Grassroots at the Gateway by Lang Clarence;

Author:Lang, Clarence;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

As soon as the “cooling-off” period ended, demonstrators resumed the bank protests with missionary verve. As a means of mediating social conflict, cooling-off periods typically favored the powerful, who used the time to strengthen their opposition, often through co-optation or the law. Insurgents, on the other hand, usually faced the task of maintaining their momentum, typically amid economic and personal hardship. In this instance, however, the two-week armistice between the bank and the demonstrators had worked to the advantage of the latter. The civil rights grass roots had not only maintained mass support, but had also consolidated enough forces to actually broaden the scope of protest. What had begun as a bank boycott quickly matured into a general strike against the racism of the entire Civic Progress economic edifice.

Not only had Jefferson Bank executives refused to take any affirmative action toward hiring black clerical workers, but the City of St. Louis and its agencies had also tacitly supported this discrimination by continuing to deposit millions of dollars at the bank. On October 28, CORE helped stage a mass rally at City Hall that involved some one thousand people. A follow up rally occurred that evening on the St. Louis University campus. The following afternoon, demonstrators picketed the offices of the St. Louis Land Clearance and Housing Authority. They appealed to the bureau to withdraw Mill Creek Valley redevelopment funds and other monies from the bank. Eighty people, mostly black, including two women carrying infants, then paraded to City Hall. Many carried signs demanding, “Remove City Money from Jim Crow Banks.” Black freedom workers marched around the second-floor rotunda singing freedom songs and clapping their hands. They gathered at the office of city treasurer John J. Dwyer, the powerful chairman of the St. Louis Democratic Party and committeeman of the Fourth Ward. Sitting outside his door, they demanded the divestment of public monies from the bank.30

When, at the end of the day, Mayor Tucker emerged from his office with a plainclothes police escort, sit-in demonstrators began singing the freedom song, “Which Side Are You On?” As he boarded the elevator, several protesters raced downstairs and gathered around his waiting limousine, but did nothing to stop it from leaving. Later, 225 people gathered outside the City Jail to sing to the nineteen jailed activists. Fifty demonstrators returned to City Hall the next day, led by Reverend Frank Reid, a member of the Ministers and Laymen’s Association and an organizer in ongoing protests against the board of education. Sit-ins at Dwyer’s doorstep also continued. On November 6, Percy Green and twenty-four other protesters crowded outside the City Treasurer’s Office. After the other demonstrators left that evening, Green stayed behind to conduct a silent hunger strike and vigil. Clutching a copy of Louis Lomax’s The Negro Revolt, he passively refused to leave, forcing police to hoist him out of the building on a stretcher. In another episode, Winston Lockett, a national field secretary for CORE, led seven men and a sixteen-year-old girl in an overnight “sleep-in” in front of the city treasurer’s office.

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