Ch. 25 the Civil Rights Movement 1954-1968

6

U.S. History

Goal 11.02, 11.03

Ch. 25 The Civil Rights Movement 1954-1968

Section 1 The Movement Begins

I. The Origins of the Movement

·  On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks left her job a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, and boarded a bus to go home. In 1955 buses in Montgomery reserved seats in the front for whites and seats in the back for African Americans. Seats in the middle were open to Africans, but only if there were few whites on the bus. Rosa Parks took a seat just behind the white section. Soon, all of the seats on the bus were filled. When the bus driver noticed a white man standing, he told Parks and three other African Americans in her row to get up and let the white man sit down. The other three African Americans rose, but Rosa Parks did not. The driver then called the Montgomery police, who took Parks into custody.

·  The arrest reached E.D. Nixon, a former president of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

·  Nixon wanted to challenge bus segregation in court and asked Rosa Parks for permission to go ahead and challenge the bus with her case. Parks agreed.

·  After Parks’ arrest, African Americans in Montgomery organized a boycott of the bus system

·  Since the Supreme Court had ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 that segregation was constitutional as long as the facilities were “separate but equal” the struggle for civil rights would not be easy.

·  After the Plessy decision, laws segregating African Americans and whites spread quickly – nicknamed “Jim Crow” laws which would segregate trains, buses, schools, restaurants, pools, parks, and other public facilities. These facilities were usually of poorer quality than those provided for whites.

·  Areas without laws requiring segregation often had de facto segregation – segregation by custom and tradition.

Protests and Sit-ins

·  In Chicago in 1942, James Farmer and George Houser founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)

-  CORE began using sit-ins, a form of protest first used by union workers in the 1930s.

-  In 1943 CORE attempted to desegregate restaurants that refused to serve African Americans

-  Using the sit-in strategy, members of CORE went to segregated restaurants

-  If they were denied service, they sat down and refused to leave

-  Using these protests, CORE successfully integrated many restaurants, theaters, and other public facilities in Northern cities including Chicago, Detroit, Denver, and Syracuse.

Brown v. Board of Education

·  After WWII, the NAACP continued to challenge segregation in the courts

·  From 1939 to 1961, the NAACP’s chief legal counsel and director of its Legal Defense and Education Fund was the African American attorney Thurgood Marshall

·  After the war, Marshall focused his efforts on ending segregation in public schools.

·  In 1954 the Supreme Court decided to combine several cases and issue a general ruling on segregation in schools

·  One case involved a young African American girl named Linda Brown, who was denied admission to her neighborhood school in Topeka, Kansas, because of her race. She was told to attend an all-black school across town. With the help of the NAACP, her parents sued the Topeka school board

·  Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruled on May 17, 1954 that segregation of public schools was not constitutional, overturning the previous ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. The justification used was that separate facilities were by nature unequal. While schools were ordered to be desegregated, other forms of segregation were still allowed to exist.

II. The Civil Rights Movement Begins

The Montgomery Bus Boycott

·  The boycott marked the start of a new era of the civil rights movement among African Americans

·  Martin Luther King, Jr., a pastor, was asked to lead the bus boycott

-  earned a Ph.D. in theology from Boston University

-  believed that the only moral way to end segregation and racism was through nonviolent passive resistance

-  influenced by Mohandas Gandhi

-  African Americans in Montgomery were inspired by King to continue their boycott for over a year

African American Churches

·  After the Montgomery bus boycott demonstrated that nonviolent protest could be successful, African American ministers led by King established the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957. They set out to eliminate segregation from American society and to encourage African Americans to register to vote.

III. Eisenhower Responds

·  President Eisenhower sympathized with the civil movement and personally disagreed with segregation

·  He ordered navy shipyards and veterans’ hospitals to desegregate

·  He believed that segregation and racism would end gradually, as values changed

Little Rock Nine

·  In September 1957, the school board in Little Rock, Arkansas, won a court order requiring that 9 African American students be admitted to Central High, a school with 2,000 white students

·  The governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, refused to obey a federal court order to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School and called in the Arkansas National Guard to prevent 9 black students from entering the school. President Eisenhower did not necessarily support desegregation, but he would not tolerate defiance of federal authority. He nationalized the National Guard and sent them home. He then mobilized elements of the 101st Airborne to enforce the court’s ruling and make sure the Little Rock Nine (the nine African American students) were safely admitted to school.

Section 2 Challenging Segregation

I. The Sit-In Movement

·  On February 1, 1960, four black college students at North Carolina A&T University protested racial segregation in restaurants by sitting at a “whites-only” lunch counter (Woolworth’s) in Greensboro, North Carolina. When the management ordered them to leave, they peacefully refused to budge until they were served.

·  Within days, sit-ins (nonviolent protests in which blacks sat in segregated places until they were served or arrested) spread across North Carolina

·  The movement spread to students who gathered in Raleigh, North Carolina in April 1960 and formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). These students devoted themselves to the use of non-violent protests to demand civil rights for African Americans.

II. The Freedom Riders

·  In 1960, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation was illegal in bus stations open to interstate travel.

·  In 1961, CORE organized Freedom Rides to test the Court’s decision. That summer, an integrated group of black and white “Freedom Riders” boarded a bus in Washington, D.C. and traveled south. The trip was mostly peaceful until the bus reached Anniston, Alabama. In Anniston, a white mob attacked the bus and set it on fire. Then they beat the passengers as they fled. Many of the riders later continued their journey. When they reached Jackson, Mississippi, state officials arrested them and imprisoned them in the state penitentiary. Although the federal government sent US Marshalls to protect the riders, they did not interfere with these arrests for fear that doing so would cause public disorder. While the Freedom Rides resulted in the desegregation of some bus stations, their most important contribution was the fact that they helped draw national attention to the cause of civil rights.

·  In 1962, the Supreme Court ruled that the University of Mississippi had to allow an African American named James Meredith to enroll. Despite Meredith’s status as an Air Force veteran, the governor of Mississippi announced that he would sooner go to jail than allow Meredith (or any black student) to enroll in the university. Rioting broke out after President Kennedy sent federal marshals to escort Meredith and enforce the Court’s decision. The president then sent in 5,000 federal troops to deal with the situation and restore order. Meredith was admitted and eventually became the University of Mississippi’s first African American graduate.

·  A similar situation occurred when Governor George Wallace adamantly opposed the desegregation of the University of Alabama. He, too, was forced to comply when federal authorities became involved. Wallace would later run strong presidential campaigns in the South in both 1968 and 1972. He would eventually have to withdraw from the 1972 campaign, however, when a would-be assassin’s bullet left him paralyzed from the waist down. Years later, Wallace apologized for many of his segregationist views.

III. The Civil Rights Act of 1964

·  The March on Washington: Wanting to keep pressure on President Kennedy and Congress to pass civil rights legislation, national civil rights leaders planned a march on the nation’s capital. On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. stood before the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington and addressed a crowd of more than 200,000 civil rights supporters. In perhaps his most famous speech, King spoke of his dream that the US would become a desegregated society. He challenged the listeners to envision with him a day when white and black people would live peacefully together with equal rights and equal justice.

·  After the March on Washington, President Kennedy proposed new civil rights laws.

·  Following Kennedy’s assassination, the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson strongly urged Congress to pass these laws in honor of the late president. Despite fierce opposition from southern members of Congress, Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act prohibited segregation in public accommodations (hotels, restaurants, and theaters that served an interstate clientele) and discrimination in education and employment. It also gave the president the power to enforce the new law.

·  1964 was also the year that the states ratified the Twenty-forth Amendment to the Constitution. This amendment served to protect blacks’ voting rights by making the poll tax illegal.

IV. The Struggle for Voting Rights

·  Selma March: protesters in Selma, Alabama decided to bring national attention to the cause of civil rights by marching 50 miles to the state’s capital in Montgomery. The march occurred on March 7, 1965

·  When the 500 marchers reached Selma’s city limits, 200 state troopers and sheriff’s deputies beat them with clubs and whips, released dogs on them, and showered them with tear gas. People across the US were shocked by televised scenes of the violence. The event became known as Bloody Sunday and was called an “American tragedy” by President Johnson. 2 weeks after “Bloody Sunday,” Martin Luther King, Jr. led more than 3,000 marchers out of Selma, including a ore of 300 people who walked the entire journey. 4 days later they arrived in Montgomery, where King addressed a rally of nearly 40,000 people in front of the capitol building

·  Voting Rights Act of 1965: Soon after the march, on August 6, 1965, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It authorized the president to suspend literacy tests for voter registration and to send federal officials to register voters in the event that county officials failed to do so. This new law led to a huge increase in African American voter registration, as well as an increase in the number of African American candidates elected to public office.

Section 3 New Civil Rights Issues

I. Urban Problems

·  In 1965 nearly 70 percent of African Americans lived in large cities.

·  Even if African Americans had been allowed to move into white neighborhoods, poverty trapped many of them in inner cities.

·  Many African Americans living in urban poverty knew the civil rights movement had made enormous gains, but when they looked at their own circumstances, nothing seemed to be changing

II. Black Power

·  By 1965, a growing number of blacks began to advocate a more militant approach to civil rights. These individuals did not see any value or dignity in passively allowing whites to physically abuse them

·  One group was the Nation of Islam. The “Nation” combined the Muslim religion with a militant African American message. Its members preached that white people were “devils” who enslaved non-whites.

·  One of the most famous figures to emerge from this movement was Malcolm X. Born Malcolm Little, Malcolm X had been drawn to the Nation of Islam’s teachings while in prison. In contrast to the nonviolent approach of other leaders of the civil rights movement, Malcolm X preached that blacks should use “any means necessary” to secure their rights. In 1964, Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam and founded the Muslim Mosque Incorporated. He then went on a Muslim pilgrimage (a journey for a religious purpose) to the Islamic holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia. He saw black and white Muslims praying and living together peacefully. Following this experience, Malcolm returned to the U.S. with less militant views. He stopped preaching that all white people are evil and began calling for whites and blacks to work together. The Nation of Islam thought he was a traitor. On February 21, 1965, 3 African American men shot and killed Malcolm X wile he spoke at a rally in Manhattan.

·  Inspired by the teachings of Malcolm X, some workers in the SNCC began to reject nonviolent protest as being too slow and ineffective.