Sixty years after the unwinding of Jim Crow, a historic US election

ATLANTA, Georgia (Reuters) – It’s almost at the edge of living memory: President Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act in July 1964, urging Americans to “close the springs of racial poison.”

The legislation prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin at places serving the public – such as swimming pools and restaurants – as well as in education, hiring, promotion and firing and voting. And it gave the federal government powers to enforce those guarantees.

It was the beginning of the end of Jim Crow, the often brutally enforced web of racist laws and practices born in the South to subjugate Black Americans.

Members of the last generation to live under unabashed Jim Crow are among voters in a historic presidential election that has been roiled by racial and other divisions.

Both candidates have been touched by the legislation in their earlier lives.

Democratic candidate Kamala Harris was bused to school as a young girl in California, as part of efforts across the country to bring children from largely Black areas to schools in largely white neighborhoods and vice versa.

In 1973, the federal government sued Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s family-owned Trump Management Co. for discriminating against Black tenants under legislation that expanded on the original act.

Asked for comment on the suit, Trump campaign spokesperson Janiyah Thomas said: “This case is over 50 years old and long-resolved.”

To mark the Civil Rights Act milestone, Reuters traveled across Mississippi, Tennessee and Georgia to interview nine Black Americans about their memories of that time – when a Black shopper could be beaten for trying on clothes, or a wrong turn could lead to violence for Black vacation goers – and their views of a historic election.

CHURCH AND POLITICS

Paulyne Morgan White, 95, Atlanta, Georgia

White joined Atlanta’s Big Bethel AME Church in 1949 and was married there in 1960. A September Sunday found White in a pew, listening to a sermon that included exhortations to vote.

She had also been to her church for a discussion about Project 2025, a conservative group’s plans for the next Republican presidency that Democrats characterize as extreme.

White, who had a long career as a teacher and journalist, still writes a society column for The Atlanta Inquirer, a Black community newspaper. She’s followed the presidential race closely, watching the Democratic convention on television and discussing it with friends.

Though she uses a walker, she said she planned to vote in person, noting with a smile that because of her age she got special treatment at the polls.

“I’m going to vote on voting day,” she said. “I like the activity. And I don’t have to wait in line.”

She said voting can make a difference but the right politicians need to be elected.

THE MAKING OF AN ACTIVIST

Rev. Gerald Durley, 82, Atlanta, Georgia

Durley, raised in segregated schools and neighborhoods in Colorado and California, went south in 1960 to attend Tennessee State University, a historically Black college in Nashville.

He ignored his basketball coach’s warnings not to go to downtown Nashville alone, visiting a department store where he tried on a hat before returning it to the shelf.

A manager exclaimed that no white customer would buy a hat worn, however briefly, by a Black shopper. The manager hit Durley with the hat, grabbed money from his pocket and threw him out of the store.

That night, Durley attended a meeting about plans for non-violent sit-ins at lunch counters.

He thought of the hat.

“There’s always a motivating force,” Durley said.

It was the beginning of decades of involvement in the civil rights movement.

In 1963, Durley was in the crowd when Martin Luther King Jr. made his celebrated “I have a dream” speech during the march on Washington.

In the late 1960s Durley joined the Black Panther Party.

He earned a doctorate in psychology and a master’s in divinity.

A retired pastor, Durley remains active in causes and is working to raise awareness of the disproportionate impact of climate change on Black communities.

THE PUBLIC SPACE

Nanella O’Neal Graham, 74, Atlanta, Georgia

Nanella O’Neal Graham’s father organized tour groups for Black vacationers at a time when whites were resisting desegregation.

“He believed that if you worked a job 12 months out of the year, you should be able to take a vacation,” Graham, 74, said.

During a rest stop in northern Florida in 1965, Graham and her sister went into a café without their father.  A white man demanded the two to give him their seats.

“He said, ‘You ain’t hear me? I told you to get up so I can sit down!’” Graham recalled, mimicking the man’s derisive drawl.

They left, not telling their father why.

Once their group arrived in Miami, Graham said she saw the possibility of change. A white family cut ahead of their group – only to be directed to the back of the line by the maître d.

Graham, a retired IT professional, dismisses Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan as a call to go back when Black Americans were subjugated.

“It’s not ‘make America great again.’ It’s ‘make America white again’,” she said.

KEEPER OF MEMORY

Hermon Johnson Sr., 95, Mound Bayou, Mississippi

Hermon Johnson Sr. got his job at a Black-owned insurance company in 1954 because civil rights leader Medgar Evers had left it to become the NAACP’s first Mississippi field secretary

The all-Black town of Mound Bayou offered opportunities rare elsewhere in the South. But its residents knew white people could use violence to enforce Jim Crow elsewhere.

In 1955, Mamie Till-Mobley stayed in the town during breaks in the trial of two white men accused of torturing and killing her 14-year-old son Emmett Till.

Evers, civil rights activists, and Black journalists also took refuge in the town, 40 miles east of the Tallahatchie County Courthouse, gathering at the home of the insurance company owner.

Both white men were acquitted. Their confession to torturing and killing the child appeared four months later in a national magazine.

The insurance firm’s owner, the target of death threats, closed the business. Johnson, Mound Bayou’s vice mayor from 1961 to 1992, took home the desk, typewriter, and chair he and Evers used.

In 1963, a white supremacist killed Evers in Jackson, Mississippi.

When Johnson’s sons opened a local history museum in 2021, he donated the Evers desk, typewriter and chair.

“The older I get, the more important history is to me,” he said.

THE POWER OF EDUCATION

Brenda Luckett, 65, Clarksdale, Mississippi

Luckett said she was born to be a teacher.

Her mother was a teacher. Her father, who left school in the third grade to help raise his brothers and sisters, returned to earn the equivalent of a high school diploma when Brenda was in the third grade. He later worked as a railroad locomotive engineer, a job formerly reserved for white employees, his wife recording the materials he needed to qualify for the job on cassette tapes so he could listen over and over again.

“It was education all the time,” said Luckett, a retired special education teacher.

Around the time President Johnson signed the Civil Right Act, Luckett’s parents sent her to a Freedom School.

Such schools were projects of civil rights activists during the Freedom Summer of 1964, a campaign to draw attention to the oppression of Black Mississippians and to register African American voters.

Luckett said Freedom Summer instructors taught her to read. They skipped picture books and went straight to chapter books, making her feel they had confidence in her abilities.

Decades later she said it was a lesson she told her own students: “Please don’t let them tell you that you can’t learn something because they put a label on you.”

HEAR THE MUSIC

Lorenzo Washington, 81, Nashville, Tennessee

Lorenzo Washington got a job at a gas station as a teenager filling tanks and washing cars for 50 cents an hour, plus tips.

But when his boss found out he was saving to buy a car, Washington said he cut his shifts.

“He didn’t want Black folks to have anything,” Washington said.

The boss also routinely hurled brutal racist slurs at Black workers and manhandled them when he thought they were slow to respond to customers.

One day, Washington said, he stood his ground, prepared for a physical confrontation that did not occur.

Washington managed to save $85 the summer he was 15, enough to buy a1949 Chevrolet on which he still looks back fondly. He loaned his car to friends old enough to drive who took him to the music clubs of Jefferson Street, then the commercial heart of north Nashville, a Black neighborhood. It was his introduction to the city’s music scene.

In the late 1960s, clubs and other Jefferson Street businesses were demolished to make way for a highway, a fate Black neighborhoods across the country endured.

Washington went on to work for himself, including as a music promoter and producer.

In 2010, he bought a building and opened a museum packed with memorabilia of Jefferson Street’s musical heyday.

“I chose to put my money in here and have something to offer the next generations,” he said.

STARK MEMORIES

Vanessa Stanley, 71, Atlanta, Georgia

Vanessa Stanley, then in elementary school, and another young Black girl were walking in the predominantly Black Atlanta neighborhood of Summerhill.

Her friend and a white girl accidentally jostled one another. Stanley and her friend continued their walk.

Later that day, the police came to her home, Stanley said

The police, who said the white girl claimed she had been assaulted, were there with an ultimatum.

“Unless our parents whooped us, they were going to lock us up,” Stanley said. “So I got my butt whooped.”

“A white girl could say that ‘two Black girls assaulted me.’ Police would come,” she said. “That ain’t nothing but racism.”

FORGED BY JIM CROW

Carlton Wilkinson, 64, Nashville, Tennessee 

Carlton Wilkinson’s parents attended First Baptist Capitol Hill, a church of activists.

“We were in a circle of leadership that believed in us having our rights,” Wilkinson said. “We were trained early.”

Wilkinson was among the First Baptist children who integrated a department store playground that had been for the children of white shoppers only.

At Washington University in St. Louis, Wilkinson and the few other Black students successfully lobbied the administration to hire a Black art teacher, he said.

He went on to become a college art professor. Over the years he has calmly insisted on being treated with respect and as an equal, he said, though at times colleagues have viewed him as too assertive.

When white neighbors in his neighborhood treat him as an interloper, he tries to engage them in conversation, making the point that he belongs.

“The Jim Crow years were my formative years,” Wilkinson said. “Just watching and seeing and being part of, gave me the tools to fight.”

GENERATIONAL WEALTH

Johnny Newson, 71, Clarksdale, Mississippi

Newson looked out on the block of buildings his family owns on Martin Luther King Avenue, the main street in the Black part of his Mississippi Delta town.

Enslaved African Americans once picked the cotton in fields outside town. Few were ever able to own land.

A gifted tractor mechanic, Newson’s late father Charlie went into business on his own when he found out the white trainees he was instructing were earning more than he was.

He opened Newson Auto Parts in 1971, a bail bond business in 1976, and added to his empire by buying buildings and renting space to a barbershop, a beauty parlor and a dry cleaners.

“That’s my dad’s legacy,” Newson said. “And I don’t intend to let his legacy die.”

Newson has expanded the businesses: a notary public, key-making services and rental property management.

“I intend to leave that for my children. And I hope my children leave it for their children,” he said.

(Reporting by Donna Bryson from Atlanta; Clarksdale, Mississippi; Mound Bayou, Mississippi; and Nashville, Tennessee; Editing by Kat Stafford and Suzanne Goldenberg)