• The Supreme Court's decision in the case of
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) had declared segregation to be constitutional with a separate but equal policy.
• Laws that segregated
African Americans were allowed as long as African
Americans had equal places.

• Areas without laws that required segregation often had de facto segregation, which was based on custom and tradition.

• African Americans who benefited from FDR's
New Deal programs gave the Democratic
Party new strength in the North.

• In the 1940s, members of the Congress of Racial
Equality (CORE) began using sit-ins, a form of protest.
• Sit-ins staged by members of CORE successfully integrated many restaurants, theaters, and other public facilities in
Chicago, Detroit, Denver, and Syracuse.

• From 1939 to 1961, the
NAACP's chief counsel and director of its Legal
Defense and Education
Fund was the brilliant
African American attorney Thurgood
Marshall.

• Linda Brown, an African
American student from
Topeka, Kansas wanted to attend a white school very near her house.
• However, Linda’s parents were told that their daughter had to attend a black school about 45 minutes from her house.
• Marshall and the NAACP represented the Brown family against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.

• In Brown v. Board of Education (May 1954), the Supreme
Court ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional and violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
• The ruling signaled to African Americans that it was time to challenge other forms of segregation.

• The Brown decision also upset many white
Southerners.
• Many ignored the Supreme Court’s ruling and kept schools segregated for years.
• Many states adopted pupil assignment laws that created an elaborate set of requirements other than race to prevent African Americans from attending white schools.

• In 1956, a group of 101
Southern members of
Congress signed the
Southern Manifesto, which denounced the
Supreme Court's ruling as “a clear abuse of judicial power”.

• On December 1, 1955, Rosa
Parks, a seamstress, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery,
Alabama.
• She challenged bus segregation in court. African
Americans in Montgomery quickly started a boycott of the bus system.
• In the next few years, boycotts and protests spread across the nation.

• The Montgomery bus boycott marked the beginning of the civil rights movement among African
Americans.
• The boycott was a success.
• Some African American leaders formed the
Montgomery Improvement
Association, which worked with city leaders to end segregation.

• The MIA chose the young (26 year old) minister, Martin Luther
King, Jr., to lead the group.

• The leader of the
Montgomery bus boycott,
Martin Luther King, Jr., believed that the only moral way to end segregation and racism was through nonviolent passive resistance.
• This approach was based on the ideas of Mohandas
Gandhi.
• A powerful speaker, King encouraged his listeners to disobey unjust laws.

• The Supreme Court decided Rosa Parks’ case in 1956.
• It said that Alabama’s bus segregation laws were unconstitutional.

• The Montgomery bus boycott could not have succeeded without the support and encouragement of the
African American churches in the city.
• People met at churches to plan and organize protest meetings.

• The Southern Christian
Leadership Conference
(SCLC) was an organization formed in
1957 to eliminate segregation from
American society.

• King was the SCLC’s first president.
• The SCLC set out to end segregation in America.
• It also pushed African
Americans to register to vote.
• The group challenged segregation of public transportation and other public places.

• President Eisenhower personally opposed segregation.
• But he disagreed with those who wanted to end it through protests and court rulings.
• President Eisenhower believed that segregation and racism would end when people's values changed.
• He believed that segregation should end gradually.

• Eisenhower thought that the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education was wrong.
• However, he also thought that the federal government had the duty to uphold the decision.

• In September 1957 the
Little Rock, Arkansas, school board won a court order to admit nine
African American students to Central High
School.
• The governor of Arkansas ordered troops from the
Arkansas National Guard to prevent the nine students from entering the school.

• President Eisenhower sent 1,000 soldiers to
Little Rock, Arkansas to end mob violence protesting school desegregation.
• Eisenhower ordered
U.S. Army troops to
Little Rock to protect the students and to uphold the law.

• In the same year that the Little
Rock crisis took place,
Congress passed the Civil
Rights Act of 1957.
• The Civil Rights Act of 1957 protected the rights of African
Americans to vote.
• The law created a civil rights division within the
Department of Justice.
• It also created the United
States Commission on Civil
Rights to investigate instances in which the right to vote was denied.