Civil Rights Movement
I. INTRODUCTION
Civil Rights Movement in the United States, political, legal, and social struggle by black Americans to gain full citizenship
rights and to achieve racial equality. The civil rights movement was first and foremost a challenge to segregation, the
system of laws and customs separating blacks and whites that whites used to control blacks after slavery was abolished in
the 1860s. During the civil rights movement, individuals and civil rights organizations challenged segregation and
discrimination with a variety of activities, including protest marches, boycotts, and refusal to abide by segregation laws.
Many believe that the movement began with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and ended with the Voting Rights Act of
1965, though there is debate about when it began and whether it has ended yet. The civil rights movement has also been
called the Black Freedom Movement, the Negro Revolution, and the Second Reconstruction.
II. SEGREGATION
Segregation was an attempt by white Southerners to separate the races in every sphere of life and to achieve supremacy
over blacks. Segregation was often called the Jim Crow system, after a minstrel show character from the 1830s who was
an old, crippled, black slave who embodied negative stereotypes of blacks. Segregation became common in Southern
states following the end of Reconstruction in 1877. During Reconstruction, which followed the Civil War (1861-1865),
Republican governments in the Southern states were run by blacks, Northerners, and some sympathetic Southerners. The
Reconstruction governments had passed laws opening up economic and political opportunities for blacks. By 1877 the
Democratic Party had gained control of government in the Southern states, and these Southern Democrats wanted to
reverse black advances made during Reconstruction. To that end, they began to pass local and state laws that specified
certain places “For Whites Only” and others for “Colored”. Blacks had separate schools, transportation, restaurants, and
parks, many of which were poorly funded and inferior to those of whites. Over the next 75 years, Jim Crow signs went up
to separate the races in every possible place.
The system of segregation also included the denial of voting rights, known
as disfranchisement. Between 1890 and 1910 all Southern states passed
laws imposing requirements for voting that were used to prevent blacks
from voting, in spite of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution of the
United States, which had been designed to protect black voting rights.
These requirements included: the ability to read and write, which
disqualified the many blacks who had not had access to education;
property ownership, something few blacks were able to acquire; and
paying a poll tax, which was too great a burden on most Southern blacks,
who were very poor. As a final insult, the few blacks who made it over all
these hurdles could not vote in the Democratic primaries that chose the
candidates because they were open only to whites in most Southern states.
Because blacks could not vote, they were virtually powerless to prevent whites from segregating all aspects of Southern
life. They could do little to stop discrimination in public accommodations, education, economic opportunities, or housing.
The ability to struggle for equality was even undermined by the prevalent Jim Crow signs, which constantly reminded
blacks of their inferior status in Southern society. Segregation was an all encompassing system.
C. World War II
When World War II began in Europe in 1939, blacks demanded better treatment than they had experienced in World War
I. Black newspaper editors insisted during 1939 and 1940 that black support for this war effort would depend on fair
treatment. They demanded that black soldiers be trained in all military roles and that black civilians have equal
opportunities to work in war industries at home.
D. School Desegregation
In the postwar years, the legal strategy for civil rights continued. Led by Thurgood Marshall, he U.S. Supreme Court heard
arguments on five cases that challenged elementary- and secondary-school segregation, and in May 1954 issued its
landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that stated that racially segregated education was unconstitutional.
White Southerners received the Brown decision first with shock and, in some instances, with expressions of goodwill. By
1955, however, white opposition in the South had grown into massive resistance, a strategy to persuade all whites to resist
compliance with the desegregation orders. It was believed that if enough people refused to cooperate with the federal
court order, it could not be enforced. Tactics included firing school employees who showed willingness to seek integration,
closing public schools rather than desegregating, and boycotting all public education that was integrated.
Virtually no schools in the South were desegregated in the first years after the Brown decision. One county in Virginia did
indeed close its public schools. In Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, Governor Orval Faubus defied a federal court order to
admit nine black students to Central High School, and President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce
desegregation. The event was covered by the national media, and the fate of the Little Rock Nine, the students attempting
to integrate the school, dramatized the seriousness of the school desegregation issue to many Americans.
As desegregation progressed, the membership of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) grew. The KKK used violence or threats against
anyone who was suspected of favoring desegregation or black civil rights. Klan terror, including intimidation and murder,
was widespread in the South in the 1950s and 1960s, though Klan activities were not always reported in the media. One
terrorist act that did receive national attention was the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy slain in
Mississippi by whites who believed he had flirted with a white woman. The trial and acquittal of the men accused of Till's
murder were covered in the national media, demonstrating the continuing racial bigotry of Southern whites.
IV. POLITICAL PROTEST
A. Montgomery Bus Boycott
Despite the threats and violence, the struggle quickly moved beyond school
desegregation to challenge segregation in other areas. On December 1, 1955, Rosa
Parks, a member of the Montgomery, Alabama, branch of the NAACP, was told to
give up her seat on a city bus to a white person. When Parks refused to move, she
was arrested. The local NAACP, led by Edgar D. Nixon, recognized that the arrest of
Parks might rally local blacks to protest segregated buses. Montgomery's black
community had long been angry about their mistreatment on city buses where
white drivers were often rude and abusive. The community had previously
considered a boycott of the buses, and almost overnight one was organized. The
Montgomery bus boycott was an immediate success, with virtually unanimous
support from the 50,000 blacks in Montgomery. It lasted for more than a year and
dramatized to the American public the determination of blacks in the South to end
segregation. In November 1956 the Supreme Court upheld a federal court decision that ruled the bus segregation
unconstitutional. The decision went into effect December 20, 1956, and the black community of Montgomery ended its
boycott the next day.
A young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., was president of the Montgomery Improvement Association,
the organization that directed the boycott. The protest made King a national figure. His eloquent appeals to Christian
brotherhood and American idealism created a positive impression on people both inside and outside the South. King
became the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) when it was founded in 1957. SCLC
wanted to complement the NAACP legal strategy by encouraging the use of nonviolent, direct action to protest
segregation. These activities included marches, demonstrations, and boycotts. The violent white response to black direct
action eventually forced the federal government to confront the issues of injustice and racism in the South.
. The Sit-Ins
On February 1, 1960, four black college students at North Carolina A&T University began protesting racial segregation in
restaurants by sitting at “white-only” lunch counters and waiting to be served. This was not a new form of protest, but the
response to the sit-ins in North Carolina was unique. Within days sit-ins had spread throughout North Carolina, and
within weeks they were taking place in cities across the South. Many restaurants were desegregated. The sit-in movement
also demonstrated clearly to blacks and whites alike that young blacks were determined to reject segregation openly.
In April 1960 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded in Raleigh, North Carolina, to help
organize and direct the student sit-in movement. King encouraged SNCC's creation, but the most important early advisor
to the students was Ella Baker, who had worked for both the NAACP and SCLC. She believed that SNCC should not be
part of SCLC but a separate, independent organization run by the students.
C. Freedom Riders
After the sit-ins, some SNCC members participated in the 1961 Freedom Rides organized by CORE. The Freedom Riders,
both black and white, traveled around the South in buses to test the effectiveness of a 1960 Supreme Court decision. This
decision had declared that segregation was illegal in bus stations that were open to interstate travel. The Freedom Rides
began in Washington, D.C. Except for some violence in Rock Hill, South Carolina, the trip southward was peaceful until
they reached Alabama, where violence erupted. At Anniston one bus was burned and some riders were beaten. In
Birmingham, a mob attacked the riders when they got off the bus. They suffered even more severe beatings by a mob in
Montgomery, Alabama.
The violence brought national attention to the Freedom Riders and fierce condemnation of Alabama officials for allowing
the violence. The administration of President John Kennedy interceded to protect the Freedom Riders when it became
clear that Alabama state officials would not guarantee safe travel. The riders continued on to Jackson, Mississippi, where
they were arrested and imprisoned at the state penitentiary, ending the protest. The Freedom Rides did result in the
desegregation of some bus stations, but more importantly, they demonstrated to the American public how far civil rights
workers would go to achieve their goals.
The March on Washington
The national civil rights leadership decided to keep pressure on both the Kennedy
administration and the Congress to pass the civil rights legislation proposed by
Kennedy by planning a March on Washington for August 1963. It was a conscious
revival of A. Philip Randolph's planned 1941 march, which had yielded a
commitment to fair employment during World War II. Randolph was there in 1963,
along with the leaders of the NAACP, CORE, SCLC, the Urban League, and SNCC.
Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered a moving address to an audience of more than
200,000 civil rights supporters. His “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the giant
sculpture of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, became famous for how it
expressed the ideals of the civil rights movement.
After Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, the new president, Lyndon
Johnson, strongly urged its passage as a tribute to Kennedy's memory. Over fierce
opposition from Southern legislators, Johnson pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1964
through Congress. It prohibited segregation in public accommodations and
discrimination in education and employment. It also gave the executive branch of
government the power to enforce the act's provisions.
G. Voter Registration
The year 1964 was the culmination of SNCC's commitment to civil rights activism at the community level. Starting in 1961
SNCC and CORE organized voter registration campaigns in heavily black, rural counties of Mississippi, Alabama, and
Georgia. SNCC concentrated on voter registration, believing that voting was a way to empower blacks so that they could
change racist policies in the South. SNCC worked to register blacks to vote by teaching them the necessary skills—such
as reading and writing—and the correct answers to the voter registration application. SNCC worker Robert Moses led a
voter registration effort in McComb, Mississippi, in 1961, and in 1962 and 1963 SNCC worked to register voters in the
Mississippi Delta, where it found local supporters like the farm-worker and activist Fannie Lou Hamer. These civil rights
activities caused violent reactions from Mississippi's white supremacists. Moses faced constant terrorism that included
threats, arrests, and beatings. In June 1963 Medgar Evers, NAACP field secretary in Mississippi, was shot and killed in
front of his home.
In 1964 SNCC workers organized the Mississippi Summer Project to register blacks to vote in that state. SNCC leaders
also hoped to focus national attention on Mississippi's racism. They recruited Northern college students, teachers, artists,
and clergy (both black and white) to work on the project, because they believed that the participation of these people
would make the country more concerned about discrimination and violence in Mississippi. The project did receive
national attention, especially after three participants, two of whom were white, disappeared in June and were later found
murdered and buried near Philadelphia, Mississippi. By the end of the summer, the project had helped thousands of
blacks attempt to register, and about 1000 had actually become registered voters.
The Summer Project increased the number of blacks who were politically active and led to the creation of the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). When white Democrats in Mississippi refused to accept black members in their
delegation to the Democratic National Convention of 1964, Hamer and others went to the convention to challenge the
white Democrats' right to represent Mississippi. In a televised interview, Hamer detailed the harassment and abuse
experienced by black Mississippians when they tried to register to vote. Her testimony attracted much media attention,
and President Johnson was upset by the disturbance at the convention where he expected to be nominated for president.
National Democratic Party officials offered the black Mississippians two convention seats, but the MFDP rejected the
compromise offer and went home. Later, however, the MFDP challenge did result in more support for blacks and other
minorities in the Democratic Party.
In early 1965 SCLC employed its direct-action techniques in a voting-rights protest initiated by SNCC in Selma, Alabama.
When protests at the local courthouse were unsuccessful, protesters began a march to Montgomery, the state capital. As
the marchers were leaving Selma, mounted police beat and tear-gassed them. Televised scenes of that violence, called
Bloody Sunday, shocked many Americans, and the resulting outrage led to a commitment to continue the Selma march.
King and SCLC then led hundreds of people on a five-day, 80-km (50-mi) march to Montgomery. The Selma march
created broad national support for a law to protect Southern blacks' right to vote. President Johnson persuaded Congress
to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which suspended the use of literary and other voter qualification tests. Later
amendments banned these tests, which often prevented blacks from voting. In the three years following its enactment,
almost a million more blacks in the South registered to vote. By 1968 black voters were having a significant effect on
Southern politics. During the 1970s blacks were seeking and winning public offices in majority-black electoral districts.
V. CHANGING METHODS
After the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the focus of the civil rights movement began to change. Martin Luther
King, Jr., began to focus on poverty and racial inequality in the North. At the same time, younger activists challenged his
leadership of the civil rights movement, criticizing his interracial strategy and his appeals to moral idealism; they no
longer believed that appeals to idealism would cause whites to renounce racism.
In 1965 King joined protests against school discrimination in Chicago. The next year
he led marches against housing discrimination in the same city. King's Chicago efforts
resulted in little positive change and were widely criticized. After 1965 King also
focused on economic issues, particularly black poverty, and advocated income
redistribution. In 1967 he began planning what he called the Poor People's Campaign
which included another march on Washington, D.C. It was intended to pressure
national lawmakers to address the issues of black poverty and violence in cities. In
1968 King was supporting striking garbage workers in Memphis, Tennessee when he
was assassinated. The march on Washington for the Poor People's Campaign took
place in the spring of 1968 after King's death, but it failed to achieve greater
congressional commitment for addressing black poverty. It became clear that race
problems in the Northern cities were serious and perhaps harder to address than
segregation in the South because these problems were not the results of specific laws
that could be changed.
The main opponent of King's moderate policies was SNCC, led by Stokely Carmichael, who popularized the term the
Black Power. Black Power advocates were influenced by Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam minister who had been
assassinated in early 1965. They viewed Malcolm's black nationalist philosophy, which emphasized black separatism and
self-sufficiency, as more realistic for dealing with racism in the United States. They also appreciated Malcolm's emphasis
on black pride and self-assertion.
The national media reported Black Power as a new and dangerous development in the civil rights movement, and the
slogan immediately drew condemnation from whites for its racially separatist message. Leaders of the other national civil
rights organizations also denounced Black Power. The slogan helped to undermine what had once been a national
consensus for civil rights.
In 1967 Carmichael and his successor as chairman of SNCC, H. Rap Brown, became national symbols of black radicalism.
Whites condemned them as instigators of racial division and violence. Opposition became stronger in 1968 when the
Black Panther Party began promoting Black Power. The Panthers advocated violence to achieve their goals and battled
police in Chicago and Oakland. Several of its leaders were killed, and others were imprisoned for killing policemen.
VI. END OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
For many activists and some scholars, the civil rights movement ended in 1968 with the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Others have said it was over after the Selma march, because after Selma the movement ceased to achieve significant
change. Some, especially blacks, argue that the movement is not over yet because the goal of full equality has not been
achieved.
Racial problems clearly still existed in the United States after King's assassination in 1968. Urban poverty represented a
continuing and worsening problem and remained disproportionately high among blacks. A major controversy in the
1970s was desegregation of public education, where achieving a racial balance often required busing students outside of
their school districts. A broader question concerned equal opportunity for blacks, an issue which affirmative-action
programs attempted to address. These programs, which emerged in the 1970s, supported the hiring and promotion of
minorities and women. Their fairness continues to be debated and litigated.
Although full equality has not yet been reached, the civil rights movement did put fundamental reforms in place. Legal
segregation as a system of racial control was dismantled, and blacks were no longer subject to the humiliation of Jim
Crow laws. Public institutions were opened to all. Blacks achieved the right to vote and the influence that went with that
right in a democracy. Those were indeed long steps toward racial equality.