The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Coalition Politics

Professor Days began his Childress Lecture by recounting his personal experience with Jim Crow segregation. I too have such a story. I was born and raised in Hunstville, Alabama, a city that is notable, among other things, for having desegregated its public accommodations in 1962, two full years before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The turning point in the non-violent sit-in movement in Hunstville was when a young, African- American woman was arrested with a four-month-old baby in her arms, along with a friend who was eight months pregnant. This caused some outrage and widespread press coverage. The mother was Joan Carpenter Cashin and the baby was me. I am proud to have played a role, however small, in the most important social movement of the twentieth century in the United States