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Economic boycotts and withdrawals as a strategy used by blacks during their mid-twentieth century struggle to secure civil rights and liberties was not a modern-day approach. During the nineteenth century, African Americans used boycott methods to demonstrate against America’s unjust treatment. Having staged several streetcar “ride-ins,” abolitionist/feminist Sojourner Truth won a lawsuit against a streetcar driver who had forced her off his streetcar. Later, toward the century’s end, journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett seized upon the segregated transportation system with a public act of resistance by refusing to leave the white ladies’ coach. At the dawn of the twentieth century, African Americans again employed the stratagems of economic boycotts and protests. From 1900 to 1906, African Americans in more than 25 southern cities organized boycotts of segregated streetcars. A half-century later, African Americans in Montgomery, Alabama, again instituted the boycott and economic withdrawals against the public transportation system. After decades of struggle, an open crusade by the people began in the 1950s against calcified racial intolerance and discrimination, a struggle that became a protracted fight.

Whites made a public show of the unmarked police car filled with bullet holes.

The NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) all employed an assortment of boycott and economic withdrawals to combat economic, social, and institutional injustices and inequities. Two years before the Montgomery movement captured America’s attention and propelled the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. into the modern Civil Rights Movement, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the Reverend T. J. Jemison initiated one of the first bus boycotts by American blacks in the country’s South. Although short-lived, the Baton Rouge bus boycott served as a paradigm for similar protests throughout the South, including the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott.

African Americans also used protests to secure fair wages and better working conditions.

At the onset of the modern Civil Rights Movement, Montgomery, Alabama, was one of the first cities to employ economic pressure as a method of protest. Black Montgomery’s yearlong boycott caused the bus company, downtown businessmen, and the city to lose approximately $1 million. As in Montgomery, when black Nashville leaders and students began their formal sit-in movement, they too added an economic assault that devastated downtown merchants and business owners. The Reverend Kelly Miller Smith and Vivian Henderson, a professor of economics at Fisk University, organized a boycott of downtown merchants just before Easter. Empowered by their stated motto, “No Fashions for Easter,” the black community’s economic withdrawal deprived store owners of incalculable amounts of business. The paucity of dollars flowing into the cash registers of city merchants and businessmen caused the walls of racial segregation in Nashville to fall.

African Americans also used protests to secure fair wages and better working conditions, as clearly established by the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, Tennessee. While the primary impetus for the protest marches and demonstrations rested on the underpinning of economics, they brought into focus other societal maladies, including blatant racial discrimination that manifested itself in the African American community. Throughout the 1960s and into the twenty-first century, African Americans boycotted and protested with their wallets where the remnants of racism remained covert rather than overt. They targeted such corporations as Texaco, Denny’s, Coca-Cola, and Cracker Barrel, to name a few. Their use of boycotts and economic withdrawals made this methodology a compelling tool for constructive social change. African American activists and others would continue to use boycotts and protests to make American citizens more aware of, conscious about, and sensitive to all subjugated and oppressed groups.

Linda T. Wynn