it was 50 years ago that fair-goers flocked to the World’s Fair to get a taste of the wider world and a glimpse of a possible future full of rocketships, superhighways and complex kitchen gadgets. But that year, a very different future was being chiseled out by a devoted group of civil rights activists who used the prominence of the World’s Fair to propel their fight for racial equality into the national consciousness. Their vision for the future involved less spaceships and more integrated schools. They were less interested in the fair’s futuristic exhibits and more concerned with equitable hiring practices on the fair’s grounds. The protesters greeted President Johnson with chants for the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Of the 700 who demonstrated, nearly 300 were arrested and carted off to jail.
Norman and Velma Hill talking:
The Congress of Racial Equality, CORE, under Jim Farmer, because CORE became a very different organization years later. But this was under Jim Farmer right after the Freedom Rides in the South. And we were very concerned. Norm was the program director of CORE, and we were doing many things to bring the—what was going on in the South to the North, because there were always problems in the North.
We were a couple at CORE. And we had something very interesting happening on that April 22nd. We had what we called extremist groups in CORE who had decided that they agreed with our goals, but they didn’t like our tactics. What they wanted to do was what they called a stall-in. And a stall-in, they had planned to do some very interesting things. They had planned to go onto subways, stop subways from running by pulling emergency brake.
They had planned to sit in at the bridges and stop people from going to work. And they had planned to take ravenous rats and to set them loose when President Johnson was going to speak. And we just didn’t think that that was a good idea. We thought that that’s really preventing workers from going to work, who had nothing to do with the World’s Fair. So we planned something at the World’s Fair where we got 700 people from around the country to come in to sit in at pavilions, to say we want the passage of the civil rights bill, and we want to make sure that there are minorities working at the World’s Fair, visibly working, because this world is not a white world. It is a white world and a brown world and a black world. And we wanted to make that statement and make it clear.
It was clear to us that the workforce was not representative and did not include minorities, especially blacks, at all levels. And so, we felt it was important to dramatize this situation and confront the key decision-makers at the World’s Fair about this problem and to organize a demonstration that would directly confront the World’s Fair and those who were running it. And we did so by assembling a group of demonstrators, as Velma indicated, who sat in at various pavilions of the World’s Fair, including the main entrance, where James Farmer, the national director of the Congress of Racial Equality; Michael Harrington, Democratic Socialist writer and author or The Other America, exposé of poverty in America; Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph’s most outstanding colleague and a master strategist and tactician of the civil rights movement; Ernie Green, assistant secretary of labor under Ray Marshall and President Clinton;
Who endured mob threats, and Eisenhower had to call in the troops to enable them to integrate Central High School in Little Rock in 1957. But we think that the clear focal point in 1964 here in New York City was the World’s Fair and our attempt to demonstrate that the workforce was not representative and inclusive.
one of the things that happened at that World’s Fair demonstration, I think it was the first time that we actually used walkie-talkies. You know, CORE sort of came into the 20th century with walkie-talkies. They were very big, nothing like you would see now. And we had about 15 CORE staffers who were placed all around the World’s Fair. And Norm was called King Cobra. And here’s Norm, who isn’t imperial at all. But he was King Cobra, and I was Cobra One. And we took them out a week before and practiced what they would say, who got arrested, which pavilion it was, and we had a whole dialogue so that we would know what was going on at the World’s Fair.
I think it’s very interesting, because that March on Washington did something that most people don’t understand. Before the March on Washington, the question of race was the dominant factor that we were protesting about. With the March on Washington and those demands, there was a convergence of race and class that most people don’t understand. But look at what Bayard was saying, what we wanted. We wanted full employment. we wanted full employment and things that were both—were economic in nature.
— source democracynow.org
Velma Hill, longtime civil and labor rights activist. Fifty years ago, she and her husband, Norman, helped organize the nonviolent protest at the New York World’s Fair that sought to highlight discriminatory hiring practices at the fair and at exhibiting companies. At the time, she was the East Coast field director of the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE. She went on to work as assistant to the president of the United Federation of Teachers. The couple is working on a memoir about love and activism called Climbing Up the Rough Side of the Mountain.
Norman Hill, longtime civil and labor rights activist. Fifty years ago, he and his wife, Velma, helped organize the nonviolent protest at the New York World’s Fair that sought to highlight discriminatory hiring practices at the fair and at exhibiting companies. At the time, he was the national program director for the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE. He went on to work with the AFL-CIO before becoming president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute. He and his wife, Velma, are working on a memoir about love and activism called Climbing Up the Rough Side of the Mountain.