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The Civil Rights Movement: Major Events and Legacies
by James T. Patterson
Professor Emeritus of History, Brown University
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| Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. Pamphlet inscribed to Peter H. Brandt (GLC 07940) |
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From the earliest years of European settlement in North
America, whites enslaved and oppressed black people. Although
the Civil War finally brought about the abolition of slavery,
a harsh system of white supremacy persisted thereafter.
In the early twentieth century, African Americans in the
South and in many parts of nearby border states were banned
from associating with whites in a host of institutions
and public accommodations—schools, hospitals, old
folks’ homes, rest rooms, waiting rooms, railroad
cars, hotels, restaurants, lunch counters, parks and beaches,
swimming pools, libraries, concert halls, and movie theaters.
Some recreational areas posted signs, “Negroes and
Dogs Not Allowed.” Racial discrimination deprived
Southern blacks of decent jobs and schools and of elementary
rights of citizenship, including voting. White intimidation
and violence, including lynching, remained an ever-present
threat. Outside of the South, blacks had legal rights,
but they suffered from widespread discrimination and from
de facto residential and school segregation.
Black and white liberal reformers struggled to ameliorate
these oppressive practices, forming groups like the NAACP
in 1909 and the National Urban League in 1911. South Carolina’s
Septima Clark established Citizenship Schools for civil
rights across the South, and North Carolina’s Ella
Baker worked to improve conditions in the South. Their
efforts remind us that civil rights activism has a considerable
history predating the 1940s and that it featured largely
unsung grassroots workers.
The 1940s brought renewed efforts, however. In 1941, A.
Philip Randolph threatened to stage an all-black March
on Washington unless President Franklin D. Roosevelt acted
to end racial discrimination in employment and racial
segregation of the armed forces. Roosevelt agreed to a
Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to investigate
employment practices. Although the FEPC had no real power,
Randolph’s highly visible advocacy of large-scale,
direct-action protest was a sign of militant tactics to
come.
Other developments of the war years promoted pressure
for civil rights. One was massive movement of black Americans
out of the rural South in order to take defense-related
jobs in Northern and Western cities. This migration continued
in the 1950s and 1960s, and greatly increased black voting
strength and the potential for black community organization.
Black soldiers, serving abroad in World War II, witnessed
a less oppressive world of race relations than they had
known in the South. Many returned home determined to fight
racism.
After the war, civil rights advocates welcomed further
signs of liberal change. President Harry S. Truman, waging
a Cold War against Communism, recognized that racism at
home contradicted American claims to lead the “free
world” against oppression. Hoping to woo black votes
in the 1948 election, Truman ordered the desegregation
of the armed forces and called for federal laws to advance
civil rights. Congress rejected his appeals for legislation,
but Truman’s moves were noteworthy: No American
president since Reconstruction had made such an effort.
Activists operated on the local, grassroots level as well,
pressing for an end to school segregation. These bold
protestors risked not only their jobs but also their lives.
Homes and churches were burned, and attempts were made
to kill African American organizers. Often the goal was
equality between black and white schools, rather than
racial integration, for many blacks were anxious to maintain
their own black-run schools. By 1950, the NAACP’s
Legal Defense and Educational Fund, led by Thurgood Marshall,
decided to battle racial segregation through the courts.
The Fund’s efforts led to the landmark 1954 ruling
in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Marshall
exclaimed after the decision, “I was so happy I
was numb.”
Many historians have identified the Brown case
as the pivotal moment in the history of American race
relations and the beginning of a broad civil rights movement
that escalated in the 1960s. In December 1955, grassroots
activists in Montgomery, Alabama—NAACP members E.
D. Nixon and Rosa Parks chief among them--sparked what
soon became a large-scale boycott of buses and of white-owned
businesses in Montgomery. The boycott began after a white
bus driver had Parks arrested for refusing to obey rules
that required blacks to move to the back of buses when
no seats were available for whites. The Montgomery movement
catapulted the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. to leadership
in the civil rights movement. By 1957, King had created
his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to
carry on the struggle.
Two visible developments in 1957 also encouraged advocates
of civil rights. One was passage of a Civil Rights Act,
the first to be approved by Congress since Reconstruction.
It created a Civil Rights Division within the Department
of Justice as well as a federal Civil Rights Commission
that was authorized to investigate racial problems and
recommend solutions. The other was President Dwight D.
Eisenhower’s decision, arrived at reluctantly, to
send federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas in order
to establish order and enforce a token desegregation plan
admitting nine black students to the city’s all-white
Central High School.
Yet segregated social patterns did not vanish. The Court’s
ruling that “all deliberate speed” should
be used to enforce the Brown decision offered
little guidance to federal courts in the South and encouraged
white opponents of desegregation to develop delaying tactics.
In 1964, ten years after Brown, only one percent
of Southern black children attended public schools with
whites.
Escalating white violence in the South disheartened proponents
of racial justice during the 1950s. Many black people,
especially young people, became impatient with the slow
process of legal cases. To them, the federal government
was both remote and unhelpful, and organizations like
the NAACP seemed too legalistic and conservative. Local
people, they decided, must take direct action to change
racial patterns in their communities. Beginning in February
1960, with the Greensboro, North Carolina sit-ins at the
Woolworth lunch counter, the sit-in tactics spread like
wildfire throughout the South. These tactics initiated
the most powerful phase of America’s civil rights
movement, which peaked over the next five tumultuous years.
The restless young people had been essentially correct:
Direct-action protest, especially if it provoked violence
by white extremists, was the most productive means of
civil rights activity.
The shift in tactics revived older civil rights organizations
like the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and prompted
the formation of new ones such as the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC), all dedicated to direct
action such as sit-ins and demonstrations. By May 1961,
the first interracial freedom rides from Washington, D.C.,
to New Orleans were underway, designed to force Southern
officials to honor a recent Supreme Court decision that
had called for the ending of racial segregation in interstate
bus terminals. Violence quickly followed, as one bus was
firebombed in Alabama and its riders were injured. The
Kennedy administration sent federal marshals to Alabama
to restore order, but the bloodshed did not end until
the governor, anxious to rid his state of both the freedom
riders and the federal marshals, brought in state troops
to end the fighting. Attorney General Robert Kennedy then
struck a deal with Mississippi officials that resulted
in the riders being arrested (without violence) in Jackson,
the next stop.
These bloody confrontations attracted considerable public
attention. They also revealed that the Kennedy administration,
concerned mainly with Cold War issues, was reluctant to
jeopardize its political strength among whites in the
South and Southerners in the Congress. Kennedy was slow
to recognize the moral passion of civil rights demonstrators
or to employ force in order to stem the implacable resistance
and rage of many Southern white people, police, and politicians.
It took two deaths and almost 400 injuries at Ole Miss
before Kennedy sent in federal marshals to end the violence
on the campus.
In early 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. organized protests
in Birmingham, Alabama. Eugene “Bull” Connor,
the local police chief, ordered his men to fire blasts
of water against demonstrators and unleashed vicious dogs
on the resisters. Television captured a host of striking
scenes, some of them showing assaults and arrests of black
children, and relayed those images to a stunned national
audience. As a result, many Northerners became aware of
the plight of African Americans in the South. As much
as any single event in the history of the modern civil
rights movement, the violence of whites in Birmingham
forced the American people to consider serious federal
action promoting civil rights.
In June 1963, following Alabama Governor George Wallace’s
show of resistance to desegregation of the state university,
Kennedy addressed a national television audience to call
for a federal civil rights law, which would mainly prohibit
racial segregation in public accommodations. Only a few
hours later, the widely respected Mississippi NAACP activist
Medgar Evers was killed.
When Kennedy was assassinated in November, his civil rights
bill seemed stalled on Capitol Hill. But Lyndon Johnson
of Texas, who succeeded Kennedy in the White House, proved
to be both a masterful strategist and a dedicated champion
of a strong bill. In June 1964, President Johnson signed
into law a bill that not only included a job-discrimination
title but also authorized creation of a new agency, the
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Though
school segregation remained pervasive until the early
1970s, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a landmark measure
by any standard, ending segregation in a host of public
accommodations.
Civil rights activists now turned to voting rights as
a goal. Their Freedom Summer in Mississippi brought some
700 volunteers to the state to promote citizenship- training
workshops and voter registration. When two white workers,
Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, and one black volunteer,
James Chaney, were killed, the FBI reluctantly infiltrated
the Ku Klux Klan and ultimately cracked the case.
The focus on voting rights in Selma, Alabama led to further
attacks on civil rights activists in 1965. The violence
against the men and women who joined the fifty-mile march
from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery was widely
televised and President Johnson won increased support
for strong reforms. That August, Congress passed the Voting
Rights Act. A high point of the civil rights movement,
the law supplemented the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and
further guaranteed black legal equality. Passage of the
law also encouraged Johnson, King, and other advocates
to think seriously about tackling other pressing issues—notably
of social and economic inequality--that badly divided
Americans along racial lines. But support for federal
social programs did not prove as strong as Johnson had
hoped.
By 1965, the civil rights movement was growing fragmented,
less interracial, and less committed to nonviolence. Only
five days after LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act, looting
and burning began in the black neighborhood of Los Angeles
known as Watts. Other urban riots followed. These outbreaks
exposed the rage of blacks outside the South, but many
Americans were appalled by them, blaming them on lawless
radicals and revolutionaries. Equally harmful to the movement
was its rapid splintering along racial lines. In 1966,
black militants, led by Stokely Carmichael, advanced calls
for Black Power. “The only way we gonna stop them
white men from whippin’ us,” Carmichael insisted,
“is to take over.” Carmichael and others soon
forced whites from positions of responsibility in CORE
and SNCC. They also distanced themselves from the emphasis
on nonviolence that King had championed. New groups, notably
the Black Panthers, adopted militaristic poses that alarmed
whites. Other blacks, including members of the Nation
of Islam, rejected integration entirely. The decline of
interracialism and the turn away from strict adherence
to nonviolence cost CORE and SNCC dearly: No longer did
they hold high moral ground. White financial support for
these groups, which had been vital, dried up. By 1968,
both organizations had collapsed.
The Vietnam War also damaged the political coalition that
had enabled the president to secure a host of other landmark
legislative victories—Medicare, Medicaid, and federal
aid to public education among them--in 1965. Political
conservatives, who had been routed by LBJ in the election
of 1964, grew increasingly powerful by 1968. The assassination
of Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968, was another
significant blow to the civil rights movement.
Assessing the movement is difficult. It produced unexpected
policies, such as the establishment of affirmative action,
especially in the areas of employment and higher education
admissions. It benefited blacks in other ways, too. As
they acquired confidence in their ability to organize
and to effect political change, they gained greater pride
in their cultural strengths and accomplishments, notably
(but not only) in the fields of music, dance, film, and
sports. The work of black artists, such as photographer
Gordon Parks, painter Jacob Lawrence, the Alvin Ailey
American Dance Theater, and novelist Toni Morrison, received
widespread notice and critical praise. In popular culture—films,
television shows, ads—ugly stereotyping of black
people and black culture became far less widespread. The
movement also helped to increase the numbers and percentages
of African Americans in middle-class jobs, and the armed
forces took steps to end discriminatory recruitment and
promotion procedures and to develop integrated forces.
Yet the civil rights movement did not achieve as much
as dreamers had hoped for in the mid-1960s. The desegregation
of schools, which moved ahead in the 1970s and 1980s,
has fallen back, and gaps in educational test scores between
black and white students, always high, have widened. In
the early 2000s, rates of poverty and unemployment among
African Americans remain roughly twice as high as those
of whites. For a variety of reasons, including relatively
low levels of access to health care, the longevity of
African Americans is less than that of whites. Black median
income is approximately 70 percent of white income; black
median wealth is a tiny fraction of white wealth. Many
black inner-city areas feature very high rates of students
dropping out of high school, violent crime, out-of-wedlock
pregnancy, family breakups, and drug addiction. Rates
of arrests and imprisonment of African American men far
exceed those of white men. And the civil rights movement,
still suffering from the blows that afflicted it in the
late 1960s, lacks power. In 1965, Martin Luther King,
Jr. and Lyndon Johnson hoped that America, having rallied
around effective civil rights acts that promoted legal
equality, could move on to tackle serious social and economic
inequality—but in the early twenty-first century,
that goal still seems out of reach.
| For a list
of biographies and websites about the major
events of the civil rights movement, visit
our Additional
Resources Page |
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