The Civil Rights Movement

When Did the Civil Rights Movement Begin?

The Founding of the NAACP in 1909? The “Double V” Campaign of WWII? Brown v. Board of Education in 1954? The murder of Emmett Till in 1955?The Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955? The Greensboro Sit-Ins in 1960?

The NAACP had a long-term strategy that was a long time in the making. The civil rights movement was not an accident. It was something people had worked toward for decades.

Rhetoric Meets RealityIn the context of the Cold War, the United States’ continued racism against its black citizens looked very, very bad. The U.S. supposedly stood for freedom and democracy, but black people couldn’t even vote.

Many young African Americans grew up hearing the rhetoric of freedom and democracy and took it very seriously. Young people were often at the forefront of the civil rights movement, passionate about bringing the reality they knew closer to the rhetoric they had grown up with.

Really Bad

Did I mention that this looked bad in a Cold War Context? Yes, it looked bad.

In fact, in 1963 police in Birmingham, Alabama, attacked a march of over 1000 African American children. They put their dogs on them and sprayed them with high powered water hoses and arrested 600 children, herding them into a concentration camp makeshift prison. These images circulated the globe.

Short documentary: http://www.biography.com/news/black-history-birmingham-childrens-crusade-1963-video

No More Sweeping It under the Rug

For decades the federal government had let the South do its own thing. They couldn’t do that anymore. Kennedy, and after him Johnson, had to do something.

School Desegregation

In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 decision that had set the “separate but equal” standard.

It took time for Brown to be applied, and schools across the South were desegregated only gradually over the course of the 1950s and 1960s.

Documentary about Brown v. Board of Education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5wthZhF3Jk

Ruby Bridges

Southern schools disobeyed the Supreme Court’s order to desegregate, so the NAACP had to press the issue. Typically, they would select specific black children for the first year, which was always the hardest.

The “Little Rock Nine,” who desegregated Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957, are a chief example. Another is Ruby Bridges, selected in 1960 to desegregate an elementary school in New Orleans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09faLq3wT8c

Tension

In an era when federal and state troops stared each other down over things like school desegregation, tensions were high. There were even fears of civil war. The federal government had freed the slaves after the Civil War, but only now, nearly one hundred years later, were they actually stepping in and backing those freedoms up.

Nonviolence

“Nonviolence” was major tactic of the civil rights movement. Black youth would sit at whites-only lunch counter, waiting to be served, for hours on end. Black communities would hold marches or boycotts. Teams of black and white college students challenged state laws by traveling by bus across the South, facing severe beatings and jail time.

Black ministers tended to be at the front and center of the civil rights movement, and their religion gave many African Americans confidence that they would overcome. White ministers from mainline Protestant denominations and Jewish rabbis sometimes threw in their support as well.

The Freedom Riders

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8CAKAXR-AM

Freedom Summer

In the summer of 1964, civil rights groups targeted Mississippi, the very worst of the South. They sent college-aged volunteers from across the country to participate in voter registration and education.

Several white volunteers were murdered. This shocked the country.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gYKcZCWv-w

Federal Action

The Civil Rights Act of 1964The Voting Rights Act of 1965

These laws were passed with stiff opposition.

The Limits of Progress

Northern Racism: Chicago

Martin Luther King Jr. faced some of his greatest opposition in Chicago in 1965.

http://www.wttw.com/main.taf?p=76,4,5,7

Northern Racism: BostonSchool districts are determined by where students live, and blacks had been forced to live in black-only housing areas for decades now. Housing separation meant school segregation.

In an attempt to fix this problem, judges called for busing, bringing white and black students together. Ultimately, the Supreme Court found busing across city lines unconstitutional, which meant that those whites who had left the city for the suburbs were free from the specter of busing. More whites left.

The result was that cities were increasingly black while the suburbs around them were increasingly white. This has not changed. Schools today are more segregated than they were in the 1960s.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/resources/vid/21_video_boston_qt.html

Economic Limitations

Blacks were increasingly in poverty and increasingly confined to ghetto areas. Remember, this was a result of highly discriminatory housing policy, not a result of any deficiency on African Americans’ part. Unfortunately, the civil rights movement, while it may have officially ended desegregation, did not have the resources or political clout to address the underlying economic problems many blacks faced.

New Solutions?

Black Power

Some black Americans began finding power and pride in their own race. Malcolm X is a key example. Advocates of black power often questioned the value of nonviolence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1prIok_uedw

Riots

Okay, so this isn’t a solution. But, some African Americans grew so fed up with the lack of change that they rioted, burning and looting. Unfortunately, this tended to result in white Americans turning against African Americans and typing them as dangerous. There was a lack of understanding of the underlying socioeconomic problems.