Causes of the Civil Rights Movement
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Segregation and Jim Crow laws
In the Southern United States, local laws called ‘Jim Crow Laws’ discriminated against Black Americans.
Local authorities insisted that black people pass certain tests – for example
reading tests – before they were allowed to enrol as voters; in this way they
stopped most black people voting or sitting on juries.
The idea of ‘segregation’ grew up in many states. It affected every area of life for Black Americans, who (e.g.) went to separate schools, ate at separate restaurants, and sat on separate seats at the back of buses.
The principle behind the Jim Crow Laws – ‘separate but equal’ – was
underpinned in law by the Supreme Court.
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Economic and Employment
Inequality
The white to Black racial wealth gap in the US in 1950
was 7:1.
Average black income in 1957 was 57% of white
households.
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Black Americans generally still had the lowest paid jobs and the lowest standards of education.
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Unemployment amongst black Americans in 1957 was 11%,
double that of whites.
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41% of black Americans lived below the poverty line in 1959.
Even wealthy Black families found it impossible to buy houses in suburban
areas; Housing Authorities assigned Black applicants to separate areas
(usually of inferior housing).
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Violence and lynchings
Lynchings were still happening in the USA – 12 Black Americans were lynched, 1946-50.
Beatings (e.g. if a Black boy jumped into a white-only swimming pool) were
regular occurrences.
In 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago, was murdered when – on a visit to his great-uncle in Mississippi – he whistled at a white woman shopkeeper.
Three days later, his body was discovered; he had been shot in the head, and
beaten and mutilated until he was unrecognisable.
Emmett’s great-uncle (bravely ignoring KKK threats) identified the woman’s husband, Roy Bryant, as Emmett’s abductor, but the jury took only an hour to find Bryant not guilty of murder or kidnap. (Two months after the trial, Bryant admitted the killing to Look magazine
for $4,000; but he stayed free until his death in 1994.)
Emmett's mother
insisted that the funeral had an open coffin, and the world saw what they
had done to her son.
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Everyday racial discrimination and humiliation
Black men were still called ‘Boy’ in the Southern
States.
Hotels even in the North routinely refused Black
guests, restaurants to serve Black diners.
In southern cotton states, all-Black schools would
close for three months during the harvest, so that the children could help.
Black bathrooms were situated far from the
workplace, so the entire break was spent getting there; black
water-fountains and toilets were never cleaned.
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Relocation to Northern Cities
As the 'Great Migration' relocated millions of African Americans from the South to the cities of the North:
they formed large, cohesive communities that were more
easily mobilised for activism and helped the growth of civil rights
organisations such as NAACP and CORE.
they were exposed to ideas such as the Harlem
Renaissance, racial pride and ‘black is beautiful’.
they could vote, and elected black councillors who
represented them.
BUT they still faced discrimination, poverty and
violence.
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Existing civil rights organizations
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The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had been set up in 1911. By 1945 it had 450,000 members. During the 1930s it conducted a campaign against lynchings.
One black NAACP lawyer, Charles Houston, trained an elite of black
lawyers who challenged segregation laws in the courts – they achieved a
number of successes, particularly the right of blacks to graduate
education, and to sit on juries.
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In 1942, a black Christian socialist called James
Farmer founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) which organised
sit-ins at segregated restaurants and insisted in sitting in white seats
on interstate buses.
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Double V confidence after World War II
During the Second World War, black activism grew, inspired by the Double-V campaign – victory over fascism … and racism.
More than a million black people had served in the US army; they felt that they
had earned equality, but they returned to find nothing had changed.
In the southern states of the USA, black veterans
who questioned their place in society were beaten and even murdered.
Black veterans found that banks refused them the
low-cost mortgages promised in the GI Bill.
Returning black soldiers often found themselves unemployed.
The GI Bill offered veterans a year’s unemployment pay whilst they sought a
job; many employers, however, were offering returning Black solders only a
below-subsistence wage – if they turned it down, their unemployment benefits
under the GI Bill were terminated.
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Going Deeper
The following links will help you widen your knowledge:
BBC
Bitesize: KS3,
origins,
schools, civil rights..
laws
The film
The Long Walk Home (2005) tells the story of the Montgomery bus boycott. If you can, watch the whole film.
 Essay: Prioritise the reasons for the development of the Civil Rights movement, 1945-65.
 Brown v the Board of Education - BBC Witness History
The murder of black teenager Emmett Till - BBC Witness History
How Rosa Parks took a stand against racism - BBC Witness History
The Greensboro lunch counter sit-in - BBC Witness History
YouTube
Overview
- WachMojo
MLK's 'I have a Dream' speech
Interpretation:
The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It? - Alice Walker's 1967 essay
(essential)
Source A
Capricious humiliation
When did I become an activist? Was it that day when
I was twelve years old and bent over to pump air into my bicycle tires at a
Gulf station on Terry Road, and a big white guy skipped up from behind and
kicked me over?
When I turned to ask, ‘Why’ his smug answer, ‘Cause I wanted to’, made a lasting impression... I soon started doing small things to defy the system.
Mississippi doctor Gilbert R Mason, remembering an incident from his youth.
Source B
I spent four years in the Army to free a bunch of Dutchmen and Frenchmen, and I’m hanged if I’m going to let the Alabama version of the Germans kick me around when I get home. No sireebob!
I went into the army a nigger; I’m coming out a man.
Unnamed Alabama discharged army Corporal.
Source C
If you're white, you're right; if you're brown stick around; if you're black, stay back.
A Black folk-saying featured as a line in
Black, Brown and White by Big Bill Broonzy (1946).
Source D
The Children (1950) by Black artist Charles White.
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The Fight for Civil Rights, 1945-65
The events of the fight for Black civil rights in America
form one of the most momentous and inspiring stories in history. However,
for GCSE you only need to know the key events, which please find listed below
(green for legal achievements/ red for opposition, black for actions).
If you click on the on the orange arrows
(u)
I have provided explanatory accounts of what happened.
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1946: Truman set up the civil rights committee
- President Truman (1945-53) was racist in private, and had once joined the KKK, but now he made a number of speeches supporting Civil Rights, particularly for returning black soldiers. He gave black workers equality in the armed forces and the civil service, and ruled that government contracts could not be given to companies which refused to employ black workers.
- In 1946, Truman set up a civil rights committee which recommended anti-lynching laws, voting rights, an end to discrimination in interstate travel, a Fair Employment Board, and a permanent Commission on Civil Rights. However, Congress refused to enact its recommendations into law.
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1954: Brown v Topeka
- In 1954, the NAACP fought the Board of Education of Topeka (Kansas) in the Supreme Court. NAACP lawyers asserted the right of black Church Minister Oliver Brown to send his daughter to the nearby white school, rather than a black school far away. In a landmark ruling, Chief Justice Warren stated that ‘separate but equal’ was unconstitutional and that segregated schools were psychologically harmful to children.
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1955: Revival of the KKK
- Brown v Topeka brought the Ku Klux Klan back to life, led by Robert Shelton and the ‘White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan’. Shelton declared desegregation ‘communist’, thus linking two fears of white southerners – the third being that black men might violate white women.
- The Klan received passive support from southern whites, especially Protestant churches. The organisation was racist and violent. Murders and bombings increased.
- Klansmen who did these things were often protected by the police, who were themselves members of the Klan. In addition, juries made up of white people were reluctant to find people guilty of Klan activities.
- In the South, White Citizens Councils went through the same voters’ lists finding excuses to delete the names of black voters. ‘Uppity’ blacks were fired. And a number of southern states outlawed the NAACP
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1955: Montgomery bus boycott:
- In December 1955, Rosa Parks sat on a bus on her way home from work in Montgomery, Alabama. The bus was full, and when a white man got on, the driver ordered Rosa to stand up.
She refused and was arrested.
- Rosa was a trained NAACP activist.
Her stand was taken on purpose, after a number of incidents of
rudeness and discrimination against blacks on Montgomery’s buses.
- Choosing a young local preacher named Martin Luther King as their leader, the black people of Montgomery decided to boycott the buses. Thousands of black people walked to work, while the city’s 210 black cab-drivers offered seats for the cost of the bus fare. A car-pool of supporters of the boycott was also organise to get black people to work.
The boycott lasted 381 days.
- King and his supporters called themselves the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA).
The MIA also hired NAACP lawyers to take the case to the Supreme
Court.
- The MIA deliberately sought only reasonable reforms – black drivers on black routes, and that white bus drivers be polite to blacks.
It did not even challenge the idea of segregation, asking only that
seats on city buses be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis,
with black people filling up seats from the rear, white passengers
from the front.
- The local White Citizen’s Council opposed the MTA’s proposals. Its membership doubled. It ordered local officials to harass boycott leaders – King was arrested for speeding.
In January 1956 his home was bombed by the KKK.
- But the boycott was ruining
the bus company financially, and local businesses were losing custom
(local shopkeepers lost $1 million).
- On 13 November, the city chiefs – claiming that it was in effect a taxi service operating without a proper licence – got the car-pool stopped in the courts,. It would have meant the defeat of the boycott, but it was rendered pointless when, that same day, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on buses was unconstitutional.
NAACP leader Thurgood Marshall remarked: ‘All that walking for
nothing’.
- The boycott – and Rosa Parks – became an inspiration to the civil rights movement.
It demonstrated that, when Black Americans united, they could
succeed, and that violent opposition only increased support.
- The success of the boycott increased black confidence – when the KKK, robed and hooded, drove through the black areas of town, blacks came out and waved at them.
There were copycat boycotts throughout the South.
- But the success was limited. Everything else in Montgomery was still segregated. And the boycott had revealed the depth of racism and determination of some whites. Rosa and her husband lost their jobs. She received death threats, and had to move to Detroit.
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1957: Civil Rights Act
- After huge opposition
in Congress, President Eisenhower passed a civil rights law which
banned “intimidating, coercing or otherwise interfering with the
rights of persons to vote” in Presidential or Congressional
elections, and which allowed Black Americans to serve on Federal
Juries.
- Against the advice of other Black leaders, Martin Luther King organised a ‘votes-for-all’ march in Washington in support of Eisenhower’s Bill.
It was attended by 20,000 people and was regarded as a success.
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1957: Little Rock School
- By 1957, the Supreme Court’s Brown v Topeka ruling had not resulted in any immediate changes in schools. It did not order segregated schools to be abolished – it just said they were wrong. Most of the twenty segregated states simply ignored it. The government did not force them to end segregation. And where states did try to change, some schools closed rather than desegregate, and mobs gathered to stop black children going to white schools
- On 23 September 1957, nine black students tried to attend Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. A mob of 1,000 barred their way. Two days later, the children went into school … protected by 11,000 soldiers.
The crowd shouted: ‘2, 4, 6, 8; we aren’t going to integrate’.
- In school, the black students were assaulted and abused.
Back in the black community, they faced the anger of those who said
the ‘meddling nine’ were making life harder for black people.
- Little Rock is often presented in textbooks as a victory for civil rights, but really it was a defeat. Few other schools dared to desegregate, and few black children wanted to face the danger. In 1964, only 3% of America’s black children attended desegregated schools. Little Rock itself was only fully desegregated in 1972.
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1957: SCLC
- Martin Luther King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). But the SCLC was poorly organised, and at first failed to make an impact. When the SCLC tried to organise the registration of 3 million new black voters in 1957 Act, they only managed to add 160,000 more names.
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1960: Greensboro sit-ins
- In 1960, in Greensboro, North Carolina, four college students went to the local Woolworths store, and sat down at the white section of the lunch counter. The first day they were simply ignored, so they returned next day with 30 students; this time they got in the local newspaper.
Next day there were 66 black students, and after a week of
escalating trouble – including a bomb threat – the store was forced
to close.
- The protest immediately spawned copycat sit-ins all over the South, involving perhaps 50,000 students in all. The protesters were humiliated and assaulted.
Not all of them managed not to fight back.
- The sit-ins were a
new tactic for civil rights – they were ‘direct action’.
- At the end of the sit-ins, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC (‘Snick’) was formed.
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1961: Freedom Rides
- In May 1961, CORE organised the ‘Freedom Rides’, where young blacks tried to exercise their right in law to travel on segregated interstate buses. It was a calculated martyrdom – the riders knew they would be attacked. When a first bus reached Alabama, the tyres were slashed and the bus set on fire; the mob tried to hold the doors shut so that the passengers would be burned alive. When a second bus reached Birmingham, Alabama, the police and KKK attacked the riders with clubs and chains as they left the bus.
White freedom riders were especially badly beaten by the mob.
- In all, there were 60 Freedom Rides, involving 450 very brave people. Most were beaten and/or imprisoned.
While they waited for connections, the freedom riders would also go
and break the rules in segregated restaurants and hotels.
- Many SNCC students participated in the Rides, which King supported.
CORE, SNCC and SCLC all ignored the government’s request to stop the
Rides because they were causing civil unrest, and in the end
Attorney General Robert Kennedy had to act to enforce the Supreme
Court’s decision that segregation on interstate travel was illegal.
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1961: Albany campaign
- In 1961, SNCC students began a campaign against desegregation in Albany, Georgia, including sit-ins and freedom rides. Older civil rights leaders in the city invited King, who – much to the annoyance of the SNCC – led a march and met the City Council.
- The police refused to use violence, and simply arrested and fined 1000 protestors. Eventually, King ‘ran out’ of supporters prepared to be jailed.
Instead of desegregating its amenities, the Council closed parks,
sold the swimming pool and took all the seats out of the library.
- King left believing that Albany was a failure. However, after he left, a Black Voter Registration campaign was very successful, and in 1962 the city desegregated all its facilities.
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1963: Birmingham campaign
- King chose Birmingham because of its reputation for racism (it had even banned a book which showed black and white rabbits), and because the town’s police chief ‘Bull’ Connor was known to be hot-headed. King called it ‘the most segregated city in America’. He demanded the desegregation of eating places, and the employment of black sales staff.
- Although King (as always) insisted on non-violence, his campaign was named ‘Project C’ – and the ‘C’ stood for confrontation. The demonstrations began with sit-ins at lunch counters in downtown stores, and with a succession of marches, during one of which King was arrested.
- Actually, initial support for King in Birmingham was poor, so on 3rd May he recruited a thousand school children to join one of the marches. As expected, the police attacked with water hoses, dogs and batons. There was a media outcry.
King was thrown into solitary confinement, and the KKK bombed his
motel room (shortly after the state troopers guarding it
mysteriously left).
- Blacks rioted, and the government was forced to step in. The City authorities gave in and desegregated the restaurants; soon after they desegregated all Council facilities.
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1963: Washington Freedom March – ‘I have a Dream’ speech
- In August 1963 King organised a march which drew a quarter of a million people (including at least 75,000 white supporters) to hear his brilliant ‘I have a dream’ speech before the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.
- Watched by million on live TV, to the cheers of the crowd, he finished with the words of the Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’
- By the end of 1963, King had become the leader of the Civil Rights Movement. He had proved he could manipulate the media, and he was the most famous Civil Rights campaigner. Also the government supported him, because it realised he was more moderate than other agitators.
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1963: Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital
- George Simkins, a dentist and NAACP leader in Greensboro, North Carolina, bought n action against the hospital when it refused to treat one of his patients. The Court of Appeals
ruled that separate-but-equal hospitals were unconstitutional, thus
ending segregation in hospitals.
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1964: Civil Rights Act
- President Johnson secured the Civil Rghts Act, outlawing discrimination based on race, color, religion, or gender.
It prohibited unequal application of voter registration, racial
segregation in schools, and discrimination in public housing and federal programmes.
- The mechanisms to enforce the law were weak, but were strengthened as time went on.
- 1965:
Voting Rights Act
- Enforced the right to vote – notably, banning literacy tests. This massively increased Black voter registration and turnout.
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1965: Selma March
- In 1965, King went to Selma Alabama. Again, he chose it because its sheriff, Jim Clark, could be relied on to get violent. King knew that non-violent protests ‘make people inflict violence on you’, whereby they give themselves bad publicity and destroy their own case.
So he provoked violence.
- On ‘Bloody Sunday’, 7 March 1965, brutality against the marchers was such that there was national outrage when it was shown on TV, and it became one of the reasons why Johnson’s Voting Rights Act passed through Congress in August that year.
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Source E
We're through with tokenism and gradualism and see-how-far-you've-comeism. We're through with we've-done-more-for-your-people-than-anyone-elseism. We can't wait any longer. Now is the time.
Martin Luther King, speaking in 1963, three weeks after
the Birmingham campaign.
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Opposition to the Civil Rights Movement
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The Dixiecrats
In the 1948 presidential election, the Democrats campaigned nationally to improve civil rights for black Americans. As a result, some Southern Democrats – nicknamed the Dixiecrats left and formed the States’ Rights Democratic Party. They put forward their own presidential candidate, almost stopping the Democratic candidate, Harry Truman, winning the president election.
Although they later re-joined the Democrats, they continued to oppose civil rights and Presidents had to take their views into account because there were enough of them in Congress to affect the passing of laws.
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After the Brown v Topeka decision, around 100 congressmen from the South created the Southern Manifesto in 1956, encouraging states to resist desegregation. They ran a TV programme, and published racist children’s books.
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State and Local Governments
Most Southern state governors, mayors and state officials opposed desegregation. They refused to integrate schools, manipulated election rules to disadvantage black voters, and used passive tactics, such as hiding in their offices, to stop black people from registering to vote.
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Judges in the South often sided against black people who used the new law to challenge discrimination.
Some Police Chiefs – eg Bull Connor in Birmingham and Jim Clark in Selma, were violently anti-civil rights. -
Many other Sheriffs and police winked at KKK violence; in the end, the FBI had to step in to enforce the law.
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The FBI
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White Citizens' Councils
Formed in 1956, these were a network of segregationist organisations with about 60,000 across the US. They the pamphlet Black Monday, asserting that African Americans were inferior to white people and must therefore be kept remain separate. -
They conducted voter purges to remove Black voters from election rolls.
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They used their memnbers' economic power to get
supporters of integration sacked. Although they did not support violence, Byron De La Beckwith, who assassinated civil rights campaigner Medger Evers in 1963, was a member of the White Citizens' Council.
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The Ku Klux Klan
The KKK experienced a revival in the 1950s under automobile plant worker Eldon Edwards’ Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, with about 15,000 members by 1958. There was another surge of membership after 1964 under Robert M Shelton, an Alabama salesman, reaching 50,000 by 1965.
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The KKK terrorised civil rights supporters with public acts of violence – for instance the savage attacks on the Freedom Riders. The 7,000 strong White Knights of Mississippi who murdered three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964.
The use of bombs by Klansmen dated back to January 1956, when the home of Martin Luther King in Montgomery was blasted. Between that incident and June 1, 1963, some 138 bombings were reported, with the Klan believed responsible for many of them.
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Neo-Nazis
From 1970, right-wing white supremacist groups joined forced with neo-Nazi groups which, eg, attacked a black protest in Chicago’s Marquette Park in 1976.
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Individuals
In the deep South, violent racism did not need an opposition group; Emmett Till was killed by Roy Bryant for wolf-whistling his wife; even though Bryant openly admitted murdering Till, he was never convicted.
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