Case study first half: Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Black Voting Rights

What was the decision that King had to make

Whether to turn the march back around at the bridge, or to defy a federal court order and push forward as the marchers were expecting

MLK’s civil rights movement

Aimed to overturn state laws and customs requiring racial segregation in the South, as well as state laws and practices that disenfranchised black voters there. King brought the segregation issue unprecedented attention with a campaign of mass nonviolent civil disobedience.

Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death and what happened afterward

• He was shot by a state trooper during a march.

• In response, the SCLC announced a 3-day protest march from Brown Chapel, their Selma headquarters, to the Alabama state capitol in Montgomery.

  • Alabama governor George Wallace banned the march.

  • The SCLC decided to defy his order.

Selma to Montgomery march

• When the marchers crossed the bridge, Sheriff Jim Clark blocked them.

• State troopers ordered protestors to disperse, but they didn’t.

• Troopers and Clark’s men attacked the marchers and beat any black person they encountered.

• TV networks broadcast the whole incident

SCLC and Judge Frank Johnson

• SCLC lawyers petitioned him for an injunction to prevent state/local authorities from stopping their next march, because he was seen as sympathetic to the civil rights movement.

• But he refused to issue injunction without a hearing, and instructed the SCLC to postpone their march.

King and President Lyndon Johnson

• Lyndon Johnson made it clear he didn’t want King to march, fearing that a new march would provoke more violence and threaten the prospects of voting rights legislation.

• King didn’t want to betray his ally but he decided to proceed with the march.

King’s argument with Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach

• Katzenbach called King urging him not to march

• King said “But you have not been a black man in America for three hundred years.”

President Johnson’s men at King’s front door

• John Doar and Le Roy Collins

• They informed King that Judge Johnson had issued an injunction against the march.

  • Collins suggested that King might not violate it if he marched to the bridge but then turned back around.

• Collins went to go ask Clark and Al Lingo to agree to this plan, but never got back to King, so King started his marchers toward the bridge.

Thirteenth Amendment

abolished slavery

Fourteenth Amendment

declared all people born in the US to be citizens

Civil Rights Act of 1867

offered former slaves equal protection of the law

Radical Republicans’ views on freedmen

Concluded that all freedmen, or formerly enslaved people, must be given the vote to protect their new citizenship rights and to stop Democrats, especially former Confederates, from regaining power in the South.

Impact of Reconstruction Act

• Radicals used it to force former rebel states to write new constitutions that eliminated race restrictions on voting.

• Black voters went on to form the backbone of the Republican Party in the South, and southern black Republican leaders were elected to state/local office and to Congress.

traits of the new black voters

• they were mostly impoverished, unskilled, and illiterate.

• no longer confined to plantations, they became mobile - set up their own churches/schools, obtained their own farms

sharecropping

freedmen who couldn’t afford land would rent it in return for part of the cotton they grew

Fifteenth Amendment

allowed blacks to vote

actions of the KKK

Southern whites, began a campaign of terror against both white and black Republicans across the South. The violence provoked Republicans in Congress to approve Enforcement Acts

Enforcement Acts

• banned KKK activity

• allowed all US citizens to vote

• made illegal using force/threats to prevent any citizen from voting

counting out black votes

Democrats stuffed ballot boxes with fake Democratic ballots, while destroying Republican ballots or simply tallying them as Democratic

Black Belt

southern Alabama (Montgomery and Selma). The name was inspired by soil color, but it came to refer to the color of its voters.

immigrants and voting

Most immigrants voted Democratic, so Republicans enacted laws restricting their right to vote - poll taxes, literacy tests.

convict leasing

• It was slavery by another name

• A sheriff could arrest a black laborer on a vague charge such as vagrancy. He would have an unfair trial and then sent to labor somewhere under harsh conditions.

lily white juries

almost never voted to convict perpetrators who lynched blacks

why couldn’t people outwardly ban black voting

• it would go against the Fifteenth Amendment

• so they devised voting requirements instead - poll tax, literacy test

Australian ballot

secret ballot, voters are anonymous

grandfather clause

exempted anyone descended from a man who could vote on January 1, 1867, from the new literacy and poll tax requirements (protected white voters). The Supreme Court ruled that it violated the 15th Amendment.

Jackson Giles

He petitioned a federal district court alleging that his 15th Amendment rights had been violated. Then the Supreme Court ruled that if the registration requirements were unconstitutional, then the solution was not for courts to force black citizens to be registered under them.

Number of black voters decreased - impact on black elected officials

Without black votes to sustain them, they quickly lost their positions. The last black congressman was George Henry White, Republican of North Carolina. No African American would serve in Congress for another 28 years.

primary election

voters cast secret ballots for their preferred candidates; reduced the corrupt control of party and state bosses, giving more control to the citizens.

white primary

Democrats used primary systems but with one distinctive feature: they did not allow black citizens to vote in them. Basically ensured that even those few black citizens who still voted would never affect an election outcome.

Jim Crow

racial segregation system

ex: black churches & schools, separate coach laws

Plessy v. Ferguson

The Supreme Court ruled that the “enforced separation of the two races” did not stamp “the colored race with a badge of inferiority” and that “separate but equal” facilities were therefore constitutional.

What happened with Rosa Parks

• She was arrested on a segregated bus in Montgomery for refusing to yield her seat to a white passenger.

• Yet the city ordinance required that she yield her seat to a white only if she could move to a free colored seat.

• The police jailed her anyways.

• Showed how whites in the South enforced Jim Crow whenever they wanted.

boll weevil

A beetle that devastated cotton production. Tenants fell into even more debt, which landlords exploited.

FDR’s view on civil rights

He pursued a very cautious policy on civil rights because he didn’t wanna alienate powerful southern Democratic members of Congress, whose support he needed to pass legislation.

Eleanor Roosevelt

When the Daughters of the American Revolution refused the use of their Washington DC concert hall to black opera singer Marian Anderson, she resigned her DAR membership to help her organize a concert at the Lincoln Memorial.

why did both parties start appealing to blacks for their votes

they realized that in a close presidential race, black voters could swing key states.

Truman’s actions

he issued executive orders beginning the desegregation of the US armed forces.

irony of black drafting for WW2

the idea that those who fought for their country were denied suffrage at home because of their race, especially because the US was battling racist Nazi Germany

NAACP

• It appealed principally to the black middle class and organized protests

• Triumphs were the Supreme Court rulings that grandfather clauses and white primaries were unconstitutional

Brown v. Board of Education

Justices decided that legally mandated racial segregation of public schools violated black children’s Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection. Court declared that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

Fred Gray

Alabama’s first activist black lawyer and second black lawyer overall

what the black community in Montgomery did with their new political leverage

They got the city to establish its first black public high school, a black hospital, and a number of black public housing developments. They also persuaded the city to hire its first black police officers.

• White city leaders who agreed to these changes only did so to keep segregation.

  • With the separate but equal doctrine discarded, it became increasingly clear that segregation would not stand unless “colored” facilities at least approximated “white” ones.

Impact of Rosa Parks’s arrest

Activists saw it as the perfect opportunity for a bus boycott. They created the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to run the boycott and chose Martin Luther King Jr as its president.

Why was King chosen as president of MIA

He was well-educated, an impressive public speaker, and was not tied to any faction of the local black leadership.

How was King appealing

his insistence that protestors “meet hate with love”; his nonviolent, mass-movement approach to civil rights

White Citizens Councils

Advocated “massive resistance” to integration. Concentrated their efforts on “eliminating all white dissent" and “silencing all public advocacy of racial moderation.”

King + carpools

• The city government tried to disrupt the MIA boycott by falsely announcing that black leaders had agreed to end it and subsequently ordered police to tail black drivers who were carpooling black commuters to work.

• Police arrested King, who was driving a carpool, for going 30mph in a 25mph zone. He was jailed, though his friends quickly bailed him out.

• At this point the MIA decided compromise was useless.

when did the MIA end the boycott

Only when they got bus integration in Montgomery

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)

King helped to create it with the idea of organizing black ministers for civil rights action.

Civil Rights Act of 1957

• It disappointed King and the NAACP because it reflected the mainstream white view that civil rights reform should be “gradual”

• It created a Civil Rights Commission to investigate and report on voting rights abuses and a small Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department

• But it did not directly attack segregation; its procedures were aimed only at individuals, as if the problem was just a few “bad apples”