GUM OF MECAlS LIBERATION STRUGGLE - KORA

The Gathering Rain Clouds
I was to be on the staff of the FOR for 13 years. I had been ordained an
elder in the Methodist Church in Colorado in 1943, and I assumed that
after a temporary period of organizing in the area of peace and race
relations, I would settle into a church somewhere. But this was not to be. I
became deeply involved in the struggle against racism when, in 1942, we
founded the first Committee of Racial Equality (CORE) in Chicago. A year
later this became a national effort under the name of the Congress of Racial
Equality and I became executive secretary. I was able to combine this work
with my FOR work because one of my FOR responsibiiities was to adapt
the nonviolent methods of Mohandas K. Gandhi, who influenced me
greatly, to the struggle for racial justice. One of my two closest associates
was James Farmer, who became the first president of CORE and later in
the 1960s its executive director. The other was Bayard Rustin, who led a
stimulating one-man crusade challenging Jim Crow nonviolently.
Although I organized many projects for FOR, my main activity was
challenging racism. After two years in Chicago and another two in
Cleveland, I moved to FOR national headquarters in New York in 1946.
CORE was the primary vehicle for action on racial issues. Our theme was
nonviolent direct action in resisting segregation. We organized interracial
housing establishments in segregated areas; sit-ins at discriminatory res-
taurants; and interracial waiting lines at the box offices of theaters, roller
rinks, and other public places, effectively blocking the entrances unless all
were admitted.
We organized the first "freedom ride" into the South in April 1947,
which challenged Jim Crow laws in interstate travel following the 1946
decision of the Supreme Court to revoke them. Rustin and I collaborated
with others on a song that we would sing at public gatherings to the tune of
the spiritual "No Hidin' Place Down Here." The first verse went
You don't have to ride Jim Crow.
You don't have to ride Jim Crow.
On June the 3rd
The High Corn said
When you ride interstate
Jim CrotK is dead,
You don't have to ride Jim Crow.
Our activities in CORE were a little in advance of the major civil rights
campaign of the later 1950s and I*, when Martin Luther King and the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference rose to prominence and CORE
became a much larger national movement. But the tactics we inaugurated
were the same as those popularized on a larger scale a few years later.
During all these years I participated in innumerable picket Lines and
protest poster walks. I was chased by threatening gangs of irate whites who
opposed our actions against discrimination, and on a few occasions I was
srrested and locked up.
Although I was not serving the church directly, I felt committed to the
Christian gospel of love. I made no easy assumption that I was ushering in