"CORE" redirects here. For other uses, see
Core.
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
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
External links
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