Level One HistoryLevel One HistoryBlack Civil Rights Black Civil Rights

USA USA 1954-19701954-1970-Background-Background-

Focus Question One:Focus Question One:What position did blacks hold in What position did blacks hold in United States society in the mid-United States society in the mid-

1950s and why were there 1950s and why were there moves to bring about change?moves to bring about change?

The civil rights issues:

• Racism • Discrimination• Segregation• Second rate education• Poverty• Poor health • Unemployment• Substandard housing

Background• English seaman John Hawkins began the slave trade in 1562

when he took slaves from Guinea to the West Indies• By 1600 the Dutch and French had entered the business.• By the time Jamestown bought its first 20 slaves in 1619

there were over a million slaves held by the Spanish and Portuguese in the Caribbean and South America

Jamestown

• By the end of the seventeenth century slaves were more economically viable than white indentured servants.

• Casual bigotry soon became entrenched racism.• By 1730 slaves were an integral part of the economy of

the ‘United States’.• They grew rice, tobacco and indigo.• Many slaves died in the abysmal conditions of the wet

rice areas

Rice

Tobacco

Indigo

• The New England shipping industry also relied on slaves as part of the ‘Golden Triangle’ of trade.

• Later ‘King Cotton’ became the most important export, feeding the British Industrial Revolution.

• There was a slave rebellion in 1712 in New York City when nine whites were murdered by blacks.

• Eighteen blacks were killed in retribution: four were burned alive, one broken on the wheel and one chained until he starved to death.

• Most slaves in the United States worked for small family units. The image of large plantations with hundreds of slaves was the exception.

• In 1739 eighty slaves escaped, armed themselves and marched towards Spanish Florida.

• They were recaptured and forty-four were executed.

• After the War of Independence a clause was inserted into the draft of the Declaration of Independence but it was subsequently crossed out, perhaps because several of the signatories kept slaves.

• The ‘Underground Railroad’ had operated since 1776

• By 1830 it was well organised.

• Harriet Tubman slipped into the South 19 times to help 300 slaves get into the north.

1831 Nat Turner Rebellion

• Nat Turner and his band killed 60 whites in a killing spree

• This sent shudders through the white south.

• After the blacks were caught, the whites went on their own spree and killed and tortured innocent blacks.

Jim Crow• In 1829 a white entertainer named

Thomas “Daddy”Rice appeared in a play as a comic black field hand. He sang a song he had learned from a slave.

• It was called “Jim Crow” and became immensely popular.

• He turned it into a separate act and toured with it until 1860

• Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852

• It helped to spread the idea of abolition.

• Southerners were outraged and claimed Stowe had no understanding of slavery as it existed

• During the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries black slaves increased in numbers through breeding and through fresh imports from Africa.

• The American Civil War 1860-65 made its moral objective the abolition of slavery

• The final Emancipation Proclamation was made on 1st January 1863

• Only when a Union victory seemed possible was this proclamation made

• During the Civil War, runaway black soldiers from the south and black soldiers from the north fought for the Unionists

• The south declared they would not take any blacks as prisoners but would execute them

Fourteenth Amendment

• The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified• It barred states from passing laws which

would be detrimental to its citizens• No state was to prevent its citizens from

voting

• While the South was reluctant to ratify this Act the North passed a series of Reconstruction Acts which put State governments under military control until they agreed to the new constitution.

• Gradually and reluctantly the states signed

Fifteenth Amendment

• This prohibited states from preventing anyone from voting on the basis of ‘race, color or previous condition of servitude.’

• This passed in March 1870

White Resistance

• Southerners had organised secret societies such as:

• Ku Klux Klan – formed in 1868 by disgruntled southern soldiers

• Knights of the White Camellia

• The KKK was declared an illegal organisation in 1871

KKK 1868

• Southerners rewrote their constitutions

• They framed new laws to disenfranchise and discriminate against blacks.

• These were referred to as ‘Jim Crow Laws’

• In 1881 Booker T. Washington set up the Tuskegee Institute to offer agricultural training to blacks

• 1920s it moved to professional and business education

• In 1943 it added a graduate programme

• During WW2 it was the home of the Tuskegee Army Air Field where black pilots were trained

• In 1945 it added a school of veterinary medicine

• In 1953 It added a school of nursing

1896 Plessy V Ferguson• Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act

in 1892 • A black civil rights organization

decided to challenge the law in the courts.

• Homer Plessy deliberately sat in the white section and identified himself as black. He was arrested and the case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. He lost.

• The concept of “separate but equal” was entrenched

Homer Plessy

Plessy Supreme Court

• 1909 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was formed by Storey, Ovington and Du Bois

• By 1918 the NAACP had 165 branches and 43,994 members.

Storey, Ovington, and Du Bois

NAACP

By 1925 the KKK had six million members

Depression

• During the Depression three million black people moved north to find work

In March 1939 Lloyd Gaines was denied entrance to the law school at the University of Missouri because he was black. Instead, Missouri offered to pay his expenses for law school outside the state. It was argued that Missouri was obligated to either build a law school for blacks equal to that of whites or admit him to the University of Missouri. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed.

• The Gaines case was a precurser to Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

• Gaines mysteriously disappeared three months later

Lloyd Gaines

• Most of the black soldiers who enlisted in the armed services during World War II served in segregated units.

• When blacks came home after the war, whites were prepared to:

"put them back in their place.“

Harry Truman• In 1947 Truman decided to

make civil rights a national issue.

• He promised African Americans that the federal government would act to end discrimination, violence and race prejudice.

• In 1948 Truman made it illegal to discriminate within the armed forces.

• The forces became one of the very few places where blacks could be rewarded for their skill and talent without discrimination.

Conclusion• By the 1950s blacks had made some progress in

their quest for civil rights.• Soldiers returning from WW2 felt disinclined to

put up with being treated as second class citizens any more.

• The Cold War left America susceptible to criticism over the treatment of their black population. How could they condemn ‘enemy’ countries of oppression with what was going on in their own backyard?

By 1954 Blacks were no longer going to endure:• Racism • Discrimination• Segregation• Second rate Education • Poverty• Poor Health• Unemployment• Substandard Housing

The EndThe End