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Congress of Racial Equality, Inc.

Contact Information
Congress of Racial Equality, Inc.
817 Broadway, 3rd Fl.
New York, NY 10003
NY Tel. 212-598-4000
Toll Free 800-439-2673
Fax 212-598-4141

Type: Private - Not-for-Profit
On the web: http://www.core-online.org
Employees: 150

The Congress of Racial Equality doesn't meet in Washington but it does work for racial equality regardless of race, creed, sex, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, or disability. Local chapters are spread throughout the US and in Africa, Central America, and the Caribbean. Programs include welfare to work projects, immigration counseling, victim and witness assistance, ex-offender rehabilitation, and community outreach and education. One of the first major civil rights organizations in the US, the Congress of Racial Equality was founded in 1942 and participated in early civil rights battles like sit-ins, freedom rides, and fights against Jim Crow laws.

Key numbers for fiscal year ending December, 2007:
Sales: $4.7M

Officers:
National Chairman and CEO: Roy Innes
Finance Director and CFO: Teresa Alexander
National Spokesman: Niger Innes

 
 
US History Encyclopedia: Congress of Racial Equality

Founded in 1942 in Chicago, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was originally an interracial group seeking to use Gandhian tactics of nonviolent direct action in the struggle for racial equality. During the 1940s, it organized sitins and pickets to protest segregation in public accommodations and had success in integrating public facilities in the North. In 1947, CORE organized the "Journey of Reconciliation," the precusor to its later "Freedom Rides." Eight black and eight white men traveled together throughout the upper South to test the 1946 Supreme Court ruling that segregation on buses in interstate travel was unconstitutional. The men were beaten in some towns, and three ended up working on a chain gang in North Carolina after convictions under local segregation laws. But the journey was not a failure; it garnered national publicity and kicked off CORE's long campaign against discrimination in interstate travel.

Despite the success of its early efforts, CORE remained a minor organization until the southern black college student sit-ins of 1960, for which CORE officials provided guidance. The organization became nationally famous a year later with its Freedom Rides. In December 1960, the Supreme Court extended its earlier decision banning segregation on interstate buses with a ruling that prohibited segregation in the waiting rooms and restaurants serving interstate bus passengers. CORE decided to test compliance with the decision by once again sending interracial teams on buses throughout the Deep South. The freedom riders' dramatic challenge to southern segregation and the violent response ultimately led to the ending of segregation on interstate bus routes.

By the end of 1961, CORE had 53 chapters throughout the United States. For the next four years, it played a major role in the African American protest movement, North and South. CORE participated in President Kennedy's Voter Education Project. It was part of the 1963 Birmingham campaign that included the CORE-SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) Freedom Walk in honor of a white postal carrier who had been assassinated as he walked across Alabama wearing signboards urging an end to segregation. CORE also cosponsored the 1963 March on Washington. Along with SNCC and the NAACP, it organized the Mississippi Freedom Summer project in 1964. And it organized rent strikes, school boycotts, and demonstrations against police brutality in cities outside of the South.

By the middle of the 1960s, however, CORE was losing members and, in the minds of some, relevancy. In 1966, Floyd McKissick replaced James Farmer as National Director of the organization. McKissick endorsed "Black Power" and moved the organization away from its original commitment to interracialism and nonviolent direct action. Current National Director Roy Innis replaced McKissick in 1968. Innis focused CORE's efforts on black economic development and community self-determination. Innis has become one of the country's leading black conservatives, a philosophical position indicated by his support of the nominations of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court. By the end of the twentieth century, CORE had a membership of around 100,000.

Bibliography

Bell, Inge Powell. CORE and the Strategy of Nonviolence. New York: Random House, 1968.

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.

Farmer, James. Freedom, When? New York: Random House, 1965.

Meier, August, and Elliott Rudwick. CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942–1968. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Powledge, Fred. Free At Last?: The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991.

Sitkoff, Harvard. The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954–1980. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

—August Meier

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Congress of Racial Equality
(CORE), civil-rights organization founded (1942) in Chicago by James Farmer. Dedicated to the use of nonviolent direct action, CORE initially sought to promote better race relations and end racial discrimination in the United States. It first focused on activities directed toward the desegregation of public accommodations in Chicago, later expanding its program of nonviolent sit-ins to the South. CORE gained national recognition by sponsoring (1961) the Freedom Rides, a series of confrontational bus rides throughout the South by interracial groups of CORE members and supporters that ultimately succeeding in ending segregation on interstate bus routes. CORE was one of the sponsors of the 1963 civil-rights march on Washington. After 1966, when Farmer resigned, the organization concentrated more on black voter registration in the South and on community problems. Later leaders have focused on African-American political and economic empowerment and have tended to agree with civil-rights critics such as Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W.Bush. CORE leader Roy Innis supported the nominations of Robert Bork (1987) and Clarence Thomas (1991) to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1996–98, Innis led teams that monitored elections in Nigeria. By 1999, CORE had about 100,000 members in 5 regional groups, 39 state groups, and 116 local groups.

Bibliography

See study by A. Meier and E. Rudwick (1973).


 
WordNet: Congress of Racial Equality
Note: click on a word meaning below to see its connections and related words.

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: an organization founded by James Leonard Farmer in 1942 to work for racial equality
  Synonym: CORE


 
Wikipedia: Congress of Racial Equality
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The Congress of Racial Equality or CORE is a U.S. civil rights organization that played a pivotal role in the Civil Rights Movement of the 20th century. Membership in CORE is stated to be open to "anyone who believes that 'all people are created equal' and is willing to work towards the ultimate goal of true equality throughout the world."

Foundation

CORE was founded in Chicago in 1942 by James L. Farmer, Jr., George Houser and Bernice Fisher. Bayard Rustin, while not a father of the organization, was "an uncle to CORE", Farmer and Houser later said. CORE evolved out of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation. The Congress of Racial Equality sought to apply the principles of nonviolence as a tactic against segregation. The group's inspiration was Krishnalal Shridharani's book War Without Violence (1939, Harcourt Brace), which outlined Gandhi's step-by-step procedures for organizing people and mounting a nonviolent campaign. Shridharani, a popular writer and journalist as well as a vibrant and theatrical speaker, had been a protege of Gandhi and had been jailed in the Salt March. Gandhi had, in turn, been influenced by the writings of Henry David Thoreau. Mohandas Gandhi was then still engaged in non-violent resistance against British rule in India. The group believed that nonviolent civil disobedience could be used by African-Americans to challenge racial segregation in the South and eventually other parts of the United States.

Civil rights campaign

On April 10, 1947, CORE sent a group of eight white and eight black men on what was to be a two-week Journey of Reconciliation through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky in an effort to end segregation in interstate travel. The members of this group were arrested and jailed several times, but they received a great deal of publicity, and this marked the beginning of a long series of similar campaigns.

By the early 1960s, Farmer, who had taken a hiatus from leading the group, returned as its executive secretary and sought to repeat the 1947 journey, coining a new name for it: the Freedom Ride. On May 4, 1961, participants journeyed to the deep South, this time including women as well as men and testing segregated bus terminals as well. The riders were met with severe violence and garnered national attention, sparking a summer of similar rides by other Civil Rights leaders and thousands of ordinary citizens.

The Congress of Racial Equality also organized Freedom Rides in the Deep South. In Birmingham, Alabama, one of the buses was fire-bombed and passengers were beaten by a white mob. By 1961 CORE had 53 chapters throughout the United States. Two years later, the organization helped organize the famous March on Washington On 28 August 1963, more than 200,000 people marched peacefully to the Lincoln Memorial to demand equal justice for all citizens under the law. At the end of the march Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

The following year, CORE, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) organised its Freedom Summer campaign. Its main objective was to attempt to end the political disenfranchisement of African Americans in the Deep South. Volunteers from the three organizations decided to concentrate its efforts in Mississippi. In 1962 only 6.7 percent of African Americans in the state were registered to vote, the lowest percentage in the country. This involved the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Party (MFDP). Over 80,000 people joined the party and 68 delegates attended the Democratic Party Convention in Atlantic City and challenged the attendance of the all-white Mississippi representation.

CORE, SNCC and NAACP also established 30 Freedom Schools in towns throughout Mississippi. Volunteers taught in the schools and the curriculum now included black history, the philosophy of the civil rights movement. During the summer of 1964 over 3,000 students attended these schools and the experiment provided a model for future educational programs such as Head Start.

Freedom Schools were often targets of white mobs. So also were the homes of local African Americans involved in the campaign. That summer 30 black homes and 37 black churches were firebombed. Over 80 volunteers were beaten by white mobs or racist police officers and three men, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan on 21 June 1964. These deaths created nation-wide publicity for the campaign. [1]

Internal disagreements

CORE leadership had strong disagreements with the Deacons for Defense and Justice over the Deacons' threat to use violent tactics to protect CORE workers from racist organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan, in Louisiana during the 1960s. By the mid-1960s, however, Farmer was growing disenchanted with the emerging militancy and black nationalist sentiments within CORE, and he resigned in 1966. In 1966 Floyd McKissick replaced James Farmer as National Director of CORE.

CORE since 1968

Since 1968, CORE has been led by National Chairman, Roy Innis. Initially Innis, headed the organization in a strong campaign of Black Nationalism. However, subsequent political developments within the organization led it more towards the right. CORE supported the presidential candidacy of Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972.

Recently, on same sex marriage and black health in the U.S.- "When you say to society at large that you have to accept, not only accept our lifestyle, but promote it and put it on the same plane and equate it with traditional marriage, that's where we draw the line and we say 'no.' That's not something that is a civil right. That is not something that is a human right," said Niger Innis, national spokesman for CORE, and son of Roy Innis.[2]. COREcares, an HIV/AIDS advocacy, education and prevention program for black women was dismantled. Niger Innis is on the board of the conservative Project 21 organization.

Notes

  1. ^ [1]

Bibliography

  • August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942-1968 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975). ISBN 0-252-00567-8
  • James Farmer, Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Arbor House, 1985). ISBN 0-87795-624-3

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Hoover's Profile. ©2008 Hoover's, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
US History Encyclopedia. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
WordNet. WordNet 1.7.1 Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Congress of Racial Equality" Read more

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