||A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject. (January 2008)|
Bernice in front of her apartment building at 34 Monroe Place, Brooklyn, New York(1960)
|Born||December 8, 1916
New York City
|Known for||Civil Rights Activist|
Bernice Fisher (December 8, 1916, Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania – May 2, 1966, New York City) was a civil rights activist and union organizer. She was one of the original founders of the Congress of Racial Equality. Her birth name was Elsie Bernice Fisher, but she did not use her first name.
Civil rights leader and union organizer
As an activist Fisher headed a cell with the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) in Chicago to concentrate on race relationships. This small cell provided the people for the beginnings of the Committee of Racial Equality (CORE). James Farmer said he started CORE and he acknowledged this origination of CORE; see the Fellowship of Reconciliation 1992, Spring, Summer and Winter issues and Farmer's autobiography. The founding members of CORE were James L. Farmer, Jr., Bernice Fisher, George Houser, James Russell Robinson, Homer A. Jack and Joe Guinn. Bayard Rustin, while not a founder of CORE, was a campus traveler for the Fellowship of Reconciliation who worked with and advised the founders. Houser reported that James Farmer in addition to his Chicago activities traveled the country speaking about his National vision for CORE while with FOR and that Fisher was the nuts and bolts person for CORE in Chicago and later St. Louis. Houser mentioned pre-CORE and initial activities in Chicago of Jim Farmer, Jim Robinson, Bernice Fisher, Homer Jack and Joe Guinn that included the Fellowship house (an early effort at desegregating housing), Jack Spratt restaurant sit-in, and White City roller-rink among others. He spoke highly of Bernice Fisher and of her importance to the development of CORE. Fisher has been called the "godmother of the restaurant 'sit-in' technique" by fellow activist and union organizer Ernest Calloway who worked closely with Fisher in St. Louis & admired her.
Fisher worked tirelessly to establish the Committee On Racial Equality, which soon became the Committee of Racial Equality and was the forerunner to the Congress of Racial Equality, CORE. This group introduced the sit-in as a tactic in challenging racial segregation in public accommodations. Fisher was instrumental in establishing the sit-in as a nonviolent technique in the Civil Rights Movement. In 1942 CORE's six founders followed the nonviolent organizing techniques outlined in Krishnalal Shridharani's War Without Violence. War Without Violence had been Shridharani's doctoral thesis at Columbia, and within the year had become a national bestseller. Shridharani, an intimate of Gandhi, who had been jailed in the Salt March, had codified Gandhi's techniques. Gandhi had not wanted his followers to codify his teachings, as he had wanted people to come to India, study intensively and experience the movement first-hand. However, the British were barring Gandhi's followers from India, and travel to India was beyond the means of most of his followers. Fisher made a list of rules to follow at demonstrations based on Gandhi's teachings that was distributed as a handbill at some demonstrations.
Following Gandhi's first rule of involving the community and finding out its priorities, this first group of Fisher's concentrated on integrating housing, repealing laws against integrating neighborhoods in Chicago, and integrating restaurants and amusement venues in Chicago.
News of CORE's work spread and others followed their lead. In 1943, shortly after the first CORE sit-ins, a group of seventeen young women at Howard University in Washington DC began an unpublicized sit-in at a luncheonette in the Howard Neighborhood. They had become acquainted with CORE through Fellowship of Reconciliation Campus Travelers Bayard Rustin and James L. Farmer. These young women included Ruth Powell, Marianne Musgrave, Patricia Roberts, & Juanita Morrow Nelson, and they were represented by Pauli Murray, wh