Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)

Civil rights group that fought for integration and voting rights for African Americans. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) is still active today but is perhaps best known for Freedom Rides protesting segregated transportation in southern states during the civil rights era of the 1960s.

CORE was formed in 1942 by an interracial and mostly pacifist group of students in Chicago. The founders intended for the organization to promote nonviolent resistance to racial inequalities. Early members included James Farmer, Anna Murray, and Bayard Rustin. CORE advocated nonviolent direct action in order to call attention to and fight against segregation and the political disenfranchisement of African Americans.

Hindered by cold war rhetoric that labeled civil rights groups as subversive, CORE grew slowly in the 1950s, but it gained considerable size and power during the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. In the South, CORE fought for desegregation and voter registration. In the North, it focused its efforts on better jobs, housing, and school integration. Together with other civil rights groups, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [Page 218](SNCC), CORE also organized sit-ins to protest segregation in public places, such as lunch counters, parks, and swimming pools.

In 1947, CORE organized the Journey of Reconciliation, a direct-action campaign to protest segregation of buses, trains, and terminals in the South. Although unable to put an end to segregated transportation at the time, CORE nonetheless drew public attention to the issue and revisited the idea with greater success in 1961 with the Freedom Rides.

The Freedom Rides were aimed at testing a 1960 Supreme Court decision that declared segregation in interstate travel to be unconstitutional. As the Freedom Riders traveled on buses through the South, they faced beatings by white mobs and arrests by law enforcement officials. When a number of the riders, including James Farmer, CORE's leader, were arrested and sentenced to sixty-seven days in jail for sitting in the whites-only section of a bus depot, hundreds of activists journeyed south to demonstrate their support and continue the Freedom Rides.

CORE also worked with other civil rights groups on a number of projects, including the historic 1963 march on Washington, a mass demonstration for civil rights. CORE, SNCC, and other civil rights groups also organized Freedom Summer in 1964, which was aimed at registering African Americans to vote. As part of this effort, civil rights workers and local people organized freedom schools, which offered voter education and African American history. They also organized the Mississippi Freedom Party, which challenged Mississippi's all-white delegation to the Democratic convention in 1964.

Although many civil rights groups in the 1960s worked for desegregation and voting rights, CORE and SNCC were considered more radical than most. More conservative groups, such as the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), often tried to achieve their goals through court decisions, mainstream political work, and lobbying rather than nonviolent direct-action techniques such as sit-ins advocated by CORE. CORE and SNCC activists also were younger and more likely to focus on poor rather than middle-class African Americans, and they made decisions democratically.

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