Development of the Civil Rights Movement - 1954-1960

What were the problems facing Black Americans in the early 1950s?

• Segregation (Jim Crow Laws)

• Racism

• In the South - no voting rights

What did segregation look like in the 1950s

• Racist ‘Jim Crow’ laws were used to segregate Black and white American

• The law stated that it was legal to segregate as long as services were ‘separate but equal’

• Segregated public facilities and services included cinemas, toilets, schools and transport

• In reality, services for Black Americans were often inferior to those for white people

What did discrimination and violence in the south look like

• The majority of white people viewed Black Americans as racially inferior.

• Racist white officials, including police and judges, were often members of the Ku Klux Klan.

• The frequent assaults and murders of Black people
  were not properly investigated or prosecuted.

• Black people were not allowed to sit on juries in a court of law

What did black voting rights for black people look like

• White gangs physically stopped Black Americans from voting, and sometimes attacked them for trying to register to vote.

• Some Southern states, such as Georgia and Virginia, passed laws making it harder for Black people to vote. For example, they used unfair literacy tests to make it harder for Black Americans to qualify for the vote.

• Some Southern states introduced the ‘grandfather clause’ whereby voters had to prove their forefathers had voted. For descendants of enslaved people this was impossible as they had been barred from voting.

• Sometimes white employers sacked Black workers if they registered to vote or voted

What organisations were trying to improve the lives of Black Americans in the early 1950s?

• NAACP 

• CORE

What was the NAACP

• National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People

• It was set up in 1909.

• They fought for civil rights using the legal system and the courts.

• They defended Black people who had been unfairly convicted of crimes.

• It focused on overturning ‘separate but equal’ ruling

What was CORE

• Congress Of Racial Equality

• It was set up in 1942.

• They had a smaller membership than NAACP.

• Members used non-violent direct action; they trained local activists in these techniques.

• They operated mostly in Northern states.

• In early years of the organisation, most members were white and middle class

What was Plessy vs Ferguson

• In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation was constitutional as long as facilities were ‘separate but equal’.

• However, conditions for Black Americans were often separate and unequal.

• For example, Black schools were often underfunded compared to white schools and had poor facilities

What was the Supreme Court Case that began to undermine the Jim Crow segregation Laws and overturned Plessy vs Ferguson?

Brown v Board of Education (Topeka, Kansas) 1954

What was Brown vs Board of Education

• Linda Brown was an African American student whose experiences of segregated school education were used in a legal case brought to the Supreme Court by the NAACP in 1954.

• Earl Warren (more liberal) made chief justice in 1952

• The legal case was made against the Topeka Board of Education.

• It argued that the principle of ‘separate but equal’ in schools was unconstitutional, as it damaged Black children.

• In the case, a key point was that she had to walk past her local white school to reach the nearest Black school.

• Segregated schools made her feel separate and not equal to white kids

• However, the Court set no time limit for the desegregation of schools- in 1955 they said they should be done with ‘all deliberate speed’- meaningless

What was the short term significance and consequences of Brown vs Topeka

• Brown rulings overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which allowed public facilities, including schools, to be segregated.

• There was a white backlash and membership of the Ku Klux Klan increased- resistance to change e.g Little Rock 1957

• Black students and teachers, and their families, faced threats and hostility in desegregated schools.

• Some good schools for Black Americans were shut down.

• Many Southern states found ways to avoid complying with the court rulings

• Slow to desegregate

What is the long term significance of Brown vs Topeka

• Awareness of civil rights issues in the Southern states increased.

• Rulings were an inspiration for other desegregation campaigns.- NAACP used it as a legal precedent to challenge more JC laws

• White Americans moved out of areas where Black Americans lived, to avoid forced desegregation.

Who was murdered in 1955 and what does this tell us about racism in this period?

• Emmett Till - 14 years old.

• Murderers were white - got off with no punishment.

• Racist system but Emmett Till’s mother uses the tragedy to raise awareness of racism.

Who were the Little Rock 9

• Following the Brown verdict, a decision was made for school desegregation in Little Rock.

• About 75 Black students applied to join Little Rock High School; the school board accepted 25.

• However, their families were intimidated with threats if they tried to take their places at the school.

• At the start of the 1957 school year, just nine students were still planning to register.

• These students were called the ‘Little Rock Nine’ by the campaigners who took up their cause

Who was Governor Faubus

• After the 1954 Brown verdict, Orval Faubus, state governor of Arkansas, became a fierce opponent of school integration.

• In 1958, Faubus closed every school in Little Rock, in an attempt to stop racial integration taking place.

• This lasted for a year but pressure from parents eventually forced him to reopen schools

What happened at Little Rock High School in 1957?

• Governor Faubus tries to stop 9 black children from attending the school and uses the army to stop them.

• President Eisenhowever takes over the National Guar to allow the students to go.

What happened at Little Rock

• The Brown case led to the school board agreeing that Little Rock High School would be desegregated on 3 September 1957, at the start of the new school term.

• The NAACP arranged for the new Black students to arrive there together on 4 September.

• Faubus sent 250 state troops to surround the school when the Little Rock Nine were due to start; he said this was to ‘keep the peace’. This blocked the Black students from gaining entrance.

• Elizabeth Eckford did not get the notification to arrive with the rest of the group. She was targeted by the crowd and racially abused.

• District judges and lawyers for the NAACP used the courts to challenge Faubus and force him to withdraw the state troops.

• On 24 September, President Eisenhower sent in federal troops, to ensure Black students could attend school without being attacked. The Black students were finally able to enter the school successfully

What did Eisenhower do at Little Rock

• Rioting outside Little Rock High after Arkansas state troops were removed led Eisenhower to send in 1000 federal troops. - Eisenhower used a presidential order, as he knew Congress would disapprove of the decision to intervene in state affairs.

• While he wanted to avoid using federal powers, he was concerned about white opposition to integration.

• Eisenhower wanted to improve Black civil rights while avoiding potential violent unrest about racial integration in the Deep South, where opposition was strongest

What was the significance of Little Rock

• Hundreds of reporters from local and international news stations reported the events. People were shocked by the coverage of how children were being racially abused.

• There was continued resistance to school integration after 1957. In the South, many schools shut down rather than desegregate.

• The first Black student graduated from Little Rock High School in 1958, but fellow white students refused to sit with him at the ceremony.

• Even 10 years later, Black students attending newly integrated Southern schools were subjected to violence, intimidation and exclusion by teachers and peers

What were the long term causes of the MBB

• The Women’s Political Council in Montgomery had focused on bus discrimination since 1950.

• The Montgomery bus company discriminated against Black passengers by forcing them to sit at the back of buses and vacate their seats for white people.

• Requests to the bus company to change their rules were not listened to.

What were the short term causes of the MBB

• On 1 December 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the ‘Black’ area of a bus to a white man who had no seat.

• Police arrested and charged Parks under Montgomery’s segregation laws

Why was the Montgomery bus boycott successful?

• Organisation (MIA)- organised carpool, lasted 381 days, Rosa and Raymond Parks lost their jobs, and still kept going, handed out leaflets

• Leaders- MLK, strong leader, charismatic, inspirational, used non violent direct action, appealed to all Americans, ideas of unity, church baptist pastor, boosted morale, raised funds, arrested in 1956 for his part in organising the boycott, set up SCLC which worked with white politicians

  Jo Anne Robinson, E.D. Nixon and Ralph Abernathy (one of the leader of SCLC)

• Legal- NAACP used the case of Brown to argue Browder vs Gale, that the segregation faced by these people broke their 14th amendment right- the Supreme Court ordered that segregation was unconstitutional and should be ended in 1956, and used Brown case as their reasoning

20th December, MIA called off the boycott. 21st December, racially integrated bus services began

What was the SCLC

• It was set up in January 1957, to coordinate church-based protest across the South.

• It was led by Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy.

• Members campaigned against segregation.

• They used non-violent direct action.

• They secured Black and white membership.

• The earliest major campaign was for voter registration.

What was the 1957 Civil Rights Act

• The Brown case and the bus boycott led to increased public support for civil rights and a civil rights act being passed in Congress.

• The act aimed to increase Black voter registration, make it illegal to obstruct voter registration and allow federal courts to prosecute states that did not guarantee citizen's voting rights.

• However, in practice, all-white juries in the South were unlikely to uphold federal prosecutions of state violations of voting rights

Who opposed the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s?

• Ku Klux Klan - very violent - burning crosses - murder (lynching)

• White Citizens Council - more mainstream with support from white politicians in the South but still used violence and intimidation.

• The Dixiecrats - Southern Democrats who opposed change and blocked reform in Congress.

What was the KKK

• Set up in 1865 after enslaved Black people won their freedom. The KKK wanted to stop Black Americans from gaining equality.

• Operated mostly in the Southern states.

• Terrorised Black American families by intimidation and extreme violence, including murder, often by lynching (illegal execution, usually carried out by a mob).

• Only so-called WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) could join.

• They wore hoods, as membership was secret, although in reality many Southern states’ law enforcement officers were involved or sympathetic to the Klan’s aims.

• Klan members also attacked Jews, Catholics and liberals, but their most extreme hatred was for Black Americans

Who were the Dixiecrats

• The ‘Dixiecrats’ (a splinter group from the Democratic Party made up of Southern politicians) had strong views about keeping segregation.

• By 1954, they had rejoined the Democrats, after previously breaking away due to disagreements about civil rights, because they believed they could have more influence from within the Democratic Party.

• They maintained their position on keeping segregation and protecting states’ rights to retain laws that guaranteed white supremacy.

• Presidents needed the Dixiecrats’ support in Congress, so had to take their views on board when creating new laws. They were fearful that the Dixiecrats would disrupt government. This hindered the cause for civil rights laws.

Who was Emmett Till

• Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago, went to Mississippi in 1955 to visit family.

• Carolyn Bryant, a white woman, said that Till made sexual advances when he went to her store. Till’s cousins, who were waiting outside, said he only wolf-whistled at her.

• The next night, Bryant’s husband and his half- brother abducted Till and beat him severely. They shot him and threw him into the river with a weight around his neck. Till’s body was found three days later.

• Till’s mother had an open viewing of the body in Chicago. This led to extensive media coverage, which fuelled widespread shock and outrage, especially in the North, where many were ignorant of the treatment of Black Americans in the South.

• The murder trial was reported nationwide.

• The defendants were acquitted (found not guilty). They later sold their story to a magazine, admitting to the murder

Did Emmett Till get justice for his murder

• Emmett Till’s family did not get justice for his murder. After the trial, Black people continued to be murdered in Mississippi and the killers were rarely convicted.

• For example, NAACP leader George W. Lee was also murdered in 1955; his murder remains unsolved.

• Media reporting of these injustices led to a public outcry and spurred on the growth of the civil rights movement

How did state officials oppose change

• Some state officials resisted desegregation in the South in open ways, such as shutting down all state schools so they could not be
  integrated.

• Other state officials used more devious ways to oppose desegregation.

• For example, some school admission tests were deliberately biased against Black students, to prevent them from joining ‘white’ schools.

• Some states refused to end literacy tests and continued to disrupt opportunities for Black voters to cast their vote at elections

What was the WCC

• White Citizens’ Councils were set up from 1954 onwards to stop desegregation.

• They had around 60 000 members in the mid-1950s.

• They often began as organisations opposed to school desegregation in their local area after the Brown ruling.

• They opposed any desegregation, for example in libraries or swimming pools.

• As well as protesting and using violence, they used economic means to stop calls for desegregation: for example, in some towns WCC members sacked Black employees who signed petitions or were involved in civil rights activities.

• Members feared that desegregation would lead to more calls for political and economic equality for Black Americans.