The Civil Rights Movement of 1954

Separate but Not Equal

Barbra Johns went to class in a segregated African American school. The building was shabby and her books were old. Johns knew it wasn't fair. In April 1951, she led 450 students to march out on strike. since 1896, segregation had the approval of the united states Supreme Court. The court ruled Plessy v. Ferguson that segregated facilities for African Americans and whites were legal as long as they were of equal quantity. In reality, the facilities for African Americans were rarely equal. African Americans were left with run-down schools, hospitals, restaurants, even cemeteries.

The NAACP

The national association for the advancement of Colored People (NAACP)  had been fighting segregation for more than 40 years. NAACP lawyers took Barbra johns' case and four others to court. One of the cases involved Oliver Brown from Topeka, Kansas. His daughter, kinda, walked 21 blocks to an African American school. She could have gone to a white school seven blocks away.

The brown Decision

In 1952 the five cases went to the Supreme Court. They were put together under the heading Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Thurgood Marshall led a team of lawyers for the NAACP to overturn the Plessy decision. Marshall had already won several court cases forcing states to provide more money to African American schools. On May 17, 1954, the court announced its decision it said the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision was wrong. Separate schools are always unequal. Segregation in public schools was now against the law.

Protests and Marches

The change came slowly after the Court's ruling. By 1960, only 10 percent of public schools in the south were interrogated. To interrogate means to bring together people of all races. In the 1950s, other facilities remained segregated.  African Americans had to sit in the backs of buses. Most Southern states also kept African Americans from voting. Still,  Brown v. Board of Education convinced African Americans that change was possible.  In the next decade, people risked their lives challenging unjust laws and traditions. The civil rights movement was born.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks finished work at a department store in Montgomery, Alabama, and boarded a bus to go home. When the bus filled up, the driver told parks to give her seat up which she declined and was arrested. In response to Park's arrest, the local NAACP leader, E.D Nixon, organized a boycott of Montgomery buses. To Boycott means to refuse to do business or buy something from a person, group, or country. An English teacher named Jo Ann Robinson printed up 35,000 leaflets to announce the boycott. Martin Luther King jr., who was 26 years old, began preaching to huge meetings in churches in Alabama. The boycott lasted nearly 400 days. Proud protesters carpooled or walked to work. "We got our heads up now," said an African American man involved in the boycott, "and we won't ever bow down again---no sir---except for god." Finally, in November 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on public buses was illegal.

SIt-ins and Freedom Rides

In February 1960, the civil rights movement took a new path. African American students sat at "Whites Only" lunch counters until arrested. These sit-ins soon spread to nine southern states. The student Nonviolent Coordinate Committee (SNCC) was formed to organize protests. That year, at least 3,000 people were arrested during sit-ins. The following summer, African Americans and whites protested segregated bus stations in an action called the Freedom Rides. They rode interstate busses through the south and walked together into segregated beaten and taunted angry whites. The protesters had mixed results. Some businesses and cities are interrogated when faced with sit-ins. Most were not. The freedom rides were more successful. In September 1961, the government told bus companies that they could not use segregated facilities.

voting rights

Civil rights supporters also pushed for the right to vote. The Fifteenth Amendment extended that right to African American men in 1870. However, officials in the south found ways to keep African Americans away from the could polls. They changed the explosive poll taxes or gave tests that few voters could pass. They threatened African American voters with violence or fired them from their jobs. The SNCC worked to register African American voters. Fannie Lou Hamer did not even know African Americans could vote until SNCC told her. Hamer was beaten when she tried to register. She was also fired from her job. Yet little by little, African American voters began to demand the rights.

Fighting for Change

In April 1963, protesters in Montgomery, Alabama, started a string of sit-ins, boycotts, and demonstrations. The police beat back peaceful marchers with firehoses, nights sticks, and attack dogs. They threw 2,000 protesters in jail. TV news broadcast the violence across the country to a shocking audience. One Sunday morning, a bomb exploded in an African American church in Birmingham. it killed four young girls. That incident shocked many people and helped convince Birmingham officials to end segregation

The March on Washington

In August, King and other leaders staged the largest political protest the nation had ever seen. More than 200,000 people showed up for the protest in Washington, D.C. protesters demanded a federal civil rights law that would force state, and local governments to stop discrimination. From the steps of the Lincon Memorial, King addressed the crowd. He spoke of his "dream" for a world free of prejudice. His words brought the audience to tears. By the end of the summer, Dr. King's leadership and the violence in Birmingham.

Cesar Chavez

Chavez and his family themselves were Mexican American migrant workers who moved around, picking crops on different farms. He experienced low pay and poor living conditions. He went to 30 different schools in 9 years. When his dad died, he dropped out of school and worked full-time in the fields. After getting tired of the poor working conditions, he created a civil rights group for Latino Americans. Along with Dolores Huen formed the united farm workers labor union. They fought for wages($$), safer working conditions, and more affordable health care. He used strikes to get the attention of companies. Strikes are when people refuse to go to work until the job improves. He was also known for a grape boycott and led many protest marches.

Malcolm X

Malcolm X was an African-American Muslim minister and human rights activist who was a prominent figure during The Civil Rights Movement. He was a spokesman for the Nation of Islam until 1964, he was a vocal advocate for black empowerment and the promotion of Islam within the black community. He was born on May 19, 1925. Malcolm spent his time in many different foster homes after his father's death and his mother's hospitalization. He engaged in several illicit activities, eventually being sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1946 for larceny and breaking and entering. In prison, he joined the Nation of Islam (adopting the name Malcolm X to symbolize his unknown African ancestral surname), and after his parole in 1952 quickly became one of the organization's most influential leaders. He was the public face of the organization for a dozen years, advocating for black empowerment and separation of black and white Americans and criticizing Martin Luther King junior and the mainstream for emphasis on nonviolent and racial interrogation. Malcolm X also expressed pride in some of the Nation's social welfare achievements, such as its free drug rehabilitation program. Throughout his life, beginning in the 1950s, Malcolm X endured surveillance from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).