Civil Rights Movement Notes
The Civil Rights Movement Strengthens
Objectives
The postwar period brought prosperity to many, but African Americans were still treated as second-class citizens.
The civil rights movement was a broad and diverse effort to attain racial equality.
The movement compelled the nation to live up to its ideal that all are created equal.
Ordinary men and women could perform extraordinary acts of courage and sacrifice to achieve social justice, inspiring people around the world today.
Key Terms
De jure segregation: Segregation imposed by law.
De facto segregation: Segregation by unwritten custom or tradition.
Thurgood Marshall: An African American lawyer who headed the NAACP's legal team.
Orval Faubus: Arkansas Governor who opposed integration.
Earl Warren: Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Civil Rights Act of 1957: A law that established the United States Civil Rights Commission and empowered the U.S. Attorney General to address civil rights violations.
Rosa Parks: An African American seamstress who sparked the Montgomery bus boycott.
Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Baptist minister who became a leader of the civil rights movement.
Segregation Limits Equality
African Americans had a long history of fighting for their rights and were increasingly dissatisfied with their second-class status after World War II.
In the South, Jim Crow laws enforced strict separation of the races.
In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation was constitutional as long as the facilities for blacks and whites were "separate but equal."
Facilities for African Americans were rarely equal.
Segregation extended to most areas of public life, including schools, hospitals, transportation, restaurants, cemeteries, and beaches.
One city even forbade blacks and whites from playing checkers together.
Discrimination Throughout the Country
In the North, African Americans faced segregation and discrimination, even without explicit laws.
De facto segregation, or segregation by unwritten custom or tradition, was a fact of life.
African Americans in the North were denied housing in many neighborhoods and faced discrimination in employment, often getting only low-paying jobs.
Jim Crow laws and more subtle forms of discrimination had a widespread and severe impact on African Americans.
Black Americans occupied the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, with higher rates of poverty and illiteracy and lower rates of homeownership and life expectancy compared to white Americans.
Although African Americans living in the North could vote, most who lived in the South could not.
Very few African Americans held public office.
In the West and Southwest, Asian Americans and Mexican Americans also faced de facto segregation and, in some cases, legal restrictions.
Civil Rights Advance Slowly in the 1940s
World War II set the stage for the rise of the modern civil rights movement.
President Roosevelt banned discrimination in defense industries in 1941.
Gunnar Myrdal's publication in 1944 of An American Dilemma brought the issue of American prejudice to the forefront of public consciousness.
African Americans were unwilling to accept discrimination at home after risking their lives defending freedom abroad.
New organizations arose to try to bring an end to racial injustice and expand participation in the democratic process.
James Farmer and several others founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) with the goal of ending discriminatory policies and improving relations between races.
CORE members were deeply influenced by the teachings of Henry David Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi about the use of nonviolent protest to confront injustice.
CORE organized nonviolent protests such as sit-ins against segregation in public facilities in Chicago, Detroit, Denver, and other northern cities.
In 1947, Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, becoming the first African American to play major league baseball.
Robinson braved death threats and rough treatment but won the hearts of millions and paved the way for the integration of other sports.
NAACP Turns to Litigation in the Courts
By the end of World War II, the NAACP had become the largest and most powerful political civil rights organization in the nation, attracting a wide array of individuals, both black and white.
In the 1940s, a team of NAACP attorneys pursued a legal strategy to challenge the legality of segregation in the courts.
Thurgood Marshall headed the legal team that mounted this challenge.
The civil rights movement stalled in the early 1950s, one of its greatest disappointments was the NAACP's failure, after decades of lobbying Congress, to make the lynching of African Americans a federal crime.
In the wake of racial violence including against African American veterans trying to register to vote, and feeling the legislative and executive branches were unwilling to promote reforms, the NAACP decided to turn to litigation in the federal courts to attain its political goals.
In 1948, President Truman used his executive power to order the desegregation of the military; over time, the U.S. armed forces would become one of the most integrated institutions in the United States.
Landmark Supreme Court Decision
In 1950, the NAACP won a number of key court cases.
In Sweatt v. Painter, the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Texas had violated the Fourteenth Amendment by establishing a separate, but unequal all-black law school.
In McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, the Court ruled that the state of Oklahoma had violated George McLaurin's constitutional rights by denying him equal access to the library, dining hall, and classrooms, even though he had been admitted to the graduate school of the University of Oklahoma.
According to the Supreme Court, a truly equal education involved more than simply admitting African Americans to previously all-white universities.
Brown v. Board of Education
Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP legal team mounted a much broader challenge to segregated public education at all grade levels.
This challenge brought together five lawsuits from different states and became known as Brown v. Board of Education.
One of the suits, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, had originated in Virginia when high school students at a black school protested the poor conditions at their school.
Oliver W. Hill, Sr., the lead attorney for the NAACP in Virginia, provided legal support.
In the Brown case, the NAACP challenged the "separate but equal" principle itself, which had been established in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case.
The Supreme Court agreed with the NAACP's argument that segregated public education violated the U.S. Constitution.
All nine of the Court's Justices supported the Brown decision, which was written by newly appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren.
The Court declared that "in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place."
Hernandez v. Texas
In Hernandez v. Texas, the Court ended the exclusion of Mexican Americans from trial juries.
The Hernandez decision was the first Supreme Court ruling against discrimination targeting a group other than African Americans.
Public Response to Brown v. Board of Education
The Brown decision was one of the most significant and controversial in American history.
Because public education touched so many Americans, it had a much greater impact than cases involving only professional and graduate schools.
By overturning the principle of "separate but equal," the Court lent its support to the views of many civil rights advocates that all forms of segregation are wrong.
In Brown II, the Court called for the implementation of its decision "with all deliberate speed" across the nation.
Most southerners had no intention of desegregating their schools without a fight.
In 1956, about 100 southern members of Congress endorsed "The Southern Manifesto," pledging to oppose the Brown ruling through all "lawful means," on the grounds that the Court had misinterpreted the Constitution.
In Virginia, the General Assembly passed legislation to completely block desegregation in Virginia.
The Ku Klux Klan staged a revival.
Many prominent white southerners and businessmen organized "White Citizens Councils" that declared that the South would not be integrated, imposing economic and political pressure against those who favored compliance with the Supreme Court's decision.
Conflict Between Federal and State Power
Historically, education had been a state matter, and clashes with the federal government resulted as local and state officials resisted the Brown decision's order to desegregate.
The most famous battle took place in 1957 in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Soldiers Arrive at a High School in Little Rock
The Little Rock school board had established a plan to gradually desegregate its schools, beginning with Central High School.
Nine African American students volunteered to enroll.
Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus announced his opposition to integration and called out the Arkansas state National Guard to block the students' entrance.
President Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock to protect the students and to enforce the Court's decision.
Eisenhower explained this action in a nationally televised address, emphasizing the importance of national respect for law.
For the entire school year, federal troops stayed in Little Rock, escorting the nine students to and from Central High and guarding them on the school grounds.
On the last day of class, Ernest Green, the one senior of the nine, became the first African American to graduate from Central High School.
The showdown demonstrated that the President would not tolerate defiance of the law.
Still, most southern states found ways to resist full compliance with the Court's decision, and many years would pass before black and white children went to school together.
Political Lobbying Leads to a New Civil Rights Act
While organizations like CORE continued to nonviolently protest discrimination in public places in the North, the political lobbying efforts of civil rights forces yielded a small victory when Congress voted to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
President Eisenhower signed the bill into law, which established the United States Civil Rights Commission and gave it the power to investigate violations of civil rights.
It empowered the U.S. Attorney General to bring lawsuits to address civil rights violations and gave the Attorney General greater power to protect the voting rights of African Americans.
CORE leader Bayard Rustin noted that it had symbolic importance as the first civil rights law passed by Congress since Reconstruction.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott
In addition to legal efforts, some civil rights activists took direct action to end segregation.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and sat down in an empty seat.
She refused to give up her seat to a white passenger and was arrested.
Rosa Parks's Act Transforms a Movement
Parks's action set in motion a chain of events that transformed the civil rights movement.
A core of civil rights activists in Montgomery organized a one-day bus boycott.
They called upon the black community to refuse to ride the buses as a way to express their opposition to Parks's arrest, in particular, and segregation, in general.
The NAACP began preparing a legal challenge.
Parks had a record of fighting for civil rights and had been active in the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP for years.
Her choice to not give up her seat was an effective form of nonviolent protest and an influential moment in the civil rights movement's struggle for the equality of political rights.
In 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that the Montgomery city law that segregated buses was unconstitutional.
After more than a year, the MIA ended its boycott, and African Americans began to ride the buses again.
Ministers Inspire the Movement
The bus boycott represented a tremendous victory for African Americans in Montgomery and across the nation.
The boycott revealed the power that African Americans could have if they joined together and elevated King and his philosophy of nonviolence into a prominent position within the civil rights movement.
After the boycott, King and another Montgomery minister, Ralph Abernathy, established the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to continue the struggle for civil rights.
Made up largely of southern African American ministers, the SCLC advocated nonviolent resistance to fight injustice.
The SCLC went on to organize a series of protests, including a Prayer Pilgrimage in Washington, D.C., in 1957, which helped convince Congress to pass civil rights legislation.
Still, discrimination and segregation remained widespread.
Objectives
Postwar Period: Despite postwar prosperity, African Americans were still treated as second-class citizens.
Civil Rights Movement: This was a broad and diverse effort to attain racial equality, challenging the status quo.
National Ideal: The movement compelled the nation to align with its ideal that all individuals are created equal, pushing for legislative and social change.
Individual Courage: Ordinary individuals demonstrated extraordinary courage and sacrifice for social justice, inspiring global movements.
Key Terms
De jure segregation: Segregation imposed by law, particularly in the South through Jim Crow laws.
De facto segregation: Segregation by unwritten custom or tradition, prevalent even in areas without explicit segregation laws.
Thurgood Marshall: An African American lawyer who headed the NAACP's legal team, devising strategies to challenge segregation in courts.
Orval Faubus: The Arkansas Governor who publicly opposed integration, leading to federal intervention in the Little Rock Crisis.
Earl Warren: The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who presided over landmark civil rights cases such as Brown v. Board of Education.
Civil Rights Act of 1957: A law that established the United States Civil Rights Commission and empowered the U.S. Attorney General to address civil rights violations, marking one of the first civil rights laws passed since Reconstruction.
Rosa Parks: An African American seamstress whose refusal to give up her seat on a bus sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, catalyzing the civil rights movement.
Martin Luther King, Jr: A Baptist minister who became a leader of the civil rights movement, advocating for nonviolent resistance.
Segregation Limits Equality
Historical Context: African Americans have a long history of fighting for their rights, with rising dissatisfaction after World War II due to persistent second-class status.
Jim Crow Laws: These laws enforced strict racial separation in the South, affecting almost all aspects of public life.
Plessy v. Ferguson: The 1896 Supreme Court ruling that upheld segregation as constitutional under the "separate but equal" doctrine.
Inequality: Facilities for African Americans were rarely equal, leading to significant disparities in public amenities and services.
Public Life: Segregation affected schools, hospitals, transportation, restaurants, cemeteries, and beaches, illustrating its pervasive nature.