American Experience’s digital documentary THE DESEGREGATION OF HUNTSVILLE tells the untold civil rights movement story of African American activists in Huntsville, Alabama, who formed a “psychological warfare committee” to outsmart white supremacists and force the city to become the first in the state to desegregate. The video brings unusual nuance and complexity to well known historical topics, such as civil rights sit-ins and demonstrations, and figures, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. THE DESEGREGATION OF HUNTSVILLE challenges assumptions about the strategies and tactics of civil rights movement activists and about the motives and behavior of white segregationists. Our video provides a new generation of students and activists an immersive encounter with the African American agents of change in this story. At just 9 minutes in length, the video lends itself to in-depth classroom discussions as well as to research outside the classroom for further learning about the historical topics in the video.
THE DESEGREGATION OF HUNTSVILLE explores the implications of NASA's arrival in Huntsville, Alabama in 1960. The space agency brought new financial opportunities to the city, but for African Americans, the space boom only heightened the disparities of segregation.
In January of 1962, a small group of like-minded black professionals, they formed the Community Service Committee (CSC), which led a mass movement of sit-ins, poster walks and boycotts. The CSC saw Huntsville’s dependence on federal money was a vulnerability they could exploit to integrate the city. By July of 1962 the CSC's creative tactics paid off. Huntsville began desegregation two full years before the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and with almost none of the violence that met activists in Birmingham and elsewhere in the state.
In this 9 minute video, students can explore an array of rich historical topics with nuance and specificity, including:
Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War
THE DESEGREGATION OF HUNTSVILLE provides unusual insight into connections between the civil rights movement and other national and international events. What was NASA's role in the Cold War? How did the Cold War raise NASA’s significance for civil rights movement activists?
The Role of Student Activists
Huntsville sit-ins and demonstrations went on continuously for 19 months and were populated by numerous students of all ages from local African American schools and from Huntsville's historically black institutions of higher education, Oakwood College and Alabama A&M University. What were the roles of students in the movement? Why were Alabama A&M students more involved in the movement than Oakwood College students? What led students like Edna Dailey and Ivy Joe Milan, whom we interviewed, to participate in sit-ins as young teenagers?
Strategy and Tactics
The Huntsville movement employed well known tactics, like sit-ins, picketing and mass meetings. The CSC also had a "psychological warfare committee" and used expected tactics, such as sit-ins and pickets, in unconventional ways. Two upper-middle class women, Joan Cashin and Martha Hereford, conspired to get arrested in a sit-in while Martha was late in pregnancy and Joan held her infant daughter. Not long after that, Huntsville activists picketed in front of the New York Stock Exchange. How did such strategies and tactics lead to the movement's early desegregation victories? Why was there so little anti-civil rights violence in Huntsville, as compared elsewhere in the state, like Birmingham and Selma? What was the role of the media in the CSC's strategy? Why was it difficult at first to attract media coverage?
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Local Civil Rights Movements
The video features a 1962 speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. in Huntsville. A woman who attended as a teen told us, “We didn't realize we were second class citizens and we were being treated this way. All this stuff he was telling us about what was going on in America. We were hearing it for the first time.” Why did local leaders invite him? What role did King play in the Huntsville movement?
As a PBS national series, American Experience is committed to providing thoughtful and thought-provoking content that is available to everyone. We foster citizenship and culture, the joy of learning and the power of diverse perspectives. We produced THE DESEGREGATION OF HUNTSVILLE as part of our digital content campaign to support our broadcast documentary CHASING THE MOON, a 6-hour social and political history of the space race. The larger film provides a sweeping view of how cold war politics, civil rights and media culture converged in America's drive to land on the moon. Over the 9 minutes of THE DESEGREGATION OF HUNTSVILLE, we showed how these same themes converged on the local Huntsville civil rights story. In producing this video, we recovered an archive of 8mm home movies of the Huntsville movement that historians and locals feared was lost. As a result, we told a richer, more inclusive story. The video provides an unusually nuanced yet accessible starting point for classroom discussions of the nature and dynamics of an underrepresented civil rights struggle.
