Civil Rights Movement: The Southern Manifesto Of 1956

December 1962 was contemplating the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters office and was deciding on the next move for the civil rights movement when Bayard Rustin came and discussed future plans with him.They both came to the conclusion that Randolph had discussed at the meeting of Negro American Labor Council (NALC), the march of Washington. By doing this was a way to protest the mistreatment of African American’s when is came to educational and employment for African Americans. His proposition was due to how black’s incomes had been decreasing substantially compared to whites, and how the whites made twice as much as an average black worker would make. However, the meaning of an average black worker can vary, average could be the amount of

Randolph’s job was to brainstorm ideas and gather support politically so this march can gain publicity to spark controversy inside the White House to change these conditions that blacks have been suffering. In the process of the 1963 March on Washington, he called on a closed-door conference in Washington D.C in 1956. The topic that was necessary to discuss was the Southern Manifesto of 1956 (or known as the Declaration of Constitutional Principles) that was signed by 82 Representatives and 19 Senators, that refuted the Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka (KS) decision as an abuse of judicial power and for people to halt on desegregation of schools (“The Southern Manifesto of 1956.” ). Not only that legislative action, but also the President Dwight D. Eisenhower himself, because he was slowly enforcing integration because he did not want to lose Republican Southern voters. The meeting after in 1957 was with Randolph Rustin, Martin Luther King Jr., and Roy Wilkins who was the new head of the NAACP, to propose on a way to draw attention to the atrocious conditions the blacks have suffered in the

On May 17, 1957, the march took place on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to not only celebrate the anniversary of the desegregation ruling made by the U.S Supreme Court, and it became the largest civil rights demonstration with over 25,000 participants (“Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, Washington, D.C.”). Many marches have continued after that and on April 18, 1959 where twice participants protested in front of the Washington Monument. Randolph set out to achieve his goal of the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Randolph set out to use the SCLC, SNCC, CORE, and NAACP as organizations to help support his march. Carrying on with his plans, Randolph called for a conference for major civil rights leaders to discuss financial and the organization of the march itself. The conference consisted of the Fred Shuttlesworth of the SCLC, James Foreman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Norman Hill of CORE, and Cleveland Robinson, Roy Wilkins, Asa Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney Young of the National Urban League, James Farmer of CORE and John Lewis of SNCC (Kersten 97). And with the support of John F. Kennedy, he gave not only consent for the March on Washington to carry out, but also for a budget of $100,000