Explanation:
Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's protest strategies of nonviolence and civil disobedience, in 1942 a group of Black and white students in Chicago founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), helping to launch one of America’s most important civil rights movements.
Taking a leading role in sit-ins, picket lines, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Freedom Rides and the 1963 March on Washington, the group worked alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders throughout the 1950s and mid-1960s until, in 1966, under new guidance, it turned its focus from civil disobedience to becoming a Black separatist and Black Power organization.
CORE's Founding Principles
Founded by activists associated with the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), an interfaith pacifist organization, the group was influenced greatly by the teachings of Gandhi and, in the early 1940s, worked to integrate Chicago restaurants and businesses using sit-ins and other nonviolent actions, according to the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.
CORE’s 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, an integrated, multi-state bus ride through the upper South, “was met with minimal violence, although several of the riders were arrested, and two were sentenced to work on a chain gang in North Carolina,” the institute writes.
A pillar of CORE's principles was a strict devotion to interracial membership, historian Brian Purnell writes in his book Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings. “CORE hoped to create an interracial, nonviolent army that would end racial segregation in America with campaigns that employed what Gandhi called satyagraha, which translates as 'soul force' or 'truth force.' CORE founders believed that local chapters' public displays of interracial solidarity and disciplined use of nonviolence would transform America into a truly colorblind democratic society."
In its first few years, according to Purnell, local CORE chapters were formed in 19 cities, including Baltimore, Chicago, Columbus, Cleveland,Denver, Detroit, Los Angeles and New York, although many didn’t last long.
“Their victories were often limited in scope,” he writes. “CORE chapters might successfully desegregate a downtown roller-skating rink or open up housing for a handful of Black people, but the process CORE chapters had to follow was prolonged and laborious."
By the end of 1954, many CORE chapters were disbanded, but, according to the Chicago Public Library, the organization found new dedication following the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision made that same year. “CORE decided to channel the majority of its energies on the South,” the library notes, supporting sit-ins and sending field secretaries to advise activists on nonviolent protest methods.
