ENTRY # 45
It is late 1945, and the war is over. John Smith is a
Tuskegee airman heading home to Biloxi,
Mississippi. He flew multiple missions during the
war, escorting bombers on missions and earning
commendations and medals in the process. What
will he face in terms of discrimination and
segregation (you may use your book…be specific)
when he gets home? How has he changed as a
result of his WWII experiences, and what will
that mean in the way he deals with
discrimination & segregation? Will he try to
change things? If so, how?
What if his home was Pennsylvania instead of
Mississippi? How would things be different?
(First watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlkSMzXf4hc&feature=youtube_gdata_player)
Gains in the 40s
Brown vs. Board of Education
The Rise of the SCLC and Nonviolent
Civil Disobedience
 Segregation
and Civil Rights quickly became important
national topics after WWII.
 Truman had desegregated the armed forces in 1948 by
Executive Order 9981…why here first?
 Would have liked to have done more but there was
massive resistance to integration at the time.
 However, racial segregation in
America seemed hypocritical after
a war against extreme racism
(Nazis) and during a cold war of
our “freedom and democracy”
against Soviet communism
Robinson broke the baseball color
barrier when the Brooklyn Dodgers
started him at first base on April 15,
1947.
 As the first major league team to
play a black man since the 1880s,
the Dodgers ended racial segregation
that had relegated black players to
the “Negro Leagues” for six decades.
The example of Robinson's character
and unquestionable talent
challenged the traditional basis of
segregation, which, at the time,
marked many other aspects of
American life, and contributed
significantly to Civil Rights Mvmt.

 By
1950s the National
Association For the
Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) was the
largest civil rights
organization in the US.
 They decided to
challenge Segregation and
Plessy v. Ferguson
through the court system.
 Their first target: public
education
A
team of NAACP lawyers, led by Thurgood Marshall
(later the first African American Supreme Court
Justice) argued that Plessy v. Fergson’s “Separate but
Equal” was not actually equal at all, especially in the
area of public education, and that segregation went
agains the 14th Amendment of equal protection under
the law”
 Court ruled that all
schools must be
desegregated
“with all deliberate
speed.”, overturning
Plessy.
 100
southern members
of Congress (including
Samuel and W. Kerr
Scott of D-North
Carolina) and signed an
agreement (Southern
Manifesto), opposing the
integration of schools.
 Some states temporarily
closed public schools,
rather than integrate.
 Little
Rock Central High School, Little Rock,
AK.
 9 black students registered to attend the
white school
 As ordered by the Arkansas Governor the
Arkansas National Guard blocked the
students from entering the school way.
 Having taken the Presidential Oath “to
protect and defend the Constitution,”
Eisenhower sent federal troops to protect
the black students as they walked to school
in 1956

READ THIS: Civil disobedience is defined by Wikipedia as “the active,
professed refusal to obey certain laws, demands, and commands of a
government, or of an occupying international power. Civil disobedience
is commonly, though not always, defined as being nonviolent resistance.
There have been debates as to whether civil disobedience must
necessarily be non-violent. Black's Law Dictionary includes nonviolence
in its definition of civil disobedience. Christian Bay's encyclopedia
article states that civil disobedience requires "carefully chosen and
legitimate means," but holds that they do not have to be nonviolent. It
has been argued that, while both civil disobedience and civil rebellion
are justified by appeal to constitutional defects, rebellion is much more
destructive; therefore, the defects justifying rebellion must be much
more serious than those justifying disobedience, and if one cannot
justify civil rebellion, then one cannot justify a civil disobedients' use
of force and violence and refusal to submit to arrest. Civil disobedients'
refraining from violence is also said to help preserve society's tolerance
of civil disobedience. But McCloskey argues that ‘if violent,
intimidatory, coercive disobedience is more effective, it is, other things
being equal, more justified than less effective, nonviolent
disobedience.’"

THEN:ENTRY # 46:Read the documents(A-D) on page 817 of your textbook
and answer the questions (1-4) at the bottom of the page.
 Rosa
Parks ("the first lady of civil rights“) was asked
to move from her bus seat on December 1, 1955, in
Montgomery, Alabama.
 When Parks refused to obey the bus driver’s order to
give up her seat in the colored section to a white
passenger, after the white section was filled, she was
arrested.
 An active member of the NAACP, Parks’ arrest touched
off the Montgomery Bus
Boycott, which lasted from
12/1/55 to 12/20/56, and
which resulted in a federal
civil rights victory and the
legal
desegregation of public buses.
 In
a 1992 interview with National Public
Radio's Lynn Neary, Parks recalled:
I did not want to be mistreated, I did not want to be
deprived of a seat that I had paid for. It was just time...
there was opportunity for me to take a stand to express
the way I felt about being treated in that manner. I had
not planned to get arrested. I had plenty to do without
having to end up in jail. But when I had to face that
decision, I didn't hesitate to do so because I felt that
we had endured that too long. The more we gave in,
the more we complied with that kind of treatment, the
more oppressive it became.
Baptist minister and black community
leader in Montgomery, Alabama
 Led the Bus Boycott, making a national
name for himself as a result of the
boycott and became the nationally
recognized leader of the Civil Rights
Movement, who remained committed to
the non-violent protest.
 April,1963 “Letter From a Birmingham
Jail”- will Kennedy to support a tougher
civil rights bill before his death in late http://www.youtube.com/watch
?v=nFcbpGK9_aw
1963
 August, 1963 - March on Washington in
support of this civil rights bill. “I Have a
Dream” speech.

 MLK
helped establish (in 1957) this group of
ministers who worked to nonviolently end
segregation.
 Included Ralph Abernathy, who organized the March
on Washington
Early 1960s
Civil Rights Act 1964
Later Militancy
Among young African Americans,
there was a swell of popular
support for civil rights, partly
rising out of frustration for the
slow movement of change
 Sit-ins (wade-ins, read-ins) all
over the south
 SNCC (Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee) formed
in Spring, 1960 at Shaw University.
 In 1964, the SNCC Freedom
Summer project to register
African American voters in
Mississippi resulted in the murder
of 3 civil rights workers

February 1, 1960
Woolworth’s Counter
Sit-in in Greensboro, NC
Meant to force the Federal
Government to enforce their
decision to desegregate
interstate commerce.
 Two buses full of people
traveled around the south
defying segregation laws.
 One bus was firebombed; the
other attacked by a white
mob in Birmingham, Alabama

JFK vocally supported
civil rights, especially
in his later 1963
speeches (after
Birmingham, Al. & MLK
arrest).
 His brother, Robert,
pushed for civil rights
legislation in his
position as Attorney
General
and when
he ran for
President
in 1968.

Johnson
used Kennedy’s death to push
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through
Congress.
 Outlawed segregation in public places
and discrimination in employment on
the basis of race, sex, color or national
origin. –-- prosecute-able by Federal
Justice Department

Massive Televised violence against non-violent
protesters shocked the nation on March 7,1965.
President Johnson made a televised speech calling for
strong federal (rather than states) voting rights laws.

Voting Rights Act of 1965
 Outlawed literacy tests and allowed the federal
government to oversee voter registration
24th Amendment (ratified 1964)
 No poll taxes for voting

 1965-67
–huge riots
rocked large American
cities.
 Los Angeles, Detroit,
Newark,, etc.
 How different did daily
life actually look for
most Black Americans?
 Violence beginning to
replace non-violence in
the civil rights
movement…
Malcolm X (Born Malcolm Little) in 1925 in Omaha,
Nebraska) had a difficult early
life, including drugs and crime,
but turned away from all that
after
converting to Islam.
 Would become an important,
though
controversial civil
rights
leader, criticizing King’s
nonviolence
and advocating black violence
in self-defense to counter white violence: “We declare
our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human
being, to be respected as a human being, to be given
the rights of a human being in this society, on this
earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into
existence by any means necessary.” - Malcolm X, 1965

 Political
party
 Would arrange armed
patrols of black
neighborhoods.
 Led to violent
confrontations with the
police in many cities.
 Became the vocal
advocate of “Black
Power” (Stokely
Carmichael’s term)
Stokely Carmichael
rather than integration.
Huey P. Newton
Bobby Seale