The Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Movement:
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Key Concept
Harlem Renaissance
Segregation
School Desegregation
The Montgomery Bus Boycott
Sit-Ins
Freedom Riders
Desegregating Southern Universities
The March on Washington
Voter Registration
The End of the Movement
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Key Concept: Discuss how the civil rights movement evolved during the 1950s and 1960s and explain each of the three developments.
For African Americans, the path from slavery to full civil rights was long and difficult. Several developments during the 1950s and 1960s legally guaranteed them full citizenship:
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Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was an African American cultural movement of the 1920s and early 1930s centered around the Harlem neighborhood of New York City.
Several factors laid the groundwork for the movement.
During a phenomenon known as the Great Migration, hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved from the economically depressed rural South to the industrial cities of the North, taking advantage of employment opportunities created by World War I.
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Harlem Renaissance
Jazz and blues music moved with the African American populations from the South and Midwest into the bars and cabarets of Harlem.
Diversity and experimentation also flourished in the performing arts and were reflected in blues by such people as Bessie Smith and in jazz by such people as Duke Ellington and Fats Waller.
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Segregation
Segregation was an attempt by many white Southerners to separate the races in every aspect of daily life.
Segregation was often called the Jim Crow system, after a minstrel show character from the 1830s who was an African American slave who embodied negative stereotypes of African Americans.
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Segregation
African Americans 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 to separate the races went up in every possible place.
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Segregation
The system of segregation also included the denial of voting rights, known as disenfranchisement.
Between 1890 and 1910, all Southern states passed laws imposing requirements for voting. These were used to prevent African Americans from voting, in spite of the 15th Amendment, which had been designed to protect African American voting rights.
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Segregation
The voting requirements included the ability to read and write, which disqualified many African Americans who had not had access to education; property ownership, which excluded most African Americans, and paying a poll tax, which prevented most Southern African Americans from voting because they could not afford it.
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Segregation
Conditions for African Americans in the Northern states were somewhat better, though up to 1910 only ten percent of African Americans lived in the North.
Segregated facilities were not as common in the North, but African Americans were usually denied entrance to the best hotels and restaurants.
African Americans were usually free to vote in the North.
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Segregation
In the late 1800s, African Americans sued 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 order to protest segregation, African Americans created national organizations.
The National Afro-American League was formed in 1890; W.E.B. Du Bois helped create the Niagara Movement in 1905 and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.
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Segregation
The NAACP became one of the most important African American organizations of the twentieth century. It relied mainly on legal strategies that challenged segregation and discrimination in the courts.
Interestingly, Barak Obama became president 100 years after the founding of the NAACP.
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School Desegregation
After World War II, the NAACP’s campaign for civil rights continued to proceed.
Led by Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund challenged and overturned many forms of discrimination.
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School Desegregation
The main focus of the NAACP turned to equal educational opportunities.
Marshall and the Defense Fund worked with Southern plaintiffs to challenge the Plessy decision, arguing that separate was inherently unequal.
The Supreme Court of the United States heard arguments on five cases that challenged elementary and secondary school segregation.
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School Desegregation
In May 1954, the Warren Court issued its landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, stating racially segregated education was unconstitutional and overturning the Plessy decision.
White Southerners were shocked by the Brown decision.
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School Desegregation
Virtually no schools in the South segregated their schools in the first years following the Brown decision.
In Virginia, one county actually closed its public schools.
In 1957, Governor Orval Faubus defied a federal court order to admit nine African American students to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.
President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce desegregation.
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School Desegregation
As desegregation continued, the membership of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) grew.
The KKK used violence or threats against anyone who was suspected of favoring desegregation or African American civil rights.
Ku Klux Klan terror, including intimidation and murder, was widespread in the South during the 1950s and 1960s, though Klan activities were not always reported in the media.
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Civil Rights Movement,
1900-1950
1905 – Niagara Movement begun by W.E.B. Du Bois, William Monroe Trotter, and others – denounced the vocational training and gradual progress espoused by Booker T. Washington
1909 – National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) founded by Florence Kelley, Ida B. Wells, Jane Addams, Ray Stannard Baker, and others – strategy involved using the court system to challenge inequality and racism
1911 – Urban League formed to help poor black workers in cities
1920s – Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” movement and Universal Negro Improvement Association
1930 – Nation of Islam founded by Elijah Muhammad

Civil Rights Movement,
1900-1950 (Continued)
1941 – FDR ended discrimination in defense industries
1942 – Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) founded by James Farmer and others – advocated nonviolent protests
1944 – Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma published
1946 – Committee on Civil Rights appointed by Harry Truman
1947 – Major League Baseball desegregated when Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers
1948 – Harry Truman desegregated the United States military

The Montgomery Bus Boycott
Despite threats and violence, the civil rights movement quickly moved beyond school desegregation to challenge segregation in other areas.
In December 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 African Americans to protest segregated buses.
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Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
Martin Luther King
supported the Montgomery Bus Boycott
SCLC established by Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ralph Abernathy in 1957
Nonviolent protest and resistance based on civil disobedience of Henry David Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi
Christian-themed organization

Civil Rights Act of 1957
First federal civil rights legislation since Reconstruction
Established the United States Civil Rights Commission
Civil rights violations to be investigated
Voting rights of African Americans protected by the U.S. Attorney General

Sit-Ins
On February 1, 1960, four African American college students from North Carolina A&T University began protesting racial segregation in restaurants by sitting at “White Only” lunch counters and waiting to be served.
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Sit-Ins
This was not a new form of protest, but the response to the sit-ins spread throughout North Carolina, and within weeks sit-ins were taking place in cities across the South.
Many restaurants were desegregated in response to the sit-ins.
This form of protest demonstrated clearly to African Americans and whites alike that young African Americans were determined to reject segregation.
In April 1960, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded in to help organize and direct the student sit-in movement.
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Freedom Riders, 1961
Boynton v. Virginia,
1960 – segregation in
interstate transportation
unconstitutional
Freedom ride on two Greyhound buses going from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans, Louisiana – seven blacks and six whites
One bus firebombed in Anniston, Alabama
Other bus attacked by a mob in Birmingham, Alabama
Riders arrested in Jackson, Mississippi
Hundreds more were inspired and joined the freedom rides

Freedom Riders
President John F. Kennedy stepped in to protect the Freedom Riders
The Freedom Rides did result in the desegregation of some bus stations, but more importantly they caught the attention of the American public.
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“Ole Miss” Integrated, 1962
Medgar Evers worked to get Air Force veteran James Meredith into the all-white University of Mississippi
September 30, 1962 – riot sparked by rumors of Meredith’s campus arrival – 2 killed and 160 injured
Meredith enrolled, graduating in 1963
June, 1963 – Medgar Evers assassinated
1966 – James Meredith shot and wounded

Desegregating Southern Universities
In 1963, the governor of Alabama, George C. Wallace, threatened to block the desegregation of the University of Alabama.
The Kennedy administration responded with the full power of the federal government, including the U.S. Army.
The confrontations with Barnett and Wallace pushed President Kennedy into a full commitment to end segregation.
In June 1963, Kennedy proposed civil rights legislation.
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Kennedy’s Television Address, 1963
June 11, 1963
John F. Kennedy spoke on national television
Civil rights were a “moral issue”
Pledged “equal rights and equal opportunities”
Proposed new civil rights legislation
Aided by Attorney General Robert “Bobby” Kennedy (his brother)

The March on Washington
August 28, 1963
NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, and other groups
Over 200,000 peaceful demonstrators
MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial
Broadcasted live on national television
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The March on Washington
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.
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Voter Registration
SNCC recruited Northern college students, teachers, artists, and clergy to work on voter’s registration. They believed the participation of these people would make the country 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.
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Freedom Summer, 1964
Major voter registration drive in the South
Despite murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, approximately 1,000 black and white student volunteers participated
Formed Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) because Democratic Party of Mississippi was 100% white

Voter Registration
The 24th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1964. It prohibits both Congress and the states from conditioning the right to vote in federal elections on payment of a poll tax or other types of tax.
President Johnson persuaded Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which suspended the use of literacy and other voter qualification tests in voter registration.
King and SCLC members led hundreds of people on a five-day, fifty-mile march to Montgomery.
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Voter Registration
Over the next three years, almost one million more African Americans in the South registered to vote.
By 1968, African American voters had having a significant impact on Southern politics.
During the 1970s, African Americans were seeking and winning public offices in majority African American electoral districts.
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