead a struggle against the very system that made their existence possible: the system of segregation. In the South segregation did not mean separation only. It meant the right of whites to degrade blacks and treat

blacks unjustly, but mostly it meant the right to keep blacks in an inferior position by denying them equal access and equal opportunity.

Eventually the black church, a product of segregation and discrimination, would become the institutional base for the fight against segregation and discrimination. Not only did the black church provide the leadership, it also provided the following. However, since black churches had existed for decades and their congregations had been ready for change for decades, why did the ‘‘movement’’ take until 1955 to start? A critical component is the size of the black middle and skilled-working classes. In the middle to late 1950s, those two classes constituted approximately 39 percent of the black community, a larger percentage than ever before. World War II had been a major period of opportunity for African Americans, and as a result, they garnered more resources and consequently expected more from the system. In short, they experienced a revolution of rising expectations. They had become intolerant of abuse, the various forms of discrimination they had experienced, and insults to their dignity. They were in need of a social movement.

DESEGREGATION: THE CIVIL-RIGHTS

MOVEMENT

The impetus for the civil-rights movement, the movement to desegregate the South, actually began before Mrs. Rosa Parks’s heroic refusal in 1955 to give up her bus seat to a white person. The initial stimulus was the May 17, 1954, decision of the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education

(1954) that the 1896 Plessy decision was unconstitutional. Black soldiers returning from World War II and the burgeoning black middle class praised the decision and proclaimed that the Brown decision must usher in a new social order.

No sooner had the decision been made, however, than the nation was shocked by the grisly murder of a young teenager, Emmett Till, in Sumner, Mississippi. That murder dramatized the fact that no change in the law would change the customs of Southern whites, and the case demonstrated how the circumstances of blacks in the South were radically different from those of blacks in the North. According to Emmett Till’s uncle, Emmett had been bragging to some black youngsters outside a rural store. He claimed to have

white friends, even white girlfriends, in Chicago and showed photographs of his friends. Emmett had just arrived in Sumner and was trying to impress those young boys to gain their friendship. One of the boys apparently said to Emmett, ‘‘I bet you won’t go into that store and say something to that white lady.’’ Till accepted the challenge, went in, purchased some candy, and in leaving said, ‘‘’Bye, baby.’’ Late the same night, two or more white men knocked at the door of Emmett’s grandfather, Mose Wright, and took the boy away in a car. When Emmett Till was found, he had been mutilated and beaten beyond recognition, with a bullet hole through his temple. The picture of Emmett Till’s disfigured body was published in Jet magazine by Johnson Publications, a black publishing firm, and black people throughout the nation saw the picture. Till’s mother insisted on an open casket. Two men were charged with the murder, but both were found not guilty. Black people recognized that a change in the law was not enough. More had to be done.

Emmett Till was a Northern urban kid who had grown up and apparently gone to school with some liberal whites, and although the commingling of whites and blacks in the North could lead to violence, in some circles it was tolerated. Because the issue in the North was residential separation, it was easy for a black person to find himself in a predominantly black school, though generally there were at least a few white students. More important, however, was the fact that the overwhelming majority of the teachers were white ( Jones 1985, p. 180). Those teachers and other professionals usually lived outside the school districts in which they taught. Although they insisted that black schoolchildren obey them, they did not insist that blacks be subservient and inferior. As teachers, they were proud of their successful black students. Northern blacks thus developed selfesteem, a sense of ‘‘somebodyness,’’ a belief that they were the equals of others. That attitude was reinforced in black urban enclaves. In the South, however, every contact a black person had with a white person required a demonstration of black inferiority and even fear. The idea of being equal to whites was generally unthinkable, that is, if the idea was to be put into action. Northern blacks were always warned by their relatives when they went to the South that the rules were different there, that not obeying them could place every-

body in jeopardy and could even lead to the loss of life.

Emmett Till was a tough urban kid, not unlike many of the gang members of the 1990s, and the fact that he was not afraid of his captors and refused to stop fighting back made them angrier. He obviously did not know that what he did in the North could get him killed in the South. He had not been warned, or he did not heed the warning.

Emmett Till’s murder and the injustice of the final verdict produced mounting frustration. Thus, on December 1, 1955, Mrs. Rosa Parks told a bus driver who asked her to give her seat to a white person, which was the law, that she would not. This galvanized the entire black population of Montgomery, Alabama. The black community organized a bus boycott, and soon the buses were empty. The leadership was surprised (Raines 1977). Black people were fed up. They had always been angered by such demands and customs, but as Christians they had been taught to accept them and hope for change. Now, however, former soldiers and their families who had been patriotic and had sacrificed during World War II had become intolerant. Segregation did not mean biracialism to them. Instead it meant abuse and insult. A social movement had started.

Soon a brilliant young black Baptist minister would join the movement, and even though he was only twenty-six years of age, he would become the leader. That leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., defined the enemy as segregation. Segregation, King insisted, ‘‘scars the soul of the segregated. . . . It not only harms one physically, but injures one spiritually.’’ It is a system, asserted King, that ‘‘forever stares the segregated in the face saying you are less than, you are not equal to.’’ Segregation denies a human being the right to express his or her true essence; therefore, it must be destroyed. King declared that nonviolence would be the movement’s strategy and philosophy. Nevertheless, violence erupted immediately. Whites were resisting, but the Montgomery Improvement Association won its victory when the Supreme Court declared segregated busing unconstitutional. King and his leadership cadre immediately set about the task of desegregating other public facilities in Montgomery. The movement had begun, and from that point on other struggles would erupt sponta-

neously across the South, all of them devoted to desegragation.

As African-American college students observed the activities of Dr. King and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), they agreed to continue the process of desegregation. Dr. King was desegregating downtown department stores in Montgomery; they would desegregate lunch counters. It was the custom in the South not to serve blacks at lunch counters in the various dime stores, especially the Woolworth’s chain. On November 1, 1960, four students from the local black college took seats at the lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. They asked to be served, and when the management refused, they resolved to stay. After a day or two, violence broke out. A group of young white toughs and some older adults began to pull them out of their seats and beat them. The police were called in, but they refused to arrest the perpetrators of the violence. Instead they arrested the victims, those who were involved peacefully in what became known as sit-ins. As a result of the police actions, Southern blacks noted again that not only were the citizens of the South opposed to their rights, so were public officials. Segregation had to be destroyed ‘‘lock, stock, and barrel, top to bottom, left to right’’ (Carmichael 1971) because it also corrupted public officials and officers of the law whose sworn duty it was to protect the citizenry. From this point on segregation was the enemy, and going to jail to end it became a badge of honor.

The issue of segregation on buses involving interstate travel remained a problem even after the Montgomery victory. Therefore, it was not long before groups of Freedom Riders were mobilized to test the Supreme Court decision’s relevance to interstate travel. The Freedom Riders included blacks and whites, a fact that should not be forgotten. The Freedom Rides began in May 1961 and were immediately confronted with violence. Buses were bombed. Freedom Riders were beaten unmercifully at several destinations, and some were permanently disabled. The perpetrators were indiscriminate: they beat blacks and whites. Their hatred seemed greater for whites— ‘‘nigger lovers,’’ they were called then. The Freedom Riders expected to be protected by the FBI, but J. Edgar Hoover, the director, made it clear that his agency had no intention of protecting those agitators. The failure of the federal govern-