[00:00:05.41] DEAN KAYE HUSBANDS FEALING: Good afternoon, everyone. Pleasure to be here. This has been a terrific day, and I know that you're looking forward to hearing from our guest speaker. Dr. Tomiko Brown-Nagin is Dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the Daniel Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, and member of Harvard's History Department. 

[00:00:33.60] She earned her law degree from Yale University and served as an Editor of the Yale Law Journal. Brown-Nagin also earned her doctorate in history from Duke University and a Bachelors of Art in history from Furman University with summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. Accolades. In 2019, Brown-Nagin was appointed chair of the presidential committee on Harvard and the legacy of slavery, which is anchored at the Radcliffe Institute. 

[00:01:08.83] An award winning legal historian, constitutional law, education law, and policy scholar, Dean Brown-Nagin has published on a range of topics, including the Supreme Court's equal protection jurisprudence, civil rights law and history, the Affordable Care Act, and education reform. Now her 2011 book, Courage To Dissent: Atlanta And The Long History Of The Civil Rights Movement details the history of the Civil Rights movement in Atlanta from the end of World War II to 1980. 

[00:01:48.44] And the book examines the earliest African-American activists in Atlanta, who questioned the meaning of equality and the steps necessary to obtain a share of the American dream. Topics range from the roots of pragmatism, heroism and voting rights, education law and economics, housing markets, dissenters and critiques of the movement, and future organizational structures and strategies. 

[00:02:20.41] Now there was a review, a wonderful review of her book, Courage To Dissent. And the reviewer wrote, "Courage To Dissent will be rightly celebrated for what it is. A textbook example of how local knowledge can be applied to a set of debates that often take place at a high level of generality." He goes on to say, "Brown-Nagin is directly challenging much of the thesis driven work that has been done in this area. 

[00:02:52.60] Brown-Nagin demonstrates a complicated relationship between law, social change-- law and social change that would otherwise be invisible." The book won six awards, including the Bancroft Prize in US History. Brown-Nagin's most recent book, Civil Rights Queen-- everyone in the room has one-- Constance Baker Motley And The Struggle For Equality, that book explores the life and times of the pathbreaking lawyer, politician, and judge. 

[00:03:30.27] Brown-Nagin is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Law Institute, the American Philosophical Society, a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Brown-Nagin to our stage. It is my hope that her presentation will, as one of the reviewers said, that it will linger in one's consciousness long after this session ends. So please, welcome the Dean. 

[00:04:08.89] [APPLAUSE] 

[00:04:11.08] TOMIKO BROWN-NAGIN: Good afternoon. Thank you so much, Dean Husbands Fealing for that generous introduction, and to Professor Michney for moderating the discussion today. I am delighted to have been asked to speak at Georgia Tech at this event, giving the address of the opening of the Mayor Ivan Allen Digital Archives. As it happens, Georgia Tech's goals in opening the digital archive dovetail with some of the work that I am doing at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. 

[00:04:44.94] The Institute is home to the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America and for a very long time, the Schlesinger's collections reflected just a narrow slice of that history, focusing overwhelmingly on white women in the Northeast. In recent years, the Schlesinger has been engaging in a pursuit similar to what I understand that you're doing, which is to build collections, including digital collections, that are more representative of the diversity of the human experience. 

[00:05:21.04] And so I applaud you in your efforts during the symposium to discuss ways of making the archives more inclusive with the goal of telling more representative stories. And I'm happy to have the opportunity to locate mayor Ivan Allen on the spectrum of leaders in Atlanta and in America who helped us weather the turbulent 1960s to create a more perfect union. And I have to say, I'm especially happy to reflect on social change in these times when we're living in such an era of political extremism and political polarization. 

[00:06:04.92] In fact, as you all know, it seems as if the most engaged citizens are the ones who are driving the polarization. At this time, in this context, it's hard to find common ground. It gives rise to challenges to our democratic institutions, and so in this polarized time, I actually have a heightened appreciation for, what I call in my book, the Atlanta style of pragmatic civil rights. That style was premised on biracial negotiation, on consensus building, and on incrementalism. 

[00:06:46.29] And while, as I will explain, that approach was controversial, particularly among student activists, it did create the circumstances for desegregation of public schools and public accommodations in Atlanta, and the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. And so what I want to do this afternoon is take you on a journey through Atlanta during the 1960s highlighting the interplay of Black and white moderates, and I'll focus on Ivan Allen in his role as president of the Chamber of Commerce and as mayor. 

[00:07:27.02] And I'll describe some of the intergenerational tensions that developed between moderates and student activists in the Atlanta Student Movement and then Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC, as it was called. I'm going to focus on three key moments. First, 1961 and the initial deal to desegregate downtown restaurants and merchants. 1963 and dynamics surrounding the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

[00:08:01.91] And finally, 1966 and SNCC attempts to address the unfinished business on the Civil Rights movement by organizing ghettos in Atlanta and the ensuing backlash. Now to tell you a little bit about the framework for Courage To Dissent, the book from which this lecture is drawn, it focuses on civil rights in Atlanta asking the question of, what would the struggle for civil rights look like if Thurgood Marshall, the chief NAACP lawyer who argued Brown versus Board of Education and other landmark civil rights cases, and the work of US Supreme Court justices was actually not so central to the story? 

[00:08:48.12] And the book answers that if we move these familiar subjects from the center of analysis, we can see unsung lawyers and activists at the local level who helped make social and legal change, who helped create the world that we live in today. And importantly, these were people who sometimes disagreed with Thurgood Marshall and with each other. And I do think that by broadening the lens, we can add depth to the study of civil rights history and reveal a range of models of social activism and social change. So that is the framework for the book, a bottom up perspective on the law, which is a top down enterprise. 

[00:09:37.08] Now let me tell you about some of the unsung actors that I profile in my book. For purposes of this afternoon, I'm going to focus on two groups, the practitioners of pragmatic civil rights and the student activists who sought freedom now. Well, who are these pragmatists? Well, they sought to challenge Jim Crow incrementally and without destroying the social and economic capital that the Black middle class in Atlanta had built up under segregation, despite segregation. 

[00:10:11.64] Pragmatists included some of the Black College presidents, many African-American teachers, who were the lion's share of the Black middle class, and they also included AT Walden, who was one of the South's very first African-American lawyers. Now Mr. Walden is shown here. He was the son of former slaves and sharecroppers. He studied at Atlanta University with WEB Du Bois. Then he went on to graduate with honors from the University of Michigan Law School. 

[00:10:48.54] He is little known today, relatively little known, but he inspired a generation of African-American lawyers, including Vernon Jordan who said, quote, "I wanted to be a lawyer just like Walden. I wanted to walk like him and talk like him and hang out my shingle on Auburn Street just like Walden." 

[00:11:12.39] So above all else, pragmatists like Walden prioritized voting rights as the path to Black Power. And here on this next slide, we see Walden challenging the so called white primary, which excluded Blacks from voting. And then here on this next slide is the result of his activism. In 1946 after the fall of the white primary, Blacks lined up around the streets in Atlanta waiting to exercise the franchise. 

[00:11:46.02] And so if he's doing all of this for voting rights, why was he called an accommodationist of segregation? Well, because he didn't challenge segregation in housing and said he and the Atlanta Urban League made deals to build Black housing wherever it could be found in the face of the post war housing crisis. Moreover, he never fully embraced school desegregation, mostly out of a concern for Black job loss among teachers, but partly out of concern that Black students would lose out in desegregated schools, would lose the nurturing learning environment that was available in some Jim Crow schools. 

[00:12:31.74] So he didn't file a school desegregation case in Atlanta until 1958, although he had promised Thurgood Marshall that he would do so right after Brown was decided back in 1954. In terms of tactics, Walden and many other leaders associated with him believed in interracial diplomacy. Instead of confronting the white power structure and making demands, the pragmatists sought to broker deals with white elites that advanced the interests of both groups and produced incremental change. 

[00:13:08.84] They chose this route in the context of white city fathers in Atlanta clinging to and advancing the image of Atlanta as a racially liberal Southern city, the New South. This image was good for business, and Black and white proponents of racial change sought to use the gap between Atlanta's image and the reality of segregation as a wedge to seek change. 

[00:13:42.22] Enter Ivan Allen. He was one of the members of the white power structure that pragmatists repeatedly engaged with. But before I discuss a key example of this kind of biracial negotiation from 1961, I do want to describe a different activist perspective and tactics in Atlanta. Let's talk about the students who were committed to nonviolent direct action as a tactic and did not like incrementalism. They wanted freedom now. The sit in was a key example of the tactics that the students favored. 

[00:14:23.53] As some of you know-- but I'm always surprised that some of my students don't know about the sit ins originating-- commonly dated to Greensboro, North Carolina in February of 1960 where Black collegians requests for service at segregated lunch counters launched a revolution in race relations. The sit ins involved mass protests by thousands of students and it constituted a decisive break with the past. 

[00:14:55.30] New student groups formed, including in April of 1960, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, with John Lewis, the former Congressman, as chairman. And here we have one of the classic pictures of John Lewis on the Edmund Pettus Bridge during climactic voting rights marches. Now SNCC's mission was to educate students in the principles of nonviolence, to develop rank and file community based leaders, and to coordinate protest activities, including for the desegregation of public accommodations and voting rights. 

[00:15:33.96] And the sit in movement quickly spread, including in Atlanta in March of 1960 where the students waged a years long effort to desegregate public accommodations in the way that SNCC proposed. Now there was SNCC Atlanta, but also an Atlanta Student Group that was formed with many of the Black College students participating. I will note, in particular, Morehouse students Lonnie King and Julian Bond, along with Spelman students Herschel Sullivan, Carolyn Long, and Roslyn Pope. 

[00:16:15.90] Now the goals of the students were a bit different from the goals of the pragmatists as well, not just the tactics. They sought to achieve political and economic empowerment for Black communities across lines of class. They not only sat in, they walked picket lines with unions, they led rent strikes, and they organized communities. In Atlanta in the fall of 1960, these students launched a full scale direct action campaign targeting segregated restaurants in downtown Atlanta, including three in the major department store, Rich's. 

[00:17:00.27] They also sat in at lunch counters and they did so in typical fashion, carrying placards, reading, bearing slogans like Jim Crow Must Go or The Presence of Segregation is the Absence of Democracy, and so forth. And here are some slides that show examples of this activism in Atlanta. Now I also want you to know that the students turn to direct action partly out of a frustration with the pace of civil rights litigation. 

[00:17:35.73] Listen to John Lewis's critique. His language illuminates this facet of the students' frustration with adults in the Civil Rights movement. He said, "we were all about a mass movement, an irresistible movement of the masses. Not a handful of lawyers in a closed courtroom, but hundreds, thousands of everyday people taking their cause and their beliefs to the streets." 

[00:18:06.87] Mainstream civil rights lawyers, including Thurgood Marshall, resisted this approach, resisted direct action. Marshall said, and I'm quoting, "the way to change America was through the streets, not through lawbreaking." He warned the students that they risked getting people killed. In Atlanta AT Walden, this dean of Black lawyers, agreed. 

[00:18:31.56] So it's in the context of this kind of pushback against this favored tactic, nonviolent direct action, that people like John Lewis and Julian Bond and Lonnie King insisted no, anyone can serve. Which brings us to 1961 and intergenerational conflict. Well, a deal that the pragmatists negotiated in 1961 to desegregate some of the downtown merchants illustrated the chasm between the pragmatists and white allies like Ivan Allen Jr, and the students emphasizing freedom now. 

[00:19:12.33] Ivan Allen, the newly appointed head of Atlanta's Chamber of Commerce, came to the negotiating table with AT Walden in hopes of striking a deal to end the protests. And they wanted to strike this deal on the View that bad publicity surrounding the ongoing sit ins threatened to ruin Atlanta. After all, look at this sign, Atlanta's Image is a Fraud. That is not what the city fathers wanted to see. So they struck this deal. 

[00:19:44.28] Allen released a statement in March of 1961 announcing the deal and he said, "we feel that the fine relationship which has existed between the races for a long number of years should be reinstated in Atlanta in every way as soon as is possible." The newspapers, the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the Atlanta Daily World-- which was a conservative leaning Black newspaper-- praised the deal. But the students balked at the terms of the agreement because the merchants had only agreed to desegregate at some uncertain date in the future. 

[00:20:22.17] The deal is actually linked to the desegregation of schools and the students did not accept what they viewed as gradualism. Writing in the Atlanta Inquirer, a student newspaper, Julian Bond quipped, "waiting for public schools to desegregate is like waiting for this year to roll around again." Like Groundhog Day, that movie The accommodationists were willing to do just that, he said, but others are not. 

[00:20:53.34] The time for action is now. So members of the student groups denounced Walden and some of the student leaders who actually had gone along initially with the deal denounced them as traitors. And this all came to a climactic moment at a public meeting held at the Warren Memorial Methodist Church on March 10, 1961, where the crowd was openly hostile and disrespectful to AT Walden. And that quote is actually from a student newspaper. 

[00:21:26.40] So if the students are describing this meeting as characterized by open hostility, then it truly was openly hostile. And this is in the context of Walden trying to explain his support for the agreement. There were sharp questions, heckling, hissing, but Walden pleaded with the audience to accept the settlement as a necessary compromise. He cautioned against viewing the resolution as inadequate simply because it did not affect change overnight, saying, what difference does a few months make in social progress that we've been fighting for over 100 years now? 

[00:22:07.68] We have it within our grasp. Let's have the good sense not to throw it away. Now amid all of this controversy, it took an intervention by Martin Luther King Jr to quiet the crowd. He walked to the front of the church and gave an impassioned speech saying, "no greater danger exists for the Negro community than to be afflicted with the cancerous disease of disunity. Disagreements and differences there will be, but unity there must be," he said. 

[00:22:43.03] And it's after King's address Julian Bond remembered that the crowd's anger dissipated. Criticism of the agreement died down amid calls by religious and civic leaders to end the irresponsible charges of sellout and personal abuse against elders like Walden and Martin Luther King Sr, or Daddy King. Meanwhile, Walden and Allen prepared for token desegregation of certain facilities in the fall of 1961. 

[00:23:15.70] Now you should know some of the elements of the deal-- these are the kinds of things that angered the students. The deal agreed to limit the number of people permitted to integrate a facility on any given day. In other words, there was a ceiling on the number of African-Americans who would be allowed into facilities. 

[00:23:34.90] The pair enlisted the Atlanta newspapers to keep publicity on desegregation to a minimum, and the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce would preclear any statements regarding the process, with Walden and Allen designated as the arbiters of any matters of interpretation of the agreement's principles. So it's totally legalistic in quite a way that is not to the liking of the students. But later in the fall, that carefully drawn plan to do desegregate Atlanta without further direct action took effect just as it was intended. 

[00:24:19.49] The lunch counters and restaurants of the merchants who were signatories to the settlement desegregated on September 28, 1961. This was a total of 17 merchants representing 77 eating establishments, and this occurred about two weeks before the deadline that had been agreed to, October 15. And about a month after, the first African-American students desegregated Atlanta public schools. That occurred on August 31, 1961. 

[00:24:55.87] And I do want to show you, on the next slide, the Atlanta Nine, who desegregated those schools, and give you a little background. The Atlanta School Board had engaged in years of foot dragging over Brown requiring Black students who were bold enough to seek transfers, to sit for aptitude tests, not required of white students. As I mentioned, Walden had agreed to file a case but he never did. 

[00:25:25.06] Finally, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed a court case in 1958, and it was litigated all the way to the Supreme Court where plaintiffs were represented by Constance Baker Motley, shown on the next slide. First Black woman lawyer to litigate in the Supreme Court, called a Civil Rights queen, the first Black woman federal judge about whom I recently published a book. I think it's a pretty good book. I commend it to you. 

[00:25:58.12] Now let's go to the period of 1963 leading up to the circumstances surrounding passage of the Civil Rights Act. Many of you will know about the role that events in Birmingham played in the run up to the Civil Rights Act. Protests there led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr riveted the nation. 

[00:26:19.28] And when Eugene Bull Connor, the city's police commissioner or commissioner of public safety, used police dogs, fire hoses, and clubs on peaceful demonstrators, including children, and arrested scores of them, he played into the hands of Dr. King and his organization. These televised images of police abuse nationalize the Civil Rights issue, helping convince whites in the North that Southern style segregation demanded a federal solution. 

[00:26:52.85] President John F Kennedy captured the significance of the Birmingham campaign on the movement in late May of 1963 when he quipped, "the Civil Rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He's helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln." And it's within days that the president announced his intention to support the passage of a civil rights law, one that would ban racial discrimination by nominally private places of public accommodation. 

[00:27:24.35] Now let's go back to Ivan Allen in Atlanta. Well, city fathers like Ivan Allen, who was now the mayor, sought to ensure that the Southeast's largest city, the home to numerous civil rights organizations, took a different tact from Birmingham. This commitment was captured by the Atlanta Constitution which wrote, in the middle of stepped up student protests against segregation, that, quote, "this is Atlanta. The police are not out with dogs and hoses eager to make arrests. They want to keep order without arrests. The people of Atlanta are by and large progressive and fair." 

[00:28:10.87] This is also the position that Mayor Allen took. He personally requested that SNCC and the Atlanta Student Movement end these protests, but they declined. Now the antics of Lester Maddox, whom Ivan Allen had defeated in the 1961 mayoral election, belied the image of moderation in Atlanta. In late May and June of 1963, one of the highest profile conflicts over continued segregation in Atlanta took place at Maddox's Pickrick restaurant. 

[00:28:52.63] Maddox made a name for himself through racial grandstanding against these protests. He actually ran ads for his restaurant that touted Jim Crow, and he formed a white supremacist group, Georgians Unwilling to Surrender, in response to the sit in movement. And when Black students requested service in his restaurant, Maddox was-- he violently resisted. He grabbed two of the protesters, pushed them away from the restaurant, asked his Black workers to finish the job. Later on he would actually pull a gun and brandish an ax against protesters. 

[00:29:35.68] So Mayor Allen was up against these kinds of antics as he sought to steer a more moderate course. And yet, one thing that happened that turned the tide was when President Kennedy asked Mayor Allen to testify in support of the Public Accommodations title of the Civil Rights Act in the summer of 1963. Now Allen assumed that testifying would be political suicide, and why was this? 

[00:30:17.89] Well, because so many prominent whites, those same progressives that were discussing how Atlanta was different from Birmingham, actually opposed the Civil Rights Bill. This included Ralph McGill, who was famous as the voice of Southern white liberalism. He opposed it on the same grounds as rabid segregationists, saying that it violated white property rights. 

[00:30:45.64] The editorial page of The Atlanta Constitution opposed the bill as well, instead touting Atlanta's voluntary progress toward desegregation-- so that deal cutting that I was just telling you about. The Constitution editorialized that, quote, "we cannot see the need for the federal law to force actions and call those who advocated the bill intemperate." The board of directors of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce opposed the Civil Rights Bill, as did Georgia's US senators, Russell and Talmadge. 

[00:31:17.56] Russell called the bill quote "the most inhumane and sadistic legislation in US history, and a violation of white's associational and property rights." But the opposition did not end there. There were prominent African-American leaders who sent, at best, mixed signals about Kennedy's civil rights bill and objected to Allen's involvement in the debate over the proposed bill. Some of these pragmatists advocated a municipal anti discrimination law instead of a federal anti discrimination law, and this included the leadership of the Atlanta, NAACP. 

[00:32:02.11] In his book Mayor: Notes on the Sixties, Allen wrote that when he informed a group of 24 prominent Black leaders, including AT Walden, Martin Luther King Sr, Williams Holmes Borders, Rufus Clement, Benjamin Mays, and Jesse Hill Jr of his intention to accept Kennedy's requests to testify, they opposed his choice, saying that Allen shouldn't sacrifice himself for testimony that wouldn't necessarily pass the bill. 

[00:32:33.85] And he was really caught off guard by the entirely skeptical response from this group of Black elites. And you have there on this slide, "the Atlanta newspapers and big television stations weren't for the bill, the political leaders weren't for the bill, the man on the street wasn't for the bill, and now even the Negro leaders didn't want me to come out for it." But Allen issued that advice and he does, in fact, testify in support of the Public Accommodations title of the bill. 

[00:33:08.29] On July 26, 1963, he strode to the witness table in the Senate office building at the US Capitol and he broke ranks with every other elected Southern official. He called the legislation a last resort to ensure the end of segregation, which he termed quote "slavery's stepchild." "We cannot dodge the issue," he continued. At the same time, Allen requested a reasonable time for cities and businesses to desegregate before federal intervention. 

[00:33:42.51] He cited Atlanta's, quote, "constructive and responsible Black leadership," whom he called realists, not rabble rousers, who were uninterested in, quote, "stirring up demonstrations" as a factor indicating that his community and others could end segregation with the federal government's help. 

[00:34:05.07] Under questioning by South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who insisted that it would be better to rely on voluntary action on a local ordinance, Allen shot back that localities had been left up in the air by Congress and needed guidance on. Congress's failure to take action would be, quote, "an endorsement of the right of private businesses to practice racial discrimination." Allen's testimony met with national acclaim, if not full approval, from all corners. 

[00:34:39.12] For instance, The New York Times and other national media outlets hailed Allen's performance. And in this context, AT Walden went on record calling Allen the voice of the New South. And I have to say that Allen's political courage here was impressive, his moral rectitude was impressive, and it truly deserves to be remembered and the story retold time and time again. 

[00:35:12.98] But the Civil Rights Act became law against the backdrop of resistance to the movement, to the bill itself that resistance was waged inside and outside of courts, including in cities such as Atlanta. Congress passed the law on July 2, 1964. It was an omnibus law that forbade discrimination in employment, in education, in public accommodations, and it was a landmark. Then Atlanta took center stage in the legal battle over the constitutionality of a new legislation. 

[00:35:52.10] Moreton Rolleston Jr, the owner of the Heart of Atlanta Motel, who had clashed with civil rights demonstrators on multiple occasions, challenged the legality of the act exactly two hours and 10 minutes after President Johnson signed the measure into law, lodging the first major test of the new law in Hart of Atlanta Motel versus United States. And then civil rights lawyers sued Lester Maddox, who was the perennial foe of the student movement, after he made good on his promise that if Black people visit Pickrick, quote, "I'll throw the Negroes out, even if it falls my duty to go to jail." 

[00:36:37.74] Sure enough, when civil rights testers set upon his restaurant, Maddox refused to comply with the law, and it's in this context that civil rights lawyers filed suit against him for violating the Civil Rights Act in a case called Willis versus Pickwick Restaurant. And ultimately, the Supreme Court of United States unanimously upheld the public accommodations provisions of the Civil Rights Act as a valid exercise of Congress's authority to regulate interstate commerce. Thereafter, The Atlanta Constitution editorialized that the public should accept the act and the court's decision, quote, "further defiance means anarchy and disorder." 

[00:37:25.54] And so nearly four years after AT Walden and Ivan Allen's March 1961 agreement to partially desegregate downtown Atlanta, Jim Crow fell in the city. Hotels, restaurants, theaters, and places of public accommodations desegregated after Heart of Atlanta with the heads of the Atlanta Motel and restaurant associations urging compliance with the Supreme Court's decision, and most proprietors complying. So the battle for an open city had finally ended with pragmatists, student activists, and moderates like Ivan Allen all contributing to this ending, a good ending. 

[00:38:17.60] Now the final episode that I want to mention in the struggle for civil rights in Atlanta occurred in 1966, and this was in the wake of the movement's transition from protests to politics, and also to its new focus on the attention to poverty and to the people who were not well situated to take advantage of the formal changes in the law. And here, again, the students and the moderates, Black and white, squared off, this time in the context of SNCC's efforts to politically organize the ghettos for political empowerment and for economic justice. 

[00:39:00.59] It was SNCC's Atlanta project that headed this effort that focused on slum housing which brought them into contact with Mayor Ivan Allen again. The project launched a, quote, "war on Atlanta's slums" after a cold snap in January 1966 exposed deplorable conditions on Markham Street, which was already well known to Mayor Allen and to city government. The students exposed this reality to the reproachful eyes of a wider audience. 

[00:39:36.74] The dwellings in this area lacked basic features that separated human existence from that of animals. Without electricity, heat, or even indoor plumbing, inhabitants were left to freeze in subzero temperatures in that January of 1966. Now Julian Bond was now a member of the Georgia House and demanded attention to the plight of his constituents who were cold and hungry. 

[00:40:09.23] He wired Mayor Allen to request that the city fulfill its responsibility to ensure that every citizen in Atlanta had adequate housing, saying there is no justification for houses without heat. And shrewdly, Bond also reached out to the American Red Cross, treating this crisis in Atlanta like a disaster. He requested emergency provisions from the relief agency, blankets, food, and generators. 

[00:40:42.59] Local and national civil rights and relief agencies chipped in and provided these resources, and the immediate crisis subsided. But the incident demonstrated that the advances that an organized community could make with the aid of a politician who was committed to the poor, that advances could be made. The arrival of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr in Atlanta ensured that attention remained focused on the problem of inadequate housing. 

[00:41:16.01] King had recently visited Chicago, where he had decried economic exploitation and powerlessness, trapping the Black poor in urban ghettos. He had announced plans for a new campaign there, and now he was back touring the ghettos in his own hometown in the vicinity of his childhood home. He took a walking tour in vine city amid SNCC pickets bearing signs reading Slumlords Must Go. 

[00:41:46.34] And it's in that context that King declared conditions in this neighborhood appalling and said that they were even worse than he had seen in the slums of Chicago. So King's visit signaled the urgency around this issue, and the Atlanta project capitalized on the attention that the minister had drawn to the issue and announced an intention to obliterate the city's slums. 

[00:42:18.89] Now Mayor Allen who, two years earlier, had shown so much courage in testifying in favor of the Civil Rights Act and boasted of his understanding of the harms caused by Jim Crow, now showed little leadership, at least according to SNCC. He called SNCC's approach to ending the slums, which relied heavily on rent strikes-- so poor people withholding payment to their landlords-- he said it was not the American way. 

[00:42:52.43] Yet, he did not follow through on his promise to himself to rid Atlanta of the slums. He had made this vow early in 1965, but there was no massive assault on dilapidated housing. The city did take steps, but they were not enough given the scale of the problem. In fact, one of the steps that the city took, and that was raising the slums, was counterproductive insofar as it did not ensure replacement housing. 

[00:43:28.34] And so the policy of urban renewal, which is what the politicians call this, was known in Black communities as quote, "Negro removal." But the students' plan to organize the ghetto to rid the city of the slums never materialized on a grand scale. 

[00:43:50.25] There were many problems that stood in the way, but one was SNCC's embrace of Black Power in the 1966 under Stokely Carmichael, who became the chairman, and also amid ongoing problems of police brutality. It came as no surprise that the overwhelming majority of whites greeted the advent of Black Power with shock and outrage. It even was frowned upon by Dr. King, by John Lewis, who had been ousted as chairman of SNCC by Stokely Carmichael. 

[00:44:25.81] And the talk of Black Power was especially controversial within the context of ongoing urban riots, which had begun in Harlem in 1964, had spread to dozens of cities, resulting in millions of dollars property damages, not to mention injuries and loss of life. And critics feared that Carmichael's rhetoric would spark more unrest, and unrest did occur. The powder keg exploding on September 6, 1966 in the Summerhill neighborhood, a slum area that sat in the shadow of a new sports stadium. 

[00:45:05.32] The police shooting of an unarmed Black man Harold Prather, a father of four, triggered the chaos. A consensus soon emerged within the neighborhood that the officer had shot the young man without justification. In the minds of local residents, the situation fit a pattern of police brutality. The shooting was just one of a long list of recent incidents in which the neighborhood thought that trigger happy cops devalued Black lives. 

[00:45:36.55] So there was a protest, there were hundreds of people on the streets. Stokely Carmichael came. The police sent in reinforcements, initially an all white contingent of officers came in after Black officers had been dispatched. There were state troopers, there was a brandishing of guns and flashing lights, and there was fury on the part of residents. Some of them hurled rocks, bricks, sticks, and bottles. 

[00:46:09.76] Ivan Allen came into the scene, the mayor, but ultimately, force tamed the crowd, with officers in riot gear firing arms into the air, driving their vehicles into the crowd, clubbing bystanders, tear gassing residents. It was just a disaster, leaving, at the end of the day, 15 people injured, several cars damaged, 75 people arrested. No one died, fortunately, including the man who had been shot earlier who eventually recovered from his wounds. 

[00:46:47.62] And yet, Atlanta's first taste of social disorder during the '60s, although it hadn't approached the level of destruction that gripped Los Angeles or other cities since 1964, the recriminations were swift. And SNCC, the same outfit that had said it was going to get rid of some housing in Atlanta, bore the brunt of criticism. Mayor Allen actually led the charges. He accused the outside agitators and SNCC of deliberately instigating violence in Summerhill. 

[00:47:22.75] He fingered Stokely Carmichael as a source of the problem, accusing him of, quote, "stirring the residents up with lies about the police," and he promised to put SNCC out of business. And he was hardly alone in his view. The most influential African-Americans echoed these reactions and eventually, residents of the neighborhoods themselves held what they called anti Black Power rallies. 

[00:47:51.64] Ultimately, SNCC filed a lawsuit in federal court that accused Atlanta's mayor, the police chief, and the chief prosecutor of maliciously using the law against SNCC. The case was Carmichael versus Allen, and Ivan Allen was the star witness in SNCC's case against the city. Under questioning about his statements, he ultimately admitted that he couldn't actually back up those statements about the disorders being a result of SNCC's deliberate attempts to stir up violence. 

[00:48:29.32] And so in the end, Carmichael and SNCC actually prevailed over the mayor of Atlanta, Ivan Allen, when a federal court enjoined prosecution of most counts that were pending against the SNCC workers. So the Atlanta project petered out before it could make any real progress against some housing in Atlanta. In this instance, Mayor Allen had not risen to this occasion. 

[00:49:02.35] It was a challenging situation, to say the least. He did ask for federal dollars to construct additional affordable housing units in the city. The city improved some services in poverty stricken areas under pressure, but these efforts did not do enough in comparison to the need and in comparison to the city's investment and infrastructure designed to stimulate economic growth. And so the rest of the story-- everyone in the audience who is familiar with Atlanta will know. 

[00:49:34.80] In the wake of the Voting Rights Act, more African-Americans gained elective office, including Mayor Maynard Jackson, Atlanta's first Black mayor. By 1973, Blacks would occupy half of the seats on the city council, but same race politicians did not necessarily translate into sufficient attention or certainly not to resolution of the problems of the urban poor. Probably the best hope for a sustained emphasis on poverty died along with Dr. King in April of 1968. 

[00:50:11.67] And so I will conclude there with an emphasis on issues that are of enduring importance, civil unrest in the face of claims of police brutality and violence, unjustified killings, poverty amid plenty, which we now call wealth inequality, and a political system that, by many accounts, does not quite function to address the needs of the least of us despite formal equality under law through the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. And so I will leave you with those provocative thoughts and look forward to a conversation about all of this. Thank you. 

[00:51:09.49] TODD MICHNEY: Thank you so very much Dean Brown-Nagin for sharing those insightful thoughts. And before we get to the audience question and answer, I want to take a moment to acknowledge the gravity of this historic moment with the confirmation of the first Black woman to the US Supreme Court. I noticed that justice Ketanji Brown Jackson today named Constance Baker Motley in her formal speech at the White House lawn today. And would you like to offer a longer historical perspective on Justice Jackson's ascension at this time? 

[00:51:41.83] TOMIKO BROWN-NAGIN: Well, what I can say is that Justice Jackson stands on the shoulders of Constance Baker Motley who, as I mentioned, was this fabulous civil rights lawyer who had tremendous impact on the law, including arguing the Atlanta School Desegregation case, desegregating the University of Georgia with Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter-Gault as the plaintiffs, being the lead lawyer in the case to desegregate the University of Mississippi Ole Miss, which you call the second battle of the Civil War. 

[00:52:23.32] And of course, she was appointed the first Black woman judge by President Johnson. Motley would be excited, I'm sure, to see this moment finally come. It's been a long time coming. Motley herself was touted for the Supreme Court. Originally President Johnson wanted to appoint her to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, but because of backlash against her civil rights background, that did not happen. 

[00:52:55.79] And so I'm excited that finally we're at this moment in our nation's history when the norms of equal opportunity embedded in the Constitution and in the Civil Rights Act have been realized at the US Supreme Court, of course the body responsible for interpreting the laws and constitutions as a matter of last resort. So it's a great. Day it's a day to celebrate for all Americans, I think. 

[00:53:30.15] TODD MICHNEY: Thank you. I have a question from the audience. Do you believe the passage of the Civil Rights Act was the seminal event that was the prime mover in causing Southern political realignment, or do you prescribe that to larger demographic and socioeconomic changes? 

[00:53:47.58] TOMIKO BROWN-NAGIN: So thank you for that question. It's a great question. I always go for multifactor causation. 

[00:53:57.45] TODD MICHNEY: [INAUDIBLE] 

[00:53:58.71] TOMIKO BROWN-NAGIN: Certainly it would be the Civil Rights Act played a role. President Johnson famously talked about the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act ensuring realignment and losing the Democratic party-- losing the South for the Democratic party. Now the demographic shifts, I would say the ones that I'm most familiar with probably are helping to push back against that trend. 

[00:54:36.09] And so a lot of factors have contributed to where we find ourselves politically, long term and to the short term in those 10 or 20 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. And yet, what I said about Ivan Allen and testifying in support of that act, I truly meant. That was an act of political courage, and it needs to be-- it's a story that needs to be told. We need to remind people of that time and time again because, of course, it was the right thing to do, and a lot of people were skeptical at that time of him and it. 

[00:55:19.46] TODD MICHNEY: How do you see incrementalism versus direct action as applicable to modern social-- political and social controversies? 

[00:55:29.99] TOMIKO BROWN-NAGIN: So I would say, just to tether the question to an issue of the day, something like Black Lives Matter, obviously there are those who think that the movement is-- I just taught this in one of my classes-- the largest social movement with the greatest support in American history, I understand, although that support has declined among whites recently. 

[00:56:04.40] But then there are those who would say that it's too much, so there's a way that the freedom now versus the incrementalist approach is applicable to this scenario. And I would say that in social movements, it is helpful to have a range of actors and reactions. Usually what happens is that the state legislators will support whatever the midpoint is between those-- between the extremes. 

[00:56:46.88] And we have seen, in the context of that movement, a lot of bills in state legislatures certainly raise consciousness of the problem of police violence and brutality. You could say the same thing about #MeToo and so forth. So my answer is that it's important to have a variety of actors who are engaging with pressing social problems, and I would expect to see them all along the spectrum of activism and political ideology. 

[00:57:29.22] TODD MICHNEY: How can acknowledging the dissents within local struggles for equality enhance our understanding of such movements and of the possibilities for social change? 

[00:57:38.55] TOMIKO BROWN-NAGIN: Well, let me take the issue of school desegregation as an example of how acknowledging dissenters is really important. As I mentioned, AT Walden and the pragmatists engaged in some foot dragging around school desegregation, and a part of the reason that they did hearkened back to the teachings of WEB Du Bois at Atlanta University, who cautioned that the issue is not really separate schools. It's quality schools. 

[00:58:16.05] And so to the extent that majority, minority schools are quality schools, that's great. If desegregated schools are quality schools, that's great. And I wanted to, in my book, make that clear. I don't think it is useful to just brush off those who disagreed with the Civil Rights party line at the time as accommodationist. 

[00:58:45.09] They believed in equality just the same as others and had a critique that, I think, is well taken, and that is an example of how focusing on the dissenters can be helpful. The same can be true of SNCC and its focus on issues of poverty even after the Civil Rights Act was passed. 

[00:59:10.08] The people who were best situated to benefit from the Civil Rights Act were people who were, in many ways, who were middle class African-Americans. Right? And they were drawing attention to people who were not well situated to benefit from formal law. A lot of people thought they were overly dramatic and too emphatic and well, nevertheless, they were bringing up an issue that needed to be aired. 

[00:59:42.38] TODD MICHNEY: I've got two similar questions I want to combine here. What were some of the most surprising or new and exciting things that you learned while conducting research for your new book on Constance Baker Motley and also your previous book? 

[00:59:57.72] TOMIKO BROWN-NAGIN: Sure. I would say, well, something like the extent to which there was skepticism of the Civil Rights Act in the Black community. That's pretty surprising. I can appreciate, obviously, the pragmatism, but when you have the mayor of your city being asked and willing to testify in favor of the Civil Rights Act, I'm surprised that there continued to be such skepticism. 

[01:00:35.23] As to the Motley book-- and thank you for posing that question-- surprising, perhaps-- this is not surprising, but it is maybe shocking, which is just the extent to which the lives of these lawyers were under threat, including Motley's life when she went into the deep South litigating in Alabama and Mississippi, in particular. She had to fly back and forth from Atlanta to Jackson dozens of times and Medgar Evers, the NAACP head there, would pick her up from the airport and drive her to the courthouse, and sometimes they would be tailed by the state police. 

[01:01:29.53] He would tell her, don't look back. Put your legal pad inside The New York Times. We don't want to be caught with you doing the intellectual work of the Civil Rights movement. And it was frightening and ultimately, Medgar Evers was assassinated, and in a way that Constance Baker Motley had pointed out might be a possibility. 

[01:01:54.49] There were hedges next to his home, close to his home, and she said to him, someone might hide behind those hedges and try to do you harm, and that's exactly what happened. And she was devastated by his death. She couldn't get out of bed for weeks. She couldn't bring herself to attend his funeral. And so just the fear and the reality of danger and the human dimensions of the struggle for equality, I think, were just important stories for me to tell. And again, not so much surprising but just shocking. 

[01:02:39.05] TODD MICHNEY: A question from the audience. Civil rights movement has made great strides in helping to provide a better life for African-Americans, but we still have a long way to go, as seen by the confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, and the attack on voting rights in some states of our nation. What's needed to be done to bring about a more socioeconomic balance for all citizens in the United States? 

[01:03:04.96] TOMIKO BROWN-NAGIN: So that's a big question, and I understand the question to be asking both about race relations and also about economic equality. Well, I would say-- there is a saying from the Civil Rights movement era, freedom is a constant struggle, that I'm always reminded of when I'm asked these kinds of questions. 

[01:03:33.28] And I take it to mean that, first of all, the struggle for equality and for the realization of one's values, whether it's around racial justice or economic justice or social justice, can't be left to other people. It requires participation by everyone in every institution that we're associated with, so in our universities in courthouses and legislatures. People need to vote and sadly, even if that means standing on line for hours. And people will vote, by the way, even if it means standing on line for hours. 

[01:04:17.61] And so I think about that, just the political mobilization that was so important to all of those actors that I discussed in my book, from the pragmatists to the student activists. And then on economic issues, I would point to a need to insist that legislators-- lawmakers at every level, from the city council to the state legislators to even Congress, focus on those issues, pay attention to those issues. 

[01:05:01.90] And one of the things that was so disappointing, actually, about the Jackson hearing is how-- with the fixation on sentencing over child pornography, there was just so little attention paid to a range of other legal issues, including issues of civil rights. And so it was unfortunate, as was mentioned. And yet, I am an eternal optimist, including because I'm a beneficiary of the Civil Rights Act, and so the least that I can do is to maintain some optimism, try to do my part, and have some hope. 

[01:05:44.50] TODD MICHNEY: I have a question, or a double question, from my colleague Dr. Carla Gerona. And she asks, can you say more about the Atlanta Nine? Were they moderates or not? At one point you described the split as generational. Do you think that the primary difference between the two groups-- do you think that was a primary difference between the groups and do those remain issues as activists age? 

[01:06:10.63] TOMIKO BROWN-NAGIN: Yeah. So thank you for that question. They're good questions. The Atlanta Nine I would not characterize as moderates. It took a lot of courage for those students and their parents to offer them up as plaintiffs in those cases. As I mentioned, those students were subjected to a lot of hoop jumping. In my book I mention this quote that it got so bad that some people said it's easier to go to Yale than to get into a white school, public school in Atlanta because there were just so many hoops to jump through. 

[01:06:51.80] And so they were courageous. They were working with the National NAACP, which was a group that was spearheading, handling all of these suits and was not moderate or considered moderate at that time. So no, the Atlanta Nine, they were in their Sunday best, they were good students, and doing that work for the Civil Rights movement. On the question of whether the differences are generational, it's a lot of things. 

[01:07:23.56] It is generational in part. It's a function of class and stature, in part. So the pragmatists, a lot of them were business people. They were concerned about economic growth in much same way that the Chamber of Commerce was concerned about those issues. And so the generational dimension is important, but it's not only generational. 

[01:07:52.24] In my work I seek to highlight the issues of the class cleavages as being important, and certainly that is a part of the story here. I also talk about gender as being an issue that animates some of the folks who were focused on poverty issues. These were single moms who were living on next to nothing and trying to make their way. So there are a lot of different elements to the dissension in Atlanta and beyond. 

[01:08:35.90] TODD MICHNEY: I have another one from the audience. I know your presentation ended before this moment, but would you care to share your thoughts on how the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr affected Black politics, and did it have some effect like radicalization on groups, for example, the Black Panther Party? 

[01:08:58.09] TOMIKO BROWN-NAGIN: That's an interesting question. People were upset and angry. There was radicalization in the country, although the Black Panthers would have seen the assassination as just more of an I told you so than gee whiz, I can't believe this happened. I would say, as I mentioned in my talk, that King was-- towards the end of his life he was really focused on the poverty issue, and I think that with his death there was less of an effective focus on anti poverty, and so that was important. 

[01:09:55.22] But of course, I end on the note of African-Americans being elected to public office, and how even with that change, the issues surrounding poverty and race were just exposed to be really complicated, intractable, to an extent. And I think to some extent, we're sort of still stuck and in this moment with disinvestment from cities and with there being so much racial imbalance that it has this negative impact on politics, on political conversations, but also on a sense of possibility and on policy itself. 

[01:10:56.67] TODD MICHNEY: I know that I led with this, but another audience member asks, what does seeing the first Black woman confirmed to the Supreme Court mean to you personally? If you want to-- anymore. 

[01:11:07.65] TOMIKO BROWN-NAGIN: Yeah. Well, thanks for that question. I have to say that I'm happy. I'm happy for Judge Jackson. I also am happy mostly that America is seeing people who are in my professional and social circles. I know these people. I'm not surprised that there are people like Ketanji Brown Jackson, people who are qualified and able to do these high powered jobs. 

[01:11:40.84] And so it means to me that other people are seeing what I am saying and validating those who would aspire, young people in particular, who would aspire to enter professions like lawyering. I care very much about opportunity, creating opportunity for students and promoting access to the legal profession, which has been so vital to social change in this country. And I am just thrilled that we have this validation of equal opportunity and we have visible diversity on the court. That matters a great deal. 

[01:12:25.81] TODD MICHNEY: Here's another question that sort of gets at a question I had wanted to ask you about telling history from the bottom up and what is the potential of archives. But the question is, earlier you mentioned revealing the unsung heroes when major figures are removed. What are your thoughts on the women foot soldiers of the Civil Rights movement whose stories are still oftentimes untold? 

[01:12:46.30] TOMIKO BROWN-NAGIN: Yeah. I cover some of those foot soldiers in my book, Courage To Dissent. It's really important to tell those stories. It can be hard to capture people's imagination when the focus is on everyday people and yet, I try. Constance Baker Motley was not a foot soldier. She was an elite, a professional, and yet, even her story has been far less well known than it should have been. 

[01:13:20.78] And so I'm trying to put those stories out there both because these individuals are inspiring, but it actually shows continuity across time. Right? So as we're seeing, Black women, women of color are incredibly politically engaged, and that's not something new. Right? 

[01:13:47.38] If one knows the history, one can appreciate that that's gone on for quite a long time. And so I think it's vitally important to try to drive home that point, including with stories across the spectrum, and also stories of white moderates and liberals like Ivan Allen. It's important to tell those stories too and to put all of these people in conversation. So thank you for that. 

[01:14:18.52] TODD MICHNEY: One last question. How does your interpretation of Constance Baker Motley's career and significance adjust our understanding of the Black freedom struggle and particularly, of the relationship between litigation, activism, and social change? 

[01:14:30.19] TOMIKO BROWN-NAGIN: Mhm. Great question. Well, first of all, it corrects what I call in the introduction a kind of a historical malpractice. We should actually know who did what, and Motley was there and so many pivotal moments of the Civil Rights movement and put her stamp on the law. 

[01:14:55.24] Another dimension of the book is just seeing how perceptions of what equality means and how to achieve equality change over time. So when Motley started out, she and Thurgood Marshall and all the people at the Inc fund were considered radicals. She was actually called a communist, and it inhibited her ability to move quickly through the confirmation process for the court. 

[01:15:26.74] But by the time she entered politics in the mid 1960s, she was being called an accommodationist or too moderate by people like Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell in New York. And then she was appointed to the court and initially many people were elated that a figure from the Civil Rights movement and the Women's Right movement would be on the court. They thought, well, the quality of justice has to improve. 

[01:16:00.70] And Motley was able to do that to an extent, but ultimately she ends up looking pretty pragmatic. So there's a through line of pragmatism in a lot of my work because I am putting these actors in conversation with the state itself, and the state and its institutions impose a lot of constraints on what actors can achieve. So that's the way I think about that. 

[01:16:30.65] TODD MICHNEY: Dean Brown-Nagin, thank you so very much for your time with us this afternoon. I hope I speak on the behalf of everyone and certainly for all our sponsors here at Georgia Tech for such an enlightening and enlivening conversation. 

[01:16:46.49] TOMIKO BROWN-NAGIN: Thank you very much for having me. I've enjoyed the conversation. 

[01:16:48.92] [APPLAUSE]