Chatfield Speaks on Civil Rights

Law, religion and politics were the preeminent themes in the American civil rights movement, a former student activist told an audience of about 40 at the Institute of Politics on Tuesday.

Jack Chatfield, who worked for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s, said the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling initiated the civil rights movement.

"It was a blow to a southern white culture rooted in the dim and dark days of slavery," Chatfield said of the decision, which banned segregation in public schools.

But the ruling triggered a new wave of violence among white southerners, said Chatfield, who is presently an associate professor of History and American studies at Trinity College.

Chatfield pointed to a 1955 incident when a Black teenager "was whistling or maybe made a veiled sexual remark at a white woman."

Chatfield said the youth was taken from his grandmother's home in the middle of the night and was thrown into a river.

"This hardly marked the mood of the white South as a whole, but it signalled what might happen if the social system was challenged," Chatfield said.

He pointed to the Constitution's interstate commerce clause--which gives Congress the right to regulate trade among states--as the grounding point for much civil rights legislation.

Congress, Chatfield said, drew upon the interstate commerce clause when enacting laws such as the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.

"The commerce clause, as innocuous, as bland as it is, packs a keg of dynamite," he said.

The second theme of the civil rights movement, Chatfield said, was religion.

He said that the liberal and change-oriented civil rights movement was "saturated with religious character, with religious value and with religious music."

This, Chatfield said, contrasts sharply with today's politics, in which fundamentalists stand at the right of the political spectrum and seek to ban abortion and exclude gays.

Indeed, the music of the early 1960s gave the civil rights movement energy, Chatfield said. And that music, he added, "all came out of the Black Gospel tradition."

Politics was also a motif of the civil rights movement, Chatfield said.

'Cold-Blooded'

Chatfield described the civil rights movement as "Machiavellian."

Civil rights activists "made coldblooded political calculations about how to conduct their affairs," Chatfield said.

These calculations all led to support for the Democratic party--and it was "no coincidence that the civil rights movement hit its stride after the Democrats ascended to power [in 1960]."

But Chatfield said activists were dealing with a president --John F. Kennedy '40--who was far from being a pure sympathizer.

"Kennedy was a man who had big supporters in the South and made judicial appointments that would make a liberal hang his head in shame," Chatfield said.

But activists were still able to "embarrass the federal government" into instilling radical change, he said.

Chatfield also related the story of his entry into civil rights activism.

In 1962, Chatfield was a summer school student at Harvard making up science and math classes he'd "failed" during the academic year at Trinity College, he said.

But he "spent more time reading about the civil rights movement than I spent studying math and botany," he said.

Towards the end of the summer, Chatfield read that a friend of his had had a pistol drawn on him in a small town in Georgia.

Later that month, Chatfield was asked to drive a truck full of books from Hartford to New Haven, which would then be transported to a Black college in Birmingham.

But when he arrived in New Haven, Chatfieldsaid he decided on "the spur of the moment" todrive the books to Birmingham and join the civilrights movement in the South.

"I decided that my fate resided in the South,not in botany labs," Chat-field said.

He said that he was a field worker in theSouthwest Georgia Project of the SNCC for the nextseveral years

But when he arrived in New Haven, Chatfieldsaid he decided on "the spur of the moment" todrive the books to Birmingham and join the civilrights movement in the South.

"I decided that my fate resided in the South,not in botany labs," Chat-field said.

He said that he was a field worker in theSouthwest Georgia Project of the SNCC for the nextseveral years