Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Spring 2007
In the 1960s the arc of the struggle to attain equal rights and
justice for all Americans changed when volunteers called Freedom Riders
were organized by the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) to test mandated
desegregation of interstate transportation by riding buses that crossed
state lines. Trained to use nonviolent methods, the Freedom Riders encountered
violence in their May 1961 journey from Washington, D.C., into the deep
South. Their bus was firebombed and the volunteers beaten, but the group
persisted, and they were joined by many other volunteers until there were
hundreds of them. In Jackson, Mississippi, they were beaten back by a
violent group of whites intent on maintaining segregation, but the Freedom
Riders continued on and brought attention to the reality of segregation
in the South. Their efforts challenged President John F. Kennedy, who
put equal rights on the national agenda. One of the noteworthy accomplishments
of his administration was the formation of the Lawyers’ Committee
for Civil Rights Under Law, which grew out of a meeting of 244 lawyers,
including 50 African Americans, that President Kennedy and Attorney General
Robert F. Kennedy convened at the White House in the summer of 1963. At
the meeting, the president and leaders of his administration addressed
the growing public unrest and demonstrations arising from the civil rights
movement and urged legal action. Corporation support began with a $50,000
grant in 1972 for the group’s Community School System Project that
focused on New York’s school decentralization law and how local
school boards could effectively exercise their rights under that law.
Support continued over the decades, and in 2004, the Corporation awarded
a two-year grant of $200,000 to the Lawyers’ Committee for a research
and education effort on the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act of
1965. The Lawyers’ Committee (www.lawyerscommitte.org)
continues its pro bono work in civil rights, and in 2006 the group created
the Disaster Victims Relief Legal Assistance Program to help meet challenges
posed by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Building on the promise of President Kennedy’s support for civil rights, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited segregation in public places and created a Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity. Great civil unrest continued unabated and included the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles, the 1967 riots in many northern cities and the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, which prompted even more widespread violence.
Concurrent with the events of the civil rights movement, in the early 1960s, the second wave of the feminist movement began, sparked in part by publication of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (W. W. Norton, 1963). Throughout this era of social change and upheaval, Carnegie Corporation responded with grantmaking aimed at contributing to the progress of American democracy.