Key Concept: Discuss how the civil rights movement evolved during the 1950s and 1960s and explain each of the three developments
- For African Americans, the path from being enslaved to full civil rights was long and difficult.
Segregation
- The civil rights movement was a political, legal, and social struggle to gain full citizenship rights for African Americans.
- During the movement, individuals and civil rights organizations challenged segregation and discrimination with a variety of activities, including protest marches, boycotts, and refusal to abide by segregation laws.
School Desegregation
- After World War II, the NAACP’s campaign for civil rights continued to proceed.
- Led by Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund challeneged and overturned many forms of Discrimination
School Desegregation
- The main focus of the NAACP turned to equal educational opportunities.
- Marshall and the Defense Fund worked with Southern plaintiffs to challenge the Plessy decision, arguing that separate but equal was inherently unequal
- The Supreme Court of the United States heard arguments on five cases that challenged elementary and secondary school segregation.
Non-violent protest
- Boycotts: refusing to buy goods or services from a business in order to force it to change its policies
- Hunger strikes: Refusing to eat in order to get the attention for your cause
- Petitions: Writing to ask the government of a company to change its policy, and then getting as many people to sign it as possible
- Marches and demonstrations: Getting a large group to gather in one place to bring attention to your cause
- Strikes: Refusing to work in order to force your managers or government to change their policies
Civil disobedience
- Breaking the law or causing a disturbance in order to get attention for your cause.
- Sit ins: The protesters come into a place, sit down, and refuse to move.
Legal action
- Lawyers can challenge a law or policy in court. If they convince the judge that the law or policy is unconstitutional, then the judge will order them to change.
- People can speak at government hearings or meetings and try to convince legislators to make new laws or repeal unfair ones.
School Desegregation
- In May 1954, the warren court issued its landmark ruling in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, stating racially segregated education was unconstitutional and overturning the plessy decision
- White Southerners were shocked by the _Brown _decision.
- By 1955, white opposition in the South had grown into massive resistance, using a strategy to persuade all whites to resist compliance with the desegregation orders.
- Tactics included firing school employees who showed willingness to seek integration, closing public schools rather than desegregating, and boycotting all public education that was integrated.
- Virtually no schools in the South desegregated their schools in the first years following the Brown decision
- In Virginia, one county actually closed its public schools.
- In 1957, Governor Orval Faubus defied a federal court order to admit nine African American students to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.
- President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce desegregation.
- The event was covered by the national media, and the fate of the nine students attempting to integrate the school gripped the nation.
- Not all school desegregation was as dramatic as Little Rock schools gradually desegregated.
- Often, schools were desegregated only in theory because racially segregated neighborhoods led to segregated schools
- To overcome the problem, some school districts began busing students to schools outside their neighborhoods in the 1970s.
- The Riverside Unified School District was the first district in the nation to voluntarily desegregate it’s schools
- As desegregation continued, the membership of the Ku Klux klan ( KKK ) grew
- The KKK used violence or threats against anyone who was suspected of favoring desegregation or African American civil rights.
- Ku Klux Klan terror, including intimidation and murder, was widesprea din the South during the 1950s and 1960s, though Klan activities were not always reported in the media
The Montgomery bus boycott
- Despite threats and violence, the civil rights movement quickly moved beyond school desegregation to challenge segregation in other areas.
- In December 1955, Rosa Parks, a member of the Montgomery, Alabama, branch of the NAACP, was told to give up her seat on a city bus to a white person.
- When Parks refused to move, she was arrested.
- The local NAACP, led by Edgar D. Nixon, recognized that the arrest of Parks might rally local African Americans to protest segregated buses
- In November 1956, a federal court ordered Montgomery’s buses desegregated and the boycott ended in victory. Dr King was involved with the boycott