The Civil Rights Movement in the United
States has been a long struggle to bring full civil rights and equality
under the law to all Americans. It has been made up of many movements,
most prominently the struggles between 1945 and 1970 to end discrimination
against African-Americans and to end racial segregation, especially in
the U.S. South. Both together with these struggles and as a result of them,
though only sometimes allied with them, came many other struggles, including
the women's liberation movement, the gay liberation movement, the disabled
rights movement, and many socioeconomic class-based movements. Many of
the movement's goals have won broad acceptance both socially and in legal
code, and it has had a tremendous and lasting impact on United States society.
Background
Throughout the history of the United States, African Americans have resisted,
first against the institution of slavery and later second-class citizenship
and racial segregation. Opposition took many forms, from the passive resistance
of slaves who performed poor work for their masters, to slave revolts,
to slaves escaping to freedom on the Underground Railroad, to African Americans'
participation in the Abolitionist movement and fighting against the pro-slavery
Confederacy in the Civil War.
Following the Civil War, the federal government moved to extend legal
equality to African Americans with the passage of the 13th Amendment to
the Constitution (1865) which outlawed slavery, the 14th Amendment (1868)
which made citizens of all persons born in this country and afforded equal
protection of the laws to all citizens, and the 15th Amendment (1870) which
provided the right to vote to all citizens, regardless of race. During
Reconstruction (1865-1877), Northern troops occupied the South and enforced
these new constitutional amendments. Many blacks took prominent positions
in society, including elected office.
However, Reconstruction ended following the Compromise of 1877 between
Northern white elites and Southern white elites. The compromise called
for the withdrawal of Northern troops from the South (giving Southern whites
a free hand to reinstitute discrimatory practices) in exchange for decided
the contentious Presidential election in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes,
supported by Northern states, over his opponent, Samuel J. Tilden.
Following the compromise, many states adopted restrictive laws which
enforced segregation of the races and the second-class status of African
Americans. In 1883, the Supreme Court ruled in the Civil Rights Cases
163 US 3 1883, effectively destroying many of the radical-Republican-driven
reforms. Later Supreme Court cases such as Plessy v. Ferguson 163
US 537 1896 further eroded black people's civil rights.
In many cities and towns, African Americans were not allowed to share
a taxi with whites or enter a building through the same entrance. They
had to drink from separate water fountains, use separate restrooms, attend
separate schools, and even swear on separate Bibles and be buried in separate
cemeteries. They were excluded from restaurants and public libraries. Many
parks barred them with signs that read "Negroes and dogs not allowed."
One municipal zoo went so far as to list separate visiting hours.
African Americans were expected to step aside to let a white person
pass, and black men dared not look any white woman in the eye. Black men
and women were addressed as "Tom" or "Jane" but rarely as "Mr." or "Miss"
or "Mrs." A black man was referred to as "boy" and a black woman as "girl";
both often endured insulting labels of "nigger" or "colored."
Voting rights discrimination was widespread. In Tennessee, as the Justice
Department's John Doar discovered on a self-appointed tour of rural Haywood
County, black sharecroppers were being evicted by white farmers for trying
to vote. In Mississippi, names of new voter applicants had to be published
in local newspapers for two weeks before acceptance, and voters had the
right to object to an applicant's "moral character." Black applicants,
many of whom were illiterate or poorly educated, were also required to
pass literacy tests and to interpret sections of the state constitution
to the satisfaction of the registrars. These tests were not applied to
illiterate whites. In Alabama, many registration centers were only open
two days a month; voting registrars often arrived late and took long lunch
hours. In 1957 the town of Tuskegee gerrymandered black residents outside
the city limits to make them ineligible to vote. In nearby Macon County,
voter registration boards used discriminatory practices such as these to
limit the number of eligible black voters:
-
holding black applicants to a higher standard of accuracy than whites;
-
allowing white applicants to register in their cars and in their homes;
-
processing black applicants last, even when they were first in line;
-
establishing separate registration offices in different parts of the courthouse;
-
offering assistance only to white applicants in completing the registration
form;
-
refusing to notify black applicants about the status of their applications.
Some counties in the Deep South resorted to harsher means of preventing
local blacks from voting. They jailed black applicants and firebombed places
where voter education classes had been conducted, such as Mt. Olive Baptist
Church in Terrell County, Georgia. They threatened, beat, and in some cases,
murdered black applicants.
Southern blacks who resisted segregation, particularly those in rural
areas, lived in constant fear--fear of their employers, who vowed to fire
them; fear of white "citizens' councils," who adopted policies of economic
reprisal against demonstrators; and fear of white vigilante groups like
the Ku Klux Klan, who exerted an often-unchecked reign of terror across
the South, where lynching of African Americans was a common occurrence
and rarely prosecuted. Nearly 4,500 African Americans were lynched in the
United States between 1882 and the early 1950s.
Early African-American Responses
African Americans responded in a variety of ways. Booker T. Washington
(1856-1915), the early 20th century's leading advocate of black education,
stressed industrial schooling for African Americans and gradual social
adjustment rather than political and civil rights. The charismatic reformer
Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) called for racial separatism and a "Back-to-Africa"
colonization program. But it was a different path, one that emphasized
that African Americans were in this country to stay and would fight for
their freedom and political equality, that led to the modern civil rights
movement.
Post World War II responses
Although they had white supporters and sympathizers, the modern civil rights
movement was designed, led, organized, and manned by African Americans,
who placed themselves and their families on the front lines in the struggle
for freedom. Their heroism was brought home to every American through newspaper,
and later, television reports as their peaceful marches and demonstrations
were violently attacked by law enforcement. Officers used batons, bullwhips,
fire hoses, police dogs, and mass arrests to intimidate the protestors.
The second characteristic of the movement is that it was not monolithic,
led by one or two men. Rather it was a dispersed, grass-roots campaign
that attacked segregation in many different places using many different
tactics.
Southern resistance
Resistance to racial equality in the Deep South came not only from extremist
groups like the Ku Klux Klan and white "citizens' councils." It occurred
at all levels of government and society--from federal judges to state governors
to county sheriffs to local citizens serving on juries.
Governor Orval Eugene Faubus of Arkansas used the Arkansas National
Guard to prevent school integration at Little Rock Central High School
in 1957, and Governors Ross Barnett of Mississippi and George Wallace of
Alabama physically blocked school doorways at their respective states'
universities. E.H. Hurst, a Mississippi state representative, stalked and
killed a black farmer for attending voter registration classes. Laurie
Pritchett, Albany, Georgia's police chief, thwarted student efforts to
integrate public places in the city. Birmingham's public safety commissioner
[[Eugene T. "Bull" Connor]] advocated violence against freedom riders and
ordered fire hoses and police dogs turned on demonstrators. Sheriff Jim
Clark of Dallas County, Alabama loosed his deputies on "Bloody Sunday"
marchers and personally menaced other protestors. Police all across the
South arrested civil rights activists on trumped-up charges. All-white
juries in several states acquitted known killers of local African Americans.
Black churches
The leadership role of black churches in the movement was a natural extension
of their structure and function. They offered members an opportunity to
exercise roles denied them in society. Throughout history, the black church
served not only as a place of worship but also as a community "bulletin
board," a credit union, a "people's court" to solve disputes, a support
group, and a center of political activism. These and other functions enhanced
the importance of the minister. The most prominent clergyman in the civil
rights movement was Martin Luther King, Jr. Time magazine's 1964 "Man of
the Year" was a man of the people. He joined as well as led protest demonstrations,
and as comedian Dick Gregory put it, "he gave as many fingerprints as autographs."
King's powerful oratory and persistent call for racial justice inspired
sharecroppers and intellectuals alike. His tireless personal commitment
to and strong leadership role in the black freedom struggle won him worldwide
acclaim and the Nobel Peace Prize.
Other notable minister-activists included Ralph Abernathy, King's closest
associate; Bernard Lee, veteran demonstrator and frequent travel companion
of King; Fred Shuttlesworth, who defied Bull Connor and who created a safe
path for a colleague through a white mob in Montgomery by commanding "Out
of the way!"; and C.T. Vivian, who debated Sheriff Clark on his conduct
and the Constitution.
Students
Students and seminarians in both the South and the North played key roles
in every phase of the civil rights movement--from bus boycotts to sit-ins
to freedom rides to social movements. The student movement involved such
celebrated figures as John Lewis, the single-minded activist who "kept
on" despite many beatings and harassments; Jim Lawson, the revered "guru"
of nonviolent theory and tactics; Diane Nash, an articulate and intrepid
public champion of justice; Bob Moses, pioneer of voting registration in
the most rural--and most dangerous--part of the South; and James Bevel,
a fiery preacher and charismatic organizer and facilitator. Other prominent
student activists included Charles McDew, Bernard Lafayette, Charles Jones,
Lonnie King, Julian Bond (associated with Atlanta University), Hosea Williams
(associated with Brown Chapel), and Stokely Carmichael, who later changed
his name to Kwame Toure.
Institutional frameworks
Church and student-led movements developed their own organizational and
sustaining structures. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (the
SCLC), founded in 1957, coordinated and raised funds, mostly from northern
sources, for local protests and for the training of black leaders. The
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, founded in 1957, developed
the "jail-no-bail" strategy. SNCC's role was to develop and link sit-in
campaigns and to help organize freedom rides, voter registration drives,
and other protest activities. Bob Moses of SNCC created the Council of
Federated Organizations (COFO) to coordinate the work of the SCLC, SNCC,
and various other national and independent civil rights groups. These three
new groups often joined forces with existing organizations such as the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded
in 1909, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded in 1942, and the
National Urban League. The NAACP and its Director, Roy Wilkins, provided
legal counsel for jailed demonstrators, helped raise bail, and continued
to test segregation and discrimination in the courts as it had been doing
for half a century. CORE initiated the 1961 Freedom Rides which involved
many SNCC members, and CORE's leader James Farmer later became executive
secretary of SNCC. The National Urban League, founded in 1911 and headed
by Whitney M. Young, Jr., helped open up job opportunities for African
Americans. Labor was represented by A. Philip Randolph, vice-president
of the American Federation of Labor, and his chief assistant and organizer,
Bayard Rustin.
Federal involvement
All branches of the federal government impacted the civil rights movement.
President John Kennedy supported enforcement of desegregation in schools
and public facilities. Attorney General Robert Kennedy brought more than
50 lawsuits in four states to secure black Americans' right to vote. President
Lyndon Johnson was personally committed to achieving civil rights goals.
Congress passed and President Johnson signed the century's two most far-reaching
pieces of civil rights legislation--the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965. Johnson advocated civil rights even though he
knew it would cost the Democratic Party the South in the next presidential
election, and for the foreseeable future. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover,
concerned about possible Communist influence in the civil rights movement
and personally antagonistic to Martin Luther King, Jr., used the FBI to
investigate King and other civil rights leaders. U.S. District Court Judge
Frank M. Johnson, Jr., ruled against segregation and voting rights discrimination
in Alabama and made the Selma-to-Montgomery March possible.
The Strategy
In the early days of the civil rights movement, litigation and lobbying
were the focus of integration efforts. The U.S. Supreme Court decisions
in
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 347 US 483 1954,
Powell
v. Alabama 287 US 45 1932,
Smith v. Allwright 321 US 649 1944,
Shelley
v. Kraemer 334 US 1 1948,
Sweatt v. Painter 339 US 629 1950,
and
McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Board of Regents 339 US 637 1950
led to a shift in tactics, and from 1955 to 1965, "direct action" was the
strategy--primarily bus boycotts, sit-ins, freedom rides, and social movements.
Locally initiated boycotts of segregated buses, especially the Montgomery
bus boycott of 1955-1956, were designed to unite and mobilize black communities
on a commonly-shared concern. Protestors refused to ride on the buses,
opting instead to walk or carpool. The nearly one year-long boycott ended
bus segregation in Montgomery and triggered other bus boycotts such as
the highly successful Tallahassee, Florida boycott of 1956-1957.
Student-organized sit-ins like the February 1960 protest at Woolworth's
lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, offered young men and women
with no special skills or resources an opportunity to display their discontent
and raise white awareness. Protestors were encouraged to dress up, sit
quietly, and occupy every other stool so potential white sympathizers could
join in. The success of the Greensboro sit-in led to a rash of student
campaigns all across the South. By the end of 1960 the sit-ins had spread
to every southern and border state and even to Nevada, Illinois, and Ohio.
Demonstrators focused not only on lunch counters but on parks, beaches,
libraries, theaters, museums, and other public places. When they were arrested,
student demonstrators made "jail-no-bail" pledges to call attention to
their cause and to reverse the cost of protest (putting the financial burden
of jail space and food on the "jailors").
The 1961 Freedom Rides on public buses tested compliance with court
orders to desegregate interstate transportation terminals. The trips enabled
students from both the South and the North to protest away from campus
and to form a tightly-knit community of activists, many of whom would participate
in the last protest phase, which began in 1961. National civil rights leaders
launched these efforts to involve poor blacks and other blacks who had
been uninvolved until then. The movements included door-to-door voter education
projects in rural Mississippi, "The Birmingham Campaign" to desegregate
public accommodations in the city, and "Freedom Summer," to try to unseat
the regular delegation at the 1964 Democratic Convention and to publicize
the disenfranchisement of southern blacks.
While some groups and individuals within the civil rights movement advocated
Black Power, black separatism, or even armed resistance, the majority of
participants remained committed to the principles of nonviolence -- a deliberate
decision by an oppressed minority to abstain from violence for political
gain. The commitment to nonviolence gave the civil rights movement great
moral authority. Using nonviolent strategies, civil rights activists took
advantage of emerging national network-news reporting, especially television,
to capture national attention and the attention of Congress and the White
House. In 1955, journalists covered the Mississippi trial of two men accused
of murdering 14-year-old Emmett Till from Chicago, Illinois. The cover
of Jet magazine featured a photo of the boy's mutilated face. A few years
later, Americans watched the live footage of violent unrest at Little Rock
Central High School as whites rioted to prevent nine black students from
entering the school. Radio, television, and print journalism exhaustively
covered such 1960s events as police dogs attacking children in Birmingham,
former sharecropper Fannie Lou Hammer describing her jail beatings to delegates
at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, and a mounted posse charging
"Bloody Sunday" demonstrators in Selma, Alabama.
The Cost
Freedom wore an expensive price tag.
Southern blacks who tried to register to vote--and those who supported
them--were typically jeered and harassed, and sometimes beaten or killed.
In 1963, the NAACP's Medgar Evers was gunned down in front of his wife
and children in Jackson, Mississippi. Reverend George Lee of Belzoni, Mississippi,
was murdered when he refused to remove his name from a list of registered
voters, and farmer Herbert Lee of Liberty, Mississippi, was killed for
having attended voter education classes. Three "Freedom Summer" field-workers--Michael
Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman--were shot down for their part
in helping Mississippi blacks register and organize. Michael Schwerner
a social worker from Manhattan's Lower East Side, James Chaney, a local
plasterer's apprentice, and Andrew Goodman, a Queens College anthropology
student, disappeared while inspecting the recent burning of a black church
in Neshoba County on 21 June 1964. They had earlier been arrested by the
Neshoba County sheriff and deputies, who released Schwerner, Goodman, and
Chaney, then caught up with the three workers later and murdered them.
Their bodies were discovered several months later in an earthen dam outside
Philadelphia, Mississippi. Schwerner and Goodman had been shot once; Chaney,
the lone African American, had been savagely beaten and shot three times.
When violence failed to stop voter registration efforts, whites used
economic pressure. In Mississippi's LeFlore and Sunflower Counties--two
of the poorest counties in the nation--state authorities cut off federal
food relief, resulting in a near-famine in the region. Many black registrants
throughout the South were also fired from their jobs or refused credit
at local banks and stores. In one town, a black grocer was forced out of
business when local whites stopped his store delivery trucks on the highway
outside town and made them turn around.
Like voter registrants, freedom riders paid a heavy price for racial
justice. When the interracial groups of riders stepped off Greyhound or
Trailways buses in segregated terminals, local police were usually absent.
Angry mobs were waiting, however, armed with baseball bats, lead pipes,
and bicycle chains.
In Anniston, Alabama, one bus was firebombed, forcing its passengers
to flee for their lives. In Birmingham, where an FBI informant reported
that Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor had encouraged the Ku Klux
Klan to attack an incoming group of freedom riders "until it looked like
a bulldog had got a hold of them," the riders were severely beaten. In
eerily-quiet Montgomery, a mob charged another bus load of riders, knocking
John Lewis unconscious with a crate and smashing Life photographer Don
Urbrock in the face with his own camera. A dozen men surrounded Jim Zwerg,
a white student from Fisk University, and beat him in the face with a suitcase,
knocking out his teeth. The freedom riders did not fare much better in
jail. There, they were crammed into tiny, filthy cells and sporadically
beaten. In Jackson, Mississippi, some male prisoners were forced to do
hard labor in 100-degree heat. Others were transferred to Parchman Penitentiary,
where their food was deliberately oversalted and their mattresses were
removed. Sometimes the men were suspended by "wrist breakers" from the
walls. Typically, the windows of their cells were shut tight on hot days,
making it hard for them to breathe.
Out of jail, the freedom riders joined mass demonstrations where the
violent response of local police shocked the world. In Birmingham, police
loosed attack dogs into a peaceful crowd of demonstrators, and the German
shepherds bit three teenagers. In Birmingham and Orangeburg, South Carolina,
firemen blasted protestors with hoses set at a pressure to remove bark
from trees and mortar from brick.
On "Bloody Sunday" in Selma, Alabama, police and troopers on horseback
charged into a group of marchers, beating them and firing tear gas. Several
weeks later the marchers trekked the 54 miles from Selma to Montgomery
without incident, but afterwards four Klansmen murdered Detroit homemaker
Viola Liuzzo as she drove marchers back to Selma. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
gave his life for the movement, struck down by an assassin's bullet in
Memphis, Tennessee on 4 April 1968.
When white supremacists could not halt the civil rights movement, they
tried to demoralize its supporters. They bombed churches and other meeting
places. They set high bail and paced trials slowly, forcing civil rights
organizations to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. At a Nashville
lunch counter sit-in, the store manager locked the door and turned on the
insect fumigator. In St. Augustine, Florida, city officials who had promised
to meet with black demonstrators at City Hall offered them an empty table
and a tape recorder instead. In Selma, Sheriff Jim Clark and his deputies
forced 165 students into a three-mile run, poking them with cattle prods
as they ran. Random violence accompanied calculated acts. The Klan bombing
of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963 killed four black
girls. On the campus of the University of Mississippi, a stray bullet struck
a local jukebox-repairman in a riot that killed one reporter and wounded
more than 150 federal marshals. In Marion, Alabama, 26-year-old Jimmy Lee
Jackson was gunned down while trying to protect his mother and grandfather
from State Police. Not far away in Selma, a white Boston minister who had
lost his way was clubbed to death by white vigilantes.
The more violent southern whites became, the more their actions were
publicized and denounced across the nation. Increasing violence in the
South's streets, jails, and public places failed to break the spirits of
the freedom fighters. Indeed, it emboldened them.
The Prize
-
At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to
shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at
Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was
last week in Selma, Alabama. There is no Negro problem. There is no southern
problem. There is no northern problem. There is only an American problem.
Many of the issues of civil rights are very complex and most difficult.
But about this there can and should be no argument. Every American citizen
must have the right to vote...Yet the harsh fact is that in many places
in this country men and women are kept from voting simply because they
are Negroes... No law that we now have on the books...can insure the right
to vote when local officials are determined to deny it... There is no Constitutional
issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral
issue. It is wrong--deadly wrong--to deny any of your fellow Americans
the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States' rights
or National rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.
-
President Lyndon B. Johnson
-
Introducing the Voting Rights Act to Congress, 15 March 1965
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which required equal access to public places
and outlawed discrimination in employment, was a major victory of the black
freedom struggle, but the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was its crowning achievement.
The 1965 Act suspended literacy tests and other voter tests and authorized
federal supervision of voter registration in states and individual voting
districts where such tests were being used. African Americans who had been
barred from registering to vote finally had an alternative to the courts.
If voting discrimination occurred, the 1965 Act authorized the attorney
general to send federal examiners to replace local registrars.
The Act had an immediate impact. Within months of its passage on August
6, 1965, one quarter of a million new black voters had been registered,
one third by federal examiners. Within four years, voter registration in
the South had more than doubled. In 1965, Mississippi had the highest black
voter turnout--74%--and led the nation in the number of black leaders elected.
In 1969, Tennessee had a 92.1% turnout; Arkansas, 77.9%; and Texas, 73.1%.
Winning the right to vote changed the political landscape of the South.
When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, barely 100 African Americans
held elective office in the U.S.; by 1989 there were more than 7,200, including
more than 4,800 in the South. Nearly every Black Belt county in Alabama
had a black sheriff, and southern blacks held top positions within city,
county, and state governments. Atlanta boasted a black mayor, Andrew Young,
as did Jackson, Mississippi--Harvey Johnson, and New Orleans, with Ernest
Morial. Black politicians on the national level included Barbara Jordan,
who represented Texas in Congress, and former mayor Young, who was appointed
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations during the Carter Administration.
Julian Bond was elected to the Georgia Legislature in 1965, although political
reaction to his public opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam prevented
him from taking his seat until 1967. John Lewis currently represents Georgia's
5th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives, where
he has served since 1987. Lewis sits on the House Ways and Means and Health
committees.
The enormous gains of the civil rights movement stand to last a long
time. Yet the full effect of these gains is yet to be felt. "Equal rights"
struggles now involve multiple races, as well as the issues of rights based
upon gender and sexual orientation. Racism has lost its legal, political,
and social standing, but the legacy of racism--poverty, ignorance, and
disease--confronts us. "They are our enemies, not our fellow man, not our
neighbor," said President Johnson at the end of his voting rights speech.
"And these enemies too--poverty, disease, and ignorance--we shall overcome."
This article includes some text from the presumed public domain resource
http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/civilrights/intro1.htm
on the U.S. Government National Parks Service site, which appears to be
a Federal Government source that does not have a copyright claim asserted.t
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