Mukasa Willie Ricks and the Voting Rights Act of 1965

A friend of mine introduced me to a gentleman named Mukasa. He talked about him all the time. It got so bad until I begged him to please let me meet this man. Mukasa Dada's real name is Willie Ricks. What is important about this man is just who he actually is. It turns out that just like Congressman John Lewis; the rather less well known Willie Ricks was once a prominent member of SNCC, The Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee. Founded in 1960, SNCC (nicknamed 'Snick') was the student coalition that led the sit-ins and freedom rides against segregation in the early sixties along with CORE, The Congress of Racial Equality which was then under the leadership of James Farmer. Willie Ricks was an early Field Secretary and John Lewis ultimately became the president of SNCC from 1963 to the beginning of 1966 (Carson, 30). They both helped to organize and bring together all kinds of young people Black and White; most of which were college students from all over the country, in order to participate in non-violent demonstrations across the South. Quite a number of these protests ultimately turned into ugly violent episodes that would scar many of these volunteers for the rest of their lives. Nonetheless, half a century ago, they made up the enormous carders of determined foot soldiers of every conceivable stripe who were deeply inspired by the words of Dr. Martin Luther King. With uncommon valor, they risked racist brutality and even death by spending their summers fighting the evil Jim Crow empire in the Southern United States. Ultimately, this enormous movement led overwhelmingly by young people would have the single most influence upon the passage of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Day after day these nonviolent foot soldiers sat in at lunch counters and at segregated public facilities, as disciplined nonviolent combatants who were spat upon and brutalized as they quietly endured a barrage of racist taunts and unchecked violence. Courageously, they participated in Freedom Rides and risked their lives to register millions of African Americans throughout the South. The year 1965 would become a turning point for the Civil Rights Movement, and by 1967 the leadership of SNCC had become irreparably divided upon the direction of the organization. It was a struggle between those who were focused more upon Self Determination and the philosophy of Black Nationalism that Malcolm X would come to expose many of them to, and those who still maintained an ironclad abiding faith in the philosophy of Non-Violence. Intellectually, John Lewis drifted in one direction, while Willie Ricks migrated towards another. By 1970 the last chairmen of SNCC (H. Rap Brown) had fled underground, and after a decade of solid activism the organization would ultimately disband. Along the way, they had left a remarkable trail of highly trained grassroots leadership dispersed throughout the country.

The highlight of John Lewis' SNCC career was his speech at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963; the very same day that Dr. King delivered his famous 'I Have A Dream' speech. Willie Ricks had always preferred to play a somewhat background role, and early on he refused an opportunity to take over the chairmanship of the organization. However, contrary to widespread belief, it was actually Mukasa Willie Ricks who was the person that initially conceptualized and uttered the slogan "Black Power"; not Stokely Carmichael as is now widely assumed. Dr. King called Willie Ricks "the fiery orator of SNCC" (Carson, Awakening, 320), and he was known for his courage and determination. Lewis eventually became a prominent United States Congressman, who recently came under fire for his comment that the tone of many of the McCain/Palin rallies was reminiscent of George Wallace's Jim Crow South (NY Times, Oct 11, 2008). Ricks eventually joined the Black Panther Party, and he would come to travel all over the world as a colleague of Kwame Toure' (Stokely Carmichael). Even now, in his elder years, has remained a dedicated community organizer. While Lewis is quite famous, Ricks is relatively unknown. On March 7, 1963, during one of the most infamous events of the Civil Rights Movement called 'Bloody Sunday', Lewis was beaten almost to within an inch of his life, by Alabama state troopers while leading protesters across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. On two separate occasions, once in 1965, and then in 1972, Ricks was shot by police and almost left for dead. Then, shockingly, on November 10, 2005, after being invited to speak by student leaders, Willie Ricks, an icon of the Civil Rights era, was savagely beaten by campus police at Morehouse College in Atlanta; Georgia.1 Both of these gentlemen got their start as organizers in the state of Tennessee. They are each now well into their 60's and are both residents of Atlanta Georgia.

After considering the remarkable contrast that had come to mark the separate lives of these two remarkable men, I was curious to understand just what factors were involved that would come to influence the completely different directions in which their lives had obviously gone. Fortunately, Mukasa was open to an interview, and he was generous enough with his time that he allowed me to speak to him over the phone on numerous occasions. It has been through these conversations over a manner of just a few days, that I would learn quite a number of things that were previously unknown to me about the African American freedom struggle of the 1960's. Much of what I would come to discover, had seemingly been heretofore somewhat hidden from the mainstream record of that tumultuous era. What I learned was a part of the little known history of the collision of method and ideology that would eventually come to shape and mold the direction of African American politics and thought, ever since those turbulent events that would ultimately crest with the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Far be it for me to understand, I learned that the 1960's contained much more than simply a Civil Rights Movement after all.

In many ways, Willie Rick's story was the story of SNCC, and the story of how a movement for change led overwhelmingly by youth, had come to transform forever the entire character of the United States.

Most students today are almost ceremoniously taught about the 1954 Supreme Court Decision in Brown v. Board of Education, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, usually with a focus upon the enormous significance that they would ultimately have, after being used like a bludgeon in order to break down the sordid edifice of the Jim Crow Apart-Hate South. However, there was also another Supreme Court decision that would actually have an even more immediate effect upon segregation. This was the December 5, 1960 decision in Boynton v. Virginia.2 This decision struck down segregation in public transportation. It would become the catalyst that would help to launch the famous Freedom Rides during the early years of the movement. Nevertheless, earlier that year on February 1st four freshman students from North Carolina A$T College started what was to instantly become a wave of sit-ins in opposition to Apart-Hate throughout the country. Franklin McCain, David Richmond, Ezell Blair, and Joseph McNeil challenged decades of Apart-Hate law by occupying seats at the lunch counter of a downtown Greensborough Woolworth department store. Up until that moment, it was customary that African Americans were only allowed to order take-out, and they would have to place their order standing obediently at the end of the counter while White people sat and ate. In many instances throughout the South, they were made to purchase their food from restaurants by standing at the back door, and quite often they were only allowed to enter the public buses through the rear of the bus. It was a well known ploy that time and again after a person had paid their fare upfront; the bus driver might just suddenly pull off as they headed towards the back door; leaving them stranded in the midst of a loud crescendo of hearty laughter erupting from the mostly White passengers who remained seated comfortably onboard. However, those students were determined and they came back to the Woolworth on the following day. In time, their numbers grew as a multi-cultural cadre of students joined in. Soon, the movement caught on; taking shape all throughout the South and in some Northern cities as well. During that time, Willie Ricks was beginning to make a name for himself as an organizer of sit-ins and demonstrations in Chattanooga Tennessee. In time he would draw the attention of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

It was during that spring, that the Youth Movement began to really catch the attention of the slightly elder members of the new SCLC and the NAACP; who for the most part still largely favored challenging segregation laws in the courts. From the very beginning, SCLC was really not as driven by direct action as the youth were; nonetheless in time they too would be drawn into the rising tide of civil disobedience. Soon, I would discover, that SCLC was actually formed in part because Southern congregations were increasingly chasing their pastors out of their pews for favoring integration; because by and large the masses did not really favor integration after all. It was quite obvious that the struggle to integrate with a community that contained individuals who could actually lynch them almost at will, was not really the first priority of most African Americans in the Deep South at that particular time." What they simply wanted was justice, and an end to Jim Crow Apart-Hate in their lives. This was easy to understand.

Ella Jo Baker was born on December 13, 1903; the very same year that Dr. WEB Dubois published his best-selling book The Souls of Blackfolk. She graduated class valedictorian from Shaw University in Raleigh North Carolina in 1927. Baker was drawn towards social causes early on in her life. After helping to fundraise in New York City, for the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-1956) along with Bayard Ruskin and Stanley Levison - The former, was an influential philosopher of nonviolence who would ultimately become the organizing force behind the 1963 March on Washington.3 - The later would bear the brunt of the FBI's scrutiny, after becoming one of Dr. King's best friends, 4 Baker moved to the South and became an officer in the SCLC. With her strong and proud feminist character, it was a marriage that was apparently doomed from the very beginning. It didn't take long for Ella to become completely discouraged with what she deemed as the patriarchal attitudes within the relatively new organization, and she would soon leave the SCLC altogether. Although she was 57 years old at the time, in 1960 she became inspired by the youthful exuberance of the students participating in civil disobedience all throughout the South. Ella became a mentor and a kind of midwife to the brand new Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee which she helped to form that April during Easter Sunday on the campus of her Alma Mata; Shaw University in Raleigh North Carolina. Although this was an overwhelmingly African American effort, there were White students who were a part of that founding meeting as well. Perhaps the most prominent of them all, Tom Hayden who would become one of the founders of the SDS in 1962, 5 and later one of the defendants the Chicago Eight case in 1968; 6 he was a participant early on. At that meeting Guy Carawan improvised upon a popular labor song and created "We Shall Overcome" which would eventually become the unofficial anthem of the Civil Rights Movement. SCLC was a kind of fraternal Upper House with SNCC serving as the young guard of the Civil Rights Movement. Ella maintained her roll in-between the two, as a kind of guardian and mentor to the youthful activists (Zinn, 59). Ricks continued to conduct voter registration drives and demonstrations against segregation in Chattanooga, and Nashville, Tennessee (Clayborn, In Struggle, 88). He had become a well known and well respected activist who would also gain the ire of the local Klu Klux Klan and White Citizen's Council. He faced death threats constantly. His friends and neighbors were threatened. He was beaten and jailed on numerous occasions, and his car was fire-bombed right in his front yard. Taylor Branch's brilliant panoramic Pulitzer-Prize winning history of those early morning hours of the movement, speaks eloquently to the grassroots organizing occurring at that time in Nashville Tennessee. He paints a generous portiat of the work of James Lawson, another notable hero of that era. However, oddly enough the name Willie Ricks garners not even the slightest whisper (Branch, 276).

Late in 1961, he drew the attention of SCLC and the following year SNCC asked him to come to work with them in Georgia. He would now begin a long-time working relationship with people like Reverend James Orange, Ralph Abernathy, and of course John Lewis and Dr. Martin Luther King.

Over the next few years SNCC would continue to attract enthusiastic minions who would flock to the south every month in order to face down die-hard segregationalists governors and sheriffs; along with vicious police dogs and water hoses. They fought for the most part non-violently, in order to integrate public facilities and to register African Americans denied the franchise for decades, through the use of violence, intimidation, and fear. Although today John Lewis, Marion Berry, Stokely Carmichael, and H.Rap Brown are perhaps the most famous former members of SNCC; the decade of the sixties actually told quite another story. James Forman was a major theorist of the movement who remained the organization's secretary from the very beginning; and he would remain in that post almost to the very end. Harvard educated Bob Moses registered a record number of African Americans in the state of Mississippi, during a time when this alone was an almost certain death sentence. Willie Ricks knew Diane Nash quite well from his time in Tennessee (Clayborn, In Struggle, 208). She was one of the founding members of SNCC, and was a primary organizer of the Freedom Rides. Of course, there were many more who today have somewhat passed on into obscurity. Apparently for some, so too has Mukasa. Oddly enough, in Howard Zinn's celebrated dynamic history of SNCC, Marion Barry is aptly cited as part of that great "battalion of future SNCC leaders to come out of Tennessee"; yet once more, history remains silent upon Willie Ricks (Zinn, 19).

By 1963, the young activists of the movement were growing increasingly vocal in their criticisms of the gradualist policies of the Kennedy Administration. There had always been a somewhat clear divide in just how nonviolence was viewed. While philosophically, SNCC by and large saw nonviolence as a tactic; King and his loyalists regarded it as a principle. The assassination of the NAACP's Field Secretary Megar Evers, in the driveway of his own home on June 12, 1963 would only serve to intensify the mounting cynicism within the ranks of the youth movement.7 King and the SCLC continued to caution patience as all of the movement's efforts were now directed toward organizing the August 28th March On Washington. Malcolm X would come to criticize this march calling it the 'Farce On Washington', and he would tell the young radicals within SNCC, that the march was a scam from the very beginning; simply made to appease the Kennedy Administration. He said that Kennedy had promised King and SCLC that he would sign a Civil Rights Bill by the following year. "There was a White man who had the leaders of the 'Big Six' (Civil Rights Organizations) in a Washington hotel and was giving them money", Malcolm had said (Haley, 285). He was telling the truth. Dr. King (SCLC), Roy Wilkins (NAACP), Whitney Young Jr. (Urban League), A. Philip Randolph (Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters), James Farmer (CORE), and John Lewis (SNCC) all received a payout during the March On Washington. Roy Wilkins dolled out the payments based upon the size of the budgets of each of the organizations. That of course, meant that SNCC received a mere pittance compared to the other more established organizations.

By the time of the march, Lewis had become the chairman of SNCC (Carson, In Struggle, 30). Before King would woo the audience with his 'I Have A Dream' speech, John Lewis was to have a spot at the podium. What is rather commonly well known is that Lewis had originally intended to directly criticize the Kennedy Administration in his speech. Yet, he was ultimately censored and persuaded not to do so (Carson, In Struggle, 91). However, what is really not commonly well known is that both Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad actually did attend The March on Washington.

Eighteen days later, the tentative goodwill that had been so aggressively forged in front of 250,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial, was suddenly squandered when racists bombed the Sixteen Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Alabama. They viciously stole the life of four innocent little girls, and brought the eyes and the anguish of the entire world upon the American South. This incident served to only harden the resolve of the entire movement. Nevertheless, it also served to broaden the growing rift within the ranks of SNCC; between the moderate forces wielded to the Ghandian-King philosophy of nonviolence, and the increasingly anxious radical forces growing more and more attracted to the Black Nationalism of Malcolm X every day. This had become a truly crucial ideological divide.

That winter, on Friday November 22, one of the most traumatic events in the history of the nation would occur, when President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas Texas. Immediately, in response to this tragedy, Malcolm X would imprudently make his famous "The chickens are coming home to roost!" comment (Haley, 307). Within days, he was censored by Elijah Mohammad and suspended from the pulpit for 90 days (Haley, 308). This would become the beginning of the end of his relationship with the Nation of Islam. However, Malcolm was now free to elucidate his own ideas on Black Nationalism free from the theological restraints of the Muslim priesthood. The young and anxious radicals of SNCC would ultimately become evermore enamored with his teachings.

Then that following year, in an ambitious concerted campaign nicknamed Freedom Summer, more than 1,000 mostly White volunteers flocked to Mississippi in order to help SNCC along with three other organizations, to register voters in the state.8 On June 21st three volunteers, Andrew Goodman, James Cheney, and Michael Schwerner were brutally murdered; their bodies tossed into and earthen dam. This act appeared to quicken the hand of President Johnson and less than two weeks later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 making segregation in all public facilities and discrimination in employment illegal, was passed in Congress. This would only serve to broker a tentative calm, as SNCC had also thrown their hand into the effort to seat the delegates from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Facing the intransigence of a state which had denied African Americans the right to vote for decades, and a Democratic Party accustomed to running all white primaries, it became just as easy to collect enough signatures to form their own separate party. Ultimately, the MFDP boldly challenged the legitimacy of the all white Mississippi delegation at the Atlantic City convention. Many activists became completely disillusioned with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party after Johnson's acquiescence to a Southern Strategy. Tensions within the youth movement could not have risen any higher after that monumental summer; or so it seemed.

That following year, on February 21st 1965, Malcolm X was viciously murdered by three armed gunman in front of his wife and kids at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem New York. This would signal the beginning of the end of SNCC's tentative embrace of the tactics and philosophy of nonviolence. The shift was final. By the following year the overwhelming chant would become 'Black Power'; a powerful slogan first coined by none other than Willie Ricks. Despite John Lewis' best efforts; there could be no mistaking the new militant tone of the organization. Two weeks after Malcolm's death, the infamous police riot known as Bloody Sunday (March 7, 1965) would take place on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Lewis himself was brutally attacked and beaten to almost within an inch of his life while silently leading a group of demonstrators; protesting the discriminatory practices used to deny African Americans the right to vote within that state (Lewis, 240). The large continual outcry over this bloody incident would once again seem to force the hand of both Congress and the President. On August 6, 1965 Congress finally passed the much anticipated Voting Rights Act (Alabama Archive, 2005).

In his best selling history classic There Is A River, author Vincent Harding uses a rather fitting metaphor of various streams, in order to describe the historical consciousness of African Americans (Harding, 13, 27). Like a river, with several streams flowing from its mother, what has always been clear is that African Americans are not at all a monolithic community. What the journey of Willie Ricks has helped me to understand, is that ideas like, lets say the desire for repatriation (to go back to Africa), has invariably played its intellectual role however large or small, all throughout the ebb and flow of the history of this community. So too, the twin forces of integration and self determination have for the most part comfortably sparred for a grasp at the hearts and minds of African Americans all throughout this epic saga. However, during the mid and late 1800's, Fredrick Douglass was a prominent Integrationalist, and Martin Delaney a prominent Black Nationalist, yet there was nothing at all preventing them from spending years together as co-editors of the very same newspaper.9 Moreover, Ricks was quick to remind me, that one thing that Malcolm X and Dr. King often publicly agreed upon, was that if it were not for the militancy of the young radical elements that Malcolm had come to inspire, the Civil Rights Movement may have never so readily achieved the moderate gains that it did.

Now an elder, Willie Ricks told me that his arm remains in constant pain. It is possible that he will now need surgery after being so viciously attacked at Morehouse College nearly three years ago. In the end, there was a clear message that his story had helped to impart upon me, and even though it remained left unspoken, I could still hear it echoing throughout the courageous chronicle of his life within his voice. Contrary to the somewhat Disneyland version that we have been presented with over the last 40 years, the sixties was not simply a Civil Rights Movement after all.

ENDNOTES

1. Willie Ricks was beaten by Morehouse Police on Thursday, November 10, 2005.

2. Boynton v. Virginia held that segregation was against the law because it violated the

Interstate Commerce Act.

3. Ruskin, Bayard was a colleague of Asa Philip Randolph and a major figure of the Civil

Rights era. He was the main organizing force of the March On Washington.

4. Barry Levison was a long-time activist of progressive causes. In the 1950's he was a

member of the Communist Party, and he would become one of Martin Luther King's

biggest fundraisers and best friends.

5. The Students for a Democratic Society.

6. Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, David Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, Lee Weiner, John Froines,

Tom Hayden, and Rennie Davis were eight major activist charged with conspiracy and

incitement to riot during the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention in

Chicago, Illinois.

7. Byron De La Beckwith was convicted in 1994 of the 1965 murder of Megar Evers. He

died in prison at the age of 80 on January 20, 2001.

8. The coalition was called the Council Of Federated Organization (COFO) and it

included the NAACP, SCLC, CORE, AND SNCC.

9. Delaney and Douglass were coeditors of The North Star.

WORKS CITED

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to Montgomery January 2005

http://www.archives.state.al.us/teacher/rights/rights4.html

Branch, Taylor Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963. Simon $

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Bumiller, Elisabeth New York Times: Congressman Rebukes McCain for Recent

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Carson, Clayborne In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s.

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Carson, Clayborn The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. Grand Central

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Haley, Alex The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Ballantine Books 1992

University Press April 2995

Harding, Vincent There Is A River. Hartcourt Brace 1981

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Committee and the Use of Public Relations Taylor & Francis (Routledge) 2006

Pan-African News Wire Mukasa Dada. a.k.a Willie Ricks, Originator of Black Power

Slogan, Still Under Attack in Atlanta (November 25, 2007)

http://panafricannews.blogspot.com/2007/11/mukasa-dada-aka-willie-ricks-

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Zinn, Howard SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Beacon Press. South End Press 2002