Council for United Civil Rights Leadership
The Council encompassed groups with different strategies and agendas, from the radical Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to the conservative National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
It worked to oppose tactics like civil disobedience and boycotts by controlling distribution of funds and by virtue of connections to the media establishment.
[2] Historian David Garrow writes:[3] To a number of close observers, Wilkins' anger and the growing appearance of interorganizational competition were rooted basically in the heightened financial stakes that had resulted from the Birmingham crisis.
It also meant that King's SCLC, rather than the long-established NAACP, would be the chief financial beneficiary of the new interest in civil rights.On 19 June 1963, representatives from 96 corporations and foundations met for a fundraising breakfast at the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan.
The arrangement could lessen the growing internecine conflict before serious damage was done, and it was all but certain to provide each of the organizations with funds they otherwise would not receive.The Council announced itself on 2 July 1963 after a meeting of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
But the growing importance of SNCC in the field of human and civil rights made it impossible for those leaders to ignore its existence.
[11] Also involved from the White fund-raising world were tax lawyer Mel Dewitt and Jane Lee J. Eddy, director of the Taconic Foundation.
Promising access to large amounts of money allowed the CUCRL to regulate SNCC, CORE, and the SCLC—considered the more radical groups within the Council.
Historian Charles W. Eagles writes:[15] ... it is essential to appreciate the admixture of motives that lay behind the mid-1963 creation of CUCRL: first, a firm desire on the part of wealthy white movement supporters such as the Taconic Foundation President Stephen R. Currier to stabilize if not eliminate the increasing visible and hostile competition between civil rights groups for contributors' dollars; second, a wish to moderate the southern movement's increasingly aggressive and demanding tone by giving NAACP chief Wilkins and National Urban League head Whitney Young, a good friend of Currier's a regular and intimate forum for propounding their views to the more direct action-oriented leaders of SNCC, CORE, and SCLC; and, third, an intent to exert some control over SNCC's angriest inclinations by centralizing at least a part of movement fundraising and using the resulting allocation process as a carrot-and-stick inducement for SNCC to follow a "responsible" course.
Forman (of SNCC) wrote that the group felt like a jungle of civil rights hyenas, each distrustful of the other, each with personal grievances against the other, each agreeing to curb some of his hostility so that he could get just a little more money for programs with which everyone else probably disagreed.
There was, instead, a jockeying for position to determine who would be first to march victoriously into the nations' heartland, and for whom the flags would be waved and the bugles sounded.Farmer reports a dialogue between Wilkins and King:[18] The announcement of the new group coincided with endorsements of the Kennedy Civil Rights Act (eventually the Civil Rights Act of 1964) and with public planning for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
[20] The meeting proceeded smoothly, and the CUCRL leaders agreed with the Kennedy administration that the main focus of the March would be support for new legislation.
"[9] "We want to provide a cadre of experienced Negro leaders who will prevent things from getting out of hand and keep irresponsible elements from turning to violence," said a spokesperson for the Council.
[22] The organizers re-routed the march, so that instead of visiting Capitol Hill to petition Congress, it would travel directly from the Washington Monument (at the center of the National Mall) to the Lincoln Memorial.
[24] Dorothy Height experienced discrimination because of sexism, being constantly excluded and trivialized despite supposedly equal membership in the Council.
She wrote that after the organization and execution of the March on Washington, "women became much more aware and much more aggressive in facing up to sexism in our dealings with the male leadership in the movement.
"[25] Malcolm X claimed in his November 1963 "Message to the Grass Roots" speech that the White power structure created the Council for United Civil Rights Leadership specifically for the purpose of infiltrating and coopting a revolutionary march on Washington.
It includes speeches from King, Wilkins, Young, Rustin, Lewis, Randolph, Walter Reuther, and Joachim Prinz, as well as music from Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Odetta, Marian Anderson, and Peter, Paul & Mary.
[31] After the August March on Washington, Artists and Writers for Justice, a group including Ruby Dee, Louis Lomax, and James Baldwin, proposed a mass boycott of Christmas shopping.
The New York Times reported that King "had had second thoughts on the proposal and had decided to go along with the thinking of the other civil rights leaders on the matter".
[36][37] Baldwin and others, including Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, maintained support for the boycott, saying the Council did not represent Black Americans.
("I think all of us should agree here in CUCRL that none of the top leaders will appear on a platform, radio, or TV with Malcolm X because we just give him an audience", said Young.
[45] (Forman writes: "By 1965 the Council on United Civil Rights Leadership was raising less and less money while trying to inflict more and more of its conservative positions on the movement.
