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The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)was founded in Chicago, Illinois, in 1942 and became a national organization in 1943. Based on the non-violent principles of Mahatma Gandhi of India, CORE sought to integrate restaurants, snack bars, lunch counters, and public rest rooms throughout the North, the Border States, and the upper South. (Any attempt to integrate such facilities in the "Deep South" states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana was regarded as too dangerous and very unlikely to be successful.) CORE was dedicated to pushing southward the "Jim Crow" line, an indeterminate east-west line across the United States above which black customers could be served along with whites in public places and below which they could not.
CORE's preferred techniques for pressing the cause of integrated public facilities were the "freedom ride" and the "sit-in" demonstration. The first freedom ride was staged in 1947. The Supreme Court had outlawed segregation in buses and bus stations operating in interstate commerce (across state lines), so CORE sent a group of its members through the upper South by bus to see if the court decision was being obeyed.
Socio-dramas were used to train CORE members. Acting out the roles of demonstrators and arresting officers, experienced CORE members would teach newcomers how to curl their bodies and put their arms around their heads so as to reduce the effects of physical violence. CORE members were taught to be non-violent but determined. They were trained not to leave a demonstration site unless actually arrested. If restaurant or snack-bar personnel would not serve the demonstrators, they were to remain in their seats until they were either served or arrested. No matter how hard a CORE demonstrator might be struck with a fist or a club, the CORE demonstrator was never to strike back.
Similar to the NAACP, CORE had both black and white members and would send "integrated" teams on freedom rides and to sit-ins. Only half the members of a CORE team would actually participate in the demonstration. The other half would behave legally in order to be able to render medical assistance if necessary or bail arrested demonstrators out of jail.
When traveling through the upper South in the late 1940s, CORE freedom riders held their meetings and stayed overnight in local black churches. This was because the local black church was the only place where CORE members were reasonably safe from being harassed by southern opponents of racial integration.
The NAACP frowned on CORE's form of non-violent direct action because of the NAACP's preference for using court suits as the best method of securing black civil rights. After CORE began drawing significant national press attention in its efforts to integrate public facilities throughout the South, however, the NAACP began to take over the role of defending CORE demonstrators in southern court rooms after they were arrested and came to trial.
In addition to freedom rides through the upper South, CORE in the late 1940s was busy integrating the swimming pool at Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey. By 1949 CORE was working at integrating all downtown eating places in St. Louis, Missouri, and by 1953 they were working toward the same goal in Baltimore, Maryland.
By the mid-1950s CORE had refined the sit-in demonstration into a highly perfected and effective technique. Integrated groups of demonstrators would fill a certain number of tables and chairs in the restaurant or lunch counter in question, thus denying the owner the income that those tables and chairs would ordinarily be earning. One demonstrator would have a sign on his back stating the number of hours-and-minutes the demonstrators had sat there without being served. In some instances CORE would use a "trying on" technique, sitting in at the particular restaurant for only one-or-two hours one day a week in order to show the restaurant owner that having blacks in his or her eating place did not really harm business.
Throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, CORE did not generate much national or local publicity with its various freedom rides and sit-in demonstrations. In the South and the border states, newspaper editors simply did not bother to cover CORE demonstrations or report on CORE's isolated victories in integrating a snack bar here and a bus station rest room there. Until the year 1955, fighting for black civil rights was neither a popular cause nor a hot news item.
It can be argued that those CORE demonstrators who labored in relative obscurity during the 1940s and early 1950s were some of the real heroes of the civil rights movement. They did win some important victories, but their most important contribution may have been that, when the civil rights movement did become a big national news story, the non-violent techniques of the freedom ride and the sit-in demonstration were perfected, tested, and ready to go.
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