The Civil Rights Era
Postwar Movement towards Racial Integration
African Americans fought in
World War II and also worked
in war industries in the
United States during the war.
After the war, they once
again faced the racial
discrimination that had been
traditional before the war, but
many people took bold actions
to end discrimination and
promote integration.
Integration of the U.S. Armed Forces
When Congress refused to
adopt anti-lynching laws
and a ban on poll taxes, in
1948, President Harry
Truman issued an
executive order to
integrate the U.S.
armed forces and to end
discrimination in the hiring
of U.S. government
employees.
In turn, this led to civil
rights laws enacted in the
1960s.
Jackie Robinson
In 1947, Jackie Robinson
was the first African
American to play for a major
league baseball team in the
U.S., the Brooklyn Dodgers. This
led to the complete integration
of baseball and other
professional sports.
Robinson was the National
League’s most valuable player
in 1949 and the first African
American in the Baseball Hall
of Fame. Until this time,
African Americans played
professional baseball in the
Negro League.
In the Brown v. Board of Education
case (1954), the U.S. Supreme Court declared
that state laws establishing “separate but
equal” public schools denied African American
students the equal education promised in the
Fourteenth Amendment. The Court’s decision
reversed prior rulings dating back to Plessy V.
Ferguson in 1896.
Many people were unhappy with this decision,
and some even refused to follow it. The
governor of Arkansas ordered the National
Guard to keep nine African American students
from attending Little Rock’s Central
High School; President Eisenhower sent
federal troops to Little Rock to force the high
school to integrate.
Brown v Board of
Education
Reaction to the Brown Decision
Official reaction to the ruling was
mixed. In Kansas and Oklahoma,
they expected segregation to end
with little trouble, in Texas, they
promised compliance but said it
could “take years”, and in
Mississippi and Georgia they vowed
total resistance.
To hasten compliance, the Supreme
Court handed down a second
decision ordering schools to
desegregate “with all
deliberate speed.”
The Montgomery Bus Boycott
 On December 1, 1954, Rosa Parks, a
seamstress and NAACP officer, in
Montgomery, Alabama, was arrested
for refusing to give up her seat on a
bus so that a white man could sit
down.
 The Montgomery Improvement
Association, led by a young Martin
Luther King, organized a boycott
of the buses.
 For 381 days, African Americans
refused to ride the buses until the
Supreme Court finally outlawed bus
segregation.
Martin Luther King and the SCLC
Martin Luther King based his ideas of
nonviolent resistance on those of Gandhi.
King joined with more than 200 ministers
and civil rights leaders to found the
Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, which staged protests and
demonstrations throughout the South.
Letter from a Birmingham Jail
Letter written on April 16, 1963, by Martin
Luther King from the Birmingham City Jail
in response to a statement made by eight
white Alabama clergymen in which they
criticized MLK, as an “outside agitator”
King argued that without nonviolent
forceful direct actions, true civil rights
could never be achieved and that "one has
a moral responsibility to disobey unjust
laws."
The letter includes the famous statement
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to
justice everywhere"
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
In April of 1960, students at
Shaw University in Raleigh,
North Carolina, organized the
Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee
- SNCC.
Many college students viewed
the pace of change as too
slow.
SNCC, hoping to harness their
energy, would create one of
the most important student
activist movements in
American history.
SNCC vs.
SCLC
Two civil rights groups
prominent in the struggle
for African American
rights in the Sixties were
the Southern
Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC) and
the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee
(SNCC). Although the
SCLC and SNCC started as
similar organizations, they
grew to differ over time.,
especially in the SNCC’s
changing composition.
SCLC
SNCC
Founding
Founded by Martin Luther King, Founded by African American
Jr. and other ministers and civil college students with $800
rights leaders
received from the SCLC
Goal
To carry on nonviolent crusades To speed up changes mandated
against the evils of second class by Brown v. Board of Education
citizenship
Original Tactics
Marches, protests, and
demonstrations throughout the
South, using churches as bases
Sit-ins at segregated lunch
counters all across the South;
registering African Americans to
vote, in hopes they could
influence Congress to pass a
voting rights act
Later tactics
Registering African Americans
to vote, in hopes they could
influence Congress to pass a
voting rights act
Freedom rides on interstate
buses to determine if southern
states would enforce laws
requiring segregation in public
transportation
Original Membership
African American and white
adults
African American and white
college students
Later Membership
Same as original
African Americans only; no
whites
Original Philosophy
Nonviolence
Nonviolence
Later Philosophy
Same as original philosophy
Militancy and violence, “black
power” and African American
pride
Television Changes
The first regular
television broadcasts
began in 1949, providing
just two hours a week
of news and
entertainment to a very
small area of the East
Coast.
By 1956, over 500
stations were
broadcasting all over
America; bringing news
and entertainment into
the living rooms of most
Americans.
Kennedy/Nixon
Presidential Debates
In the 1960 national election campaign,
the Kennedy/Nixon presidential
debates were the first ones ever
shown on TV. Seventy million people
tuned in.
Although Nixon was more knowledgeable
about foreign policy and other topics,
Kennedy looked and spoke more
forcefully because he had been coached
by television producers. Kennedy’s
performance in the debate helped him
win the presidency. The Kennedy/Nixon
debates changed the shape of American
politics.
Sit-ins
 In February 1960, students from
North Carolina’s Agricultural and
Technical staged a sit-in at a
whites-only lunch counter at a
Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North
Carolina.
 Television brought coverage of the
protests and the ugly face of racism
– whites beating, jeering at, and
pouring food over students who
refused to strike back - into homes
throughout the United States.
 By late 1960, students had descended
on and desegregated Jim Crow lunch
counters in 48 cities in 11 states.
Freedom Riders
 In 1961, six whites and seven blacks
set out on a special bus ride
throughout the South to test Supreme
Court decisions banning segregation on
interstate bus routes and segregated
facilities in bus terminal.
 These Freedom Riders were beaten
and severely injured. In Anniston,
Alabama, a mob of 200 whites tossed a
fire bomb destroying the bus.
 SNCC members volunteered to continue
the ride. After the volunteers were
beaten by police in Birmingham,
Alabama, Attorney-General Robert
Kennedy sent 400 federal marshals to
protect the riders.
Marching to Washington
To persuade Congress to pass
President Kennedy's proposed civil
rights bill, on August 28, 1963, more
than 250,000 people converged on
Washington, D.C.
Martin Luther King appealed for
peace and racial harmony in his “I
have a dream” speech.
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church
Two weeks after King’s
historic speech, the Sixteenth
Street Baptist Church in
Birmingham, Alabama was
firebombed, claiming the lives
of four young girls.
TV News Coverage of the
Civil Rights Movement - 1
TV newscasts also changed
the shape of American
culture. Americans who might
never have attended a civil
rights demonstration saw and
heard them on their TVs in
the 1960s. In 1963, TV reports
showed helmeted police
officers from Birmingham,
Alabama using high pressure
water hoses to spray African
American children who had
been walking in a protest
march.
TV News Coverage of the
Civil Rights Movement - 2
The reports also showed the
officers setting police dogs to
attack them, and then clubbing
them. TV news coverage of the
civil rights movement helped
many Americans turn their
sympathies towards ending
racial segregation and
persuaded Kennedy that new
laws were the only way to
end the racial violence and to
give African Americans the
civil rights they were
demanding.
Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Civil Rights Act of
1964 was signed into law by
President Lyndon
Johnson. This law prohibited
discrimination based on race,
religion, national origin, and
gender. It allowed all citizens
the right to enter any park,
restroom, library, theater, and
public building in the United
States. One factor that
prompted this law was the
long struggle for civil rights
undertaken by America’s
African American population.
Civil Rights Act of 1964
Another factor was King’s
famous “I Have a Dream”
speech; its moving words
helped create widespread
support for this law. Other
factors included previous
presidential actions that
combatted civil rights
violations, such as Truman’s
in 1948 and Eisenhower’s in
1954, and Kennedy’s
sending federal troops to
Mississippi (1962) and
Alabama (1963) to force
integration of public
universities there.
Freedom Summer
 In 1964, in what was known as
Freedom Summer, SNCC
concentrated its efforts on registering
voters in Mississippi, where 90% of
African Americans were unable to vote.
 Some 1,000 volunteers, mostly white,
one-third female, went to Mississippi to
help the mostly African American SNCC,
staff register black voters.
 The project encountered violent
opposition, including the abduction,
torture, and murder of three volunteers,
Michael Schwerner, Andrew
Goodman, and James Chaney by
the Ku Klux Klan.
Voting Rights Act of 1965
 In 1965, the SCLC decided to conduct a
major voter registration campaign in
Selma, Alabama, where African
Americans were more than half the
population but only 3% of the
registered voters.
 The SCLC hoped to provoke a hostile
white response that would force the
Johnson administration to sponsor a
federal voting-rights law.
 Television news broadcast images from
Selma of police on horseback attacking
demonstrators, using tear gas, whips,
and clubs.
 Ten weeks later, Congress passed the
Voting Rights Act of 1965.
SNCC Evolves
In the later 1960s, led by
fiery leaders such as Stokely
Carmichael, SNCC focused on
"black power” and then
protesting against the
Vietnam War.
As early as 1965, James
Forman said he didn’t know
“how much longer we can
stay nonviolent” and in 1969,
SNCC officially changed its
name to the Student
National Coordinating
Committee to reflect the
broadening of its strategies.
Malcolm X
New leaders, including Malcolm
X, were emerging who argued that blacks
should take control of their communities,
livelihoods, and culture.
Malcolm X’s message that blacks
should separate from white society
appealed to many African Americans and
their growing pride in their identity. His
call for armed self-defense frightened most
whites and many moderate African
Americans.
After a pilgrimage to Mecca,
Malcolm X still burned with a hatred of
racism and injustice but his views towards
whites changed.
On Feb. 21, 1965, he was shot and
killed.
Black Panthers
The Black Panther Party achieved
national and international notoriety
through its involvement in the Black
Power movement from 1966 until 1982,
becoming an icon of the
counterculture of the 1960s.
They instituted programs designed to
alleviate poverty, improve health among
inner city black communities, and
soften the Party's public image.
However, the group's political goals
were often overshadowed by their
confrontational, militant, and violent
tactics against police.
Individual Rights
During most of the 1950s and 1960s,
the U.S. Supreme Court was headed by
Chief Justice Earl Warren. The
Warren Court, as it was known,
became famous for issuing landmark
decisions, such as declaring that
segregation in public schools was
unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of
Education, that the Constitution
includes the right to privacy, that the
right of free speech protects students
who wear armbands as an antiwar
protest on school grounds, and that all
states must obey all decisions of the
Supreme Court.
Miranda v. Arizona
In 1963, the Warren Court issued
another of its landmark decisions,
Miranda v. Arizona. Police must
inform suspects of their constitutional
rights at the time of arrest.
The case involved a man named
Ernesto Miranda, who was convicted
and imprisoned after signing a
confession, although, at the time of
his arrest, the police questioned him
without telling him he had the right
to an attorney and the right to
remain silent. The Miranda decision
strengthened Americans’ individual
rights.
Engel v. Vitale
Engel v. Vitale (1962)
• Court ruled that it is
unconstitutional for state
officials to compose an
official school prayer and
encourage its recitation in
public schools
• held that the mere promotion
of a religion is sufficient to
establish a violation, even if
that promotion is not
coercive
Gideon v. Wainwright
Gideon v. Wainwright
(1963)
• unanimously ruled that
state courts are
required under the Sixth
Amendment of the
Constitution to provide
counsel in criminal
cases for defendants
who are unable to
afford their own
attorneys
New York Times v. Sullivan
New York Times v. Sullivan (1964)
• extended the protection offered the
press by the First Amendment
• held that debate on public issues
would be inhibited if public officials
could sue for inaccuracies that were
made by mistake
• made it more difficult for public
officials to bring libel charges
against the press, since the official
had to prove that a harmful untruth
was told maliciously and with
reckless disregard for truth
The assassination of President Kennedy
in Dallas, Texas, in November, 1963, was a tragic
event with a twofold political impact.
1. The assassination showed Americans just
how strong their government was
because, although the president could be
killed, the U.S. government would live on.
2. The assassination gave the new
president, Lyndon Johnson, the
political capital to force his domestic
legislative agenda through Congress. This
included the Economic Opportunity Act
of 1964, which launched Johnson’s “War
on Poverty” and the Civil Rights Act
of 1964, which outlawed segregation in
American schools and other public
places.
Tragedy in Dallas
The Other America: Poverty in the U.S.
Michael Harrington
wrote The Other
America (1961)
• argued that up to 25%
of the nation was living
in poverty
• many believe that this
book is responsible for
President Lyndon B.
Johnson's "War on
Poverty"
The Great Society
During a 1964 speech, President
Johnson summed up his vision for
America in the phrase “the Great
Society.” His programs to make the
United States a great society would
secure civil rights for all Americans
and eliminate poverty.
The Medicare program is an
important legacy of the Great Society,
as are policies and programs that
sought to improve elementary and
secondary education, to protect the
environment, and to reform
immigration policies.
Voting Rights Act of 1965