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Civil Rights
Civil Rights Movement in the United States, political, legal, and
social struggle by black Americans to gain full citizenship rights and
to achieve racial equality. The civil rights movement was first and
foremost a challenge to segregation, the system of laws and customs
separating blacks and whites that whites used to control blacks after
slavery was abolished in the 1860s. During the civil rights movement,
individuals and civil rights organizations challenged segregation and
discrimination with a variety of activities, including protest marches,
boycotts, and refusal to abide by segregation laws. Many believe that
the movement began with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and ended
with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, though there is debate about when
it began and whether it has ended yet. The civil rights movement has
also been called the Black Freedom Movement, the Negro Revolution, and
the Second Reconstruction.
Segregation
Segregation was an attempt by white Southerners to separate the races
in every sphere of life and to achieve supremacy over blacks.
Segregation was often called the Jim Crow system, after a minstrel show
character from the 1830s who was an old, crippled, black slave who
embodied negative stereotypes of blacks. Segregation became common in
Southern states following the end of Reconstruction in 1877. During
Reconstruction, which followed the Civil War (1861-1865), Republican
governments in the Southern states were run by blacks, Northerners, and
some sympathetic Southerners. The Reconstruction governments had passed
laws opening up economic and political opportunities for blacks. By
1877 the Democratic Party had gained control of government in the
Southern states, and these Southern Democrats wanted to reverse black
advances made during Reconstruction. To that end, they began to pass
local and state laws that specified certain places For Whites Only
and others for Colored. Blacks had separate schools, transportation,
restaurants, and parks, many of which were poorly funded and inferior
to those of whites. Over the next 75 years, Jim Crow signs went up to
separate the races in every possible place.
The system of segregation also included the denial of voting rights,
known as disfranchisement. Between 1890 and 1910 all Southern states
passed laws imposing requirements for voting that were used to prevent
blacks from voting, in spite of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution
of the United States, which had been designed to protect black voting
rights. These requirements included: the ability to read and write,
which disqualified the many blacks who had not had access to education;
property ownership, something few blacks were able to acquire; and
paying a poll tax, which was too great a burden on most Southern blacks,
who were very poor. As a final insult, the few blacks who made it over
all these hurdles could not vote in the Democratic primaries that chose
the candidates because they were open only to whites in most Southern
states.
Because blacks could not vote, they were virtually powerless to prevent
whites from segregating all aspects of Southern life. They could do
little to stop discrimination in public accommodations, education,
economic opportunities, or housing. The ability to struggle for
equality was even undermined by the prevalent Jim Crow signs, which
constantly reminded blacks of their inferior status in Southern society.
Segregation was an all encompassing system.
Conditions for blacks in Northern states were somewhat better, though
up to 1910 only about 10 percent of blacks lived in the North, and
prior to World War II (1939-1945), very few blacks lived in the West.
Blacks were usually free to vote in the North, but there were so few
blacks that their voices were barely heard. Segregated facilities were
not as common in the North, but blacks were usually denied entrance to
the best hotels and restaurants. Schools in New England were usually
integrated, but those in the Midwest generally were not. Perhaps the
most difficult part of Northern life was the intense economic
discrimination against blacks. They had to compete with large numbers
of recent European immigrants for job opportunities and almost always
lost.
Early Black Resistance to Segregation
Blacks fought against discrimination whenever possible. In the late
1800s blacks sued in court to stop separate seating in railroad cars,
states' disfranchisement of voters, and denial of access to schools and
restaurants. One of the cases against segregated rail travel was Plessy
v. Ferguson (1896), in which the Supreme Court of the United States
ruled that separate but equal accommodations were constitutional. In
fact, separate was almost never equal, but the Plessy doctrine provided
constitutional protection for segregation for the next 50 years.
To protest segregation, blacks created new national organizations. The
National Afro-American League was formed in 1890; the Niagara Movement
in 1905; and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) in 1909. In 1910 the National Urban League was created
to help blacks make the transition to urban, industrial life.
The NAACP became one of the most important black protest organizations
of the 20th century. It relied mainly on a legal strategy that
challenged segregation and discrimination in courts to obtain equal
treatment for blacks. An early leader of the NAACP was the historian
and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, who starting in 1910 made powerful
arguments in favor of protesting segregation as editor of the NAACP
magazine, The Crisis. NAACP lawyers won court victories over voter
disfranchisement in 1915 and residential segregation in 1917, but
failed to have lynching outlawed by the Congress of the United States
in the 1920s and 1930s. These cases laid the foundation for a legal and
social challenge to segregation although they did little to change
everyday life. In 1935 Charles H. Houston, the NAACP's chief legal
counsel, won the first Supreme Court case argued by exclusively black
counsel representing the NAACP. This win invigorated the NAACP's legal
efforts against segregation, mainly by convincing courts that
segregated facilities, especially schools, were not equal. In 1939 the
NAACP created a separate organization called the NAACP Legal Defense
Fund that had a nonprofit, tax-exempt status that was denied to the
NAACP because it lobbied the U.S. Congress. Houston's chief aide and
later his successor, Thurgood Marshall, a brilliant young lawyer who
would become a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, began to challenge
segregation as a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
World War I
When World War I (1914-1918) began, blacks enlisted to fight for their
country. However, black soldiers were segregated, denied the
opportunity to be leaders, and were subjected to racism within the
armed forces. During the war, hundreds of thousands of Southern blacks
migrated northward in 1916 and 1917 to take advantage of job openings
in Northern cities created by the war. This great migration of Southern
blacks continued into the 1950s. Along with the great migration, blacks
in both the North and South became increasingly urbanized during the
20th century. In 1890, about 85 percent of all Southern blacks lived in
rural areas; by 1960 that percentage had decreased to about 42 percent.
In the North, about 95 percent of all blacks lived in urban areas in
1960. The combination of the great migration and the urbanization of
blacks resulted in black communities in the North that had a strong
political presence. The black communities began to exert pressure on
politicians, voting for those who supported civil rights. These
Northern black communities, and the politicians that they elected,
helped Southern blacks struggling against segregation by using
political influence and money.
The 1930s
The Great Depression of the 1930s increased black protests against
discrimination, especially in Northern cities. Blacks protested the
refusal of white-owned businesses in all-black neighborhoods to hire
black salespersons. Using the slogan Don't Buy Where You Can't Work,
these campaigns persuaded blacks to boycott those businesses and
revealed a new militancy. During the same years, blacks organized
school boycotts in Northern cities to protest discriminatory treatment
of black children.
The black protest activities of the 1930s were encouraged by the
expanding role of government in the economy and society. During the
administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt the federal
government created federal programs, such as Social Security, to assure
the welfare of individual citizens. Roosevelt himself was not an
outspoken supporter of black rights, but his wife Eleanor became an
open advocate for fairness to blacks, as did other leaders in the
administration. The Roosevelt Administration opened federal jobs to
blacks and turned the federal judiciary away from its preoccupation
with protecting the freedom of business corporations and toward the
protection of individual rights, especially those of the poor and
minority groups. Beginning with his appointment of Hugo Black to the U.
S. Supreme Court in 1937, Roosevelt chose judges who favored black
rights. As early as 1938, the courts displayed a new attitude toward
black rights; that year the Supreme Court ruled that the state of
Missouri was obligated to provide access to a public law school for
blacks just as it provided for whites-a new emphasis on the equal part
of the Plessy doctrine. Blacks sensed that the national government
might again be their ally, as it had been during the Civil War.
World War II
When World War II began in Europe in 1939, blacks demanded better
treatment than they had experienced in World War I. Black newspaper
editors insisted during 1939 and 1940 that black support for this war
effort would depend on fair treatment. They demanded that black
soldiers be trained in all military roles and that black civilians have
equal opportunities to work in war industries at home.
In 1941 A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters, a union whose members were mainly black railroad workers,
planned a March on Washington to demand that the federal government
require defense contractors to hire blacks on an equal basis with
whites. To forestall the march, President Roosevelt issued an executive
order to that effect and created the federal Fair Employment Practices
Committee (FEPC) to enforce it. The FEPC did not prevent discrimination
in war industries, but it did provide a lesson to blacks about how the
threat of protest could result in new federal commitments to civil
rights.
During World War II, blacks composed about one-eighth of the U.S. armed
forces, which matched their presence in the general population.
Although a disproportionately high number of blacks were put in
noncombat, support positions in the military, many did fight. The Army
Air Corps trained blacks as pilots in a controversial segregated
arrangement in Tuskegee, Alabama. During the war, all the armed
services moved toward equal treatment of blacks, though none flatly
rejected segregation.
In the early war years, hundreds of thousands of blacks left Southern
farms for war jobs in Northern and Western cities. In fact more blacks
migrated to the North and the West during World War II than had left
during the previous war. Although there was racial tension and conflict
in their new homes, blacks were free of the worst racial oppression,
and they enjoyed much larger incomes. After the war blacks in the North
and West used their economic and political influence to support civil
rights for Southern blacks.
Blacks continued to work against discrimination during the war,
challenging voting registrars in Southern courthouses and suing school
boards for equal educational provisions. The membership of the NAACP
grew from 50,000 to about 500,000. In 1944 the NAACP won a major
victory in Smith v. Allwright, which outlawed the white primary. A new
organization, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), was founded in
1942 to challenge segregation in public accommodations in the North.
During the war, black newspapers campaigned for a Double V, victories
over both fascism in Europe and racism at home. The war experience gave
about one million blacks the opportunity to fight racism in Europe and
Asia, a fact that black veterans would remember during the struggle
against racism at home after the war. Perhaps just as important, almost
ten times that many white Americans witnessed the patriotic service of
black Americans. Many of them would object to the continued denial of
civil rights to the men and women beside whom they had fought.
After World War II the momentum for racial change continued. Black
soldiers returned home with determination to have full civil rights.
President Harry Truman ordered the final desegregation of the armed
forces in 1948. He also committed to a domestic civil rights policy
favoring voting rights and equal employment, but the U.S. Congress
rejected his proposals.
School Desegregation
In the postwar years, the NAACP's legal strategy for civil rights
continued to succeed. Led by Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP Legal Defense
Fund challenged and overturned many forms of discrimination, but their
main thrust was equal educational opportunities. For example, in Sweat
v. Painter (1950), the Supreme Court decided that the University of
Texas had to integrate its law school. Marshall and the Defense Fund
worked with Southern plaintiffs to challenge the Plessy doctrine
directly, arguing in effect that separate was inherently unequal. The U.
S. Supreme Court heard arguments on five cases that challenged
elementary- and secondary-school segregation, and in May 1954 issued
its landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that stated that
racially segregated education was unconstitutional.
White Southerners received the Brown decision first with shock and, in
some instances, with expressions of goodwill. By 1955, however, white
opposition in the South had grown into massive resistance, a strategy
to persuade all whites to resist compliance with the desegregation
orders. It was believed that if enough people refused to cooperate with
the federal court order, it could not be enforced. Tactics included
firing school employees who showed willingness to seek integration,
closing public schools rather than desegregating, and boycotting all
public education that was integrated. The White Citizens Council was
formed and led opposition to school desegregation all over the South.
The Citizens Council called for economic coercion of blacks who favored
integrated schools, such as firing them from jobs, and the creation of
private, all-white schools.
Virtually no schools in the South were desegregated in the first years
after the Brown decision. In Virginia one county did indeed close its
public schools. In Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, Governor Orval
Faubus defied a federal court order to admit nine black students to
Central High School, and President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal
troops to enforce desegregation. The event was covered by the national
media, and the fate of the Little Rock Nine, the students attempting to
integrate the school, dramatized the seriousness of the school
desegregation issue to many Americans. Although not all school
desegregation was as dramatic as in Little Rock, the desegregation
process did proceed-gradually. Frequently schools were desegregated
only in theory, because racially segregated neighborhoods led to
segregated schools. To overcome this problem, some school districts in
the 1970s tried busing students to schools outside of their
neighborhoods.
As desegregation progressed, the membership of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)
grew. The KKK used violence or threats against anyone who was suspected
of favoring desegregation or black civil rights. Klan terror, including
intimidation and murder, was widespread in the South in the 1950s and
1960s, though Klan activities were not always reported in the media.
One terrorist act that did receive national attention was the 1955
murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy slain in Mississippi by
whites who believed he had flirted with a white woman. The trial and
acquittal of the men accused of Till's murder were covered in the
national media, demonstrating the continuing racial bigotry of Southern
whites.
Political Protest
Montgomery Bus Boycott
Despite the threats and violence, the struggle quickly moved beyond
school desegregation to challenge segregation in other areas. On
December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a member of the Montgomery, Alabama,
branch of the NAACP, was told to give up her seat on a city bus to a
white person. When Parks refused to move, she was arrested. The local
NAACP, led by Edgar D. Nixon, recognized that the arrest of Parks might
rally local blacks to protest segregated buses. Montgomery's black
community had long been angry about their mistreatment on city buses
where white drivers were often rude and abusive. The community had
previously considered a boycott of the buses, and almost overnight one
was organized. The Montgomery bus boycott was an immediate success,
with virtually unanimous support from the 50,000 blacks in Montgomery.
It lasted for more than a year and dramatized to the American public
the determination of blacks in the South to end segregation. A federal
court ordered Montgomery's buses desegregated in November 1956, and the
boycott ended in triumph.
A young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., was president
of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the organization that
directed the boycott. The protest made King a national figure. His
eloquent appeals to Christian brotherhood and American idealism created
a positive impression on people both inside and outside the South. King
became the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC) when it was founded in 1957. SCLC wanted to complement the NAACP
legal strategy by encouraging the use of nonviolent, direct action to
protest segregation. These activities included marches, demonstrations,
and boycotts. The violent white response to black direct action
eventually forced the federal government to confront the issues of
injustice and racism in the South.
In addition to his large following among blacks, King had a powerful
appeal to liberal Northerners that helped him influence national public
opinion. His advocacy of nonviolence attracted supporters among peace
activists. He forged alliances in the American Jewish community and
developed strong ties to the ministers of wealthy, influential
Protestant congregations in Northern cities. King often preached to
those congregations, where he raised funds for SCLC.
The Sit-Ins
On February 1, 1960, four black college students at North Carolina A&T
University began protesting racial segregation in restaurants by
sitting at white-only lunch counters and waiting to be served. This
was not a new form of protest, but the response to the sit-ins in North
Carolina was unique. Within days sit-ins had spread throughout North
Carolina, and within weeks they were taking place in cities across the
South. Many restaurants were desegregated. The sit-in movement also
demonstrated clearly to blacks and whites alike that young blacks were
determined to reject segregation openly.
In April 1960 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was
founded in Raleigh, North Carolina, to help organize and direct the
student sit-in movement. King encouraged SNCC's creation, but the most
important early advisor to the students was Ella Baker, who had worked
for both the NAACP and SCLC. She believed that SNCC should not be part
of SCLC but a separate, independent organization run by the students.
She also believed that civil rights activities should be based in
individual black communities. SNCC adopted Baker's approach and focused
on making changes in local communities, rather than striving for
national change. This goal differed from that of SCLC which worked to
change national laws. During the civil rights movement, tensions
occasionally arose between SCLC and SNCC because of their different
methods.
Freedom Riders
After the sit-ins, some SNCC members participated in the 1961 Freedom
Rides organized by CORE. The Freedom Riders, both black and white,
traveled around the South in buses to test the effectiveness of a 1960
Supreme Court decision. This decision had declared that segregation was
illegal in bus stations that were open to interstate travel. The
Freedom Rides began in Washington, D.C. Except for some violence in
Rock Hill, South Carolina, the trip southward was peaceful until they
reached Alabama, where violence erupted. At Anniston one bus was burned
and some riders were beaten. In Birmingham, a mob attacked the riders
when they got off the bus. They suffered even more severe beatings by a
mob in Montgomery, Alabama.
The violence brought national attention to the Freedom Riders and
fierce condemnation of Alabama officials for allowing the violence. The
administration of President John Kennedy interceded to protect the
Freedom Riders when it became clear that Alabama state officials would
not guarantee safe travel. The riders continued on to Jackson,
Mississippi, where they were arrested and imprisoned at the state
penitentiary, ending the protest. The Freedom Rides did result in the
desegregation of some bus stations, but more importantly, they
demonstrated to the American public how far civil rights workers would
go to achieve their goals.
SCLC Campaigns
SCLC's greatest contribution to the civil rights movement was a series
of highly publicized protest campaigns in Southern cities during the
early 1960s. These protests were intended to create such public
disorder that local white officials and business leaders would end
segregation in order to restore normal business activity. The
demonstrations required the mobilization of hundreds, even thousands,
of protesters who were willing to participate in protest marches as
long as necessary to achieve their goal and who were also willing to be
arrested and sent to jail.
The first SCLC direct-action campaign began in 1961 in Albany, Georgia,
where the organization joined local demonstrations against segregated
public accommodations. The presence of SCLC and King escalated the
Albany protests by bringing national attention and additional people to
the demonstrations, but the demonstrations did not force negotiations
to end segregation. During months of protest, Albany's police chief
continued to jail demonstrators without a show of police violence. The
Albany protests ended in failure.
In the spring of 1963, however, the direct-action strategy worked in
Birmingham, Alabama. SCLC joined the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, a
local civil rights leader, who believed that the Birmingham police
commissioner, Eugene Bull Connor, would meet protesters with violence.
In May the SCLC staff stepped up antisegregation marches by persuading
teenagers and school children to join. The singing and chanting
adolescents who filled the streets of Birmingham caused Connor to
abandon restraint. He ordered police to attack demonstrators with dogs
and firefighters to turn high-pressure water hoses on them. The ensuing
scenes of violence were shown throughout the nation and the world in
newspapers, magazines, and most importantly, on television. Much of the
world was shocked by the events in Birmingham, and the reaction to the
violence increased support for black civil rights. In Birmingham white
leaders promised to negotiate an end to some segregation practices.
Business leaders agreed to hire and promote more black employees and to
desegregate some public accommodations. More important, however, the
Birmingham demonstrations built support for national legislation
against segregation.
Desegregating Southern Universities
In 1962 a black man from Mississippi, James Meredith, applied for
admission to University of Mississippi. His action was an example of
how the struggle for civil rights belonged to individuals acting alone
as well as to organizations. The university attempted to block
Meredith's admission, and he filed suit. After working through the
state courts, Meredith was successful when a federal court ordered the
university to desegregate and accept Meredith as a student. The
governor of Mississippi, Ross Barnett, defied the court order and tried
to prevent Meredith from enrolling. In response, the administration of
President Kennedy intervened to uphold the court order. Kennedy sent
federal marshals with Meredith when he attempted to enroll. During his
first night on campus, a riot broke out when whites began to harass the
federal marshals. In the end, 2 people were killed, and about 375
people were wounded.
When the governor of Alabama, George C. Wallace, threatened a similar
stand, trying to block the desegregation of the University of Alabama
in 1963, the Kennedy Administration responded with the full power of
the federal government, including the U.S. Army, to prevent violence
and enforce desegregation. The showdowns with Barnett and Wallace
pushed Kennedy, whose support for civil rights up to that time had been
tentative, into a full commitment to end segregation.
The March on Washington
The national civil rights leadership decided to keep pressure on both
the Kennedy administration and the Congress to pass civil rights
legislation by planning a March on Washington for August 1963. It was a
conscious revival of A. Philip Randolph's planned 1941 march, which had
yielded a commitment to fair employment during World War II. Randolph
was there in 1963, along with the leaders of the NAACP, CORE, SCLC, the
Urban League, and SNCC. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered the keynote
address to an audience of more than 200,000 civil rights supporters.
His I Have a Dream speech in front of the giant sculpture of the
Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, became famous for how it expressed
the ideals of the civil rights movement.
Partly as a result of the March on Washington, President Kennedy
proposed a new civil rights law. After Kennedy was assassinated in
November 1963, the new president, Lyndon Johnson, strongly urged its
passage as a tribute to Kennedy's memory. Over fierce opposition from
Southern legislators, Johnson pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1964
through Congress. It prohibited segregation in public accommodations
and discrimination in education and employment. It also gave the
executive branch of government the power to enforce the act's
provisions.
Voter Registration
The year 1964 was the culmination of SNCC's commitment to civil rights
activism at the community level. Starting in 1961 SNCC and CORE
organized voter registration campaigns in heavily black, rural counties
of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. SNCC concentrated on voter
registration, believing that voting was a way to empower blacks so that
they could change racist policies in the South. SNCC worked to register
blacks to vote by teaching them the necessary skills-such as reading
and writing-and the correct answers to the voter registration
application. SNCC worker Robert Moses led a voter registration effort
in McComb, Mississippi, in 1961, and in 1962 and 1963 SNCC worked to
register voters in the Mississippi Delta, where it found local
supporters like the farm-worker and activist Fannie Lou Hamer. These
civil rights activities caused violent reactions from Mississippi's
white supremacists. Moses faced constant terrorism that included
threats, arrests, and beatings. In June 1963 Medgar Evers, NAACP field
secretary in Mississippi, was shot and killed in front of his home.
In 1964 SNCC workers organized the Mississippi Summer Project to
register blacks to vote in that state. SNCC leaders also hoped to focus
national attention on Mississippi's racism. They recruited Northern
college students, teachers, artists, and clergy-both black and white-to
work on the project, because they believed that the participation of
these people would make the country more concerned about discrimination
and violence in Mississippi. The project did receive national attention,
especially after three participants, two of whom were white,
disappeared in June and were later found murdered and buried near
Philadelphia, Mississippi. By the end of the summer, the project had
helped thousands of blacks attempt to register, and about 1000 had
actually become registered voters.
The Summer Project increased the number of blacks who were politically
active and led to the creation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic
Party (MFDP). When white Democrats in Mississippi refused to accept
black members in their delegation to the Democratic National Convention
of 1964, Hamer and others went to the convention to challenge the white
Democrats' right to represent Mississippi. In a televised interview,
Hamer detailed the harassment and abuse experienced by black
Mississippians when they tried to register to vote. Her testimony
attracted much media attention, and President Johnson was upset by the
disturbance at the convention where he expected to be nominated for
president. National Democratic Party officials offered the black
Mississippians two convention seats, but the MFDP rejected the
compromise offer and went home. Later, however, the MFDP challenge did
result in more support for blacks and other minorities in the
Democratic Party.
In early 1965 SCLC employed its direct-action techniques in a voting-
rights protest initiated by SNCC in Selma, Alabama. When protests at
the local courthouse were unsuccessful, protesters began a march to
Montgomery, the state capital. As the marchers were leaving Selma,
mounted police beat and tear-gassed them. Televised scenes of that
violence, called Bloody Sunday, s
Word Count: 4648
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