Ch 18 Sect 2 Notes-#3
The Civil Rights Movement
I.
II.
African Americans in Texas
A. Began fighting for their civil rights(rights due to all citizens
under the Constitution)
B. The NAACP(National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People) led the fight
C. As late as the 1940s, African Americans were not allowed to
vote in Democratic primary elections
1. These were the elections where the voters would choose
the candidate for that party
2. They could vote in the Republican primaries
3. An African American dentist, Lonnie Smith, wanted to
end this unfair practice
4. With the help of the NAACP, they took the case to the
US Supreme Court(1944)
5. In Smith v. Allwright, the court ruled white primaries to
be illegal
D. In Sweatt v. Painter(1950), the Supreme Court ruled that all
law schools and other graduate schools had to allow African
Americans
E. African Americans also won cases that gave them rights to sit
on juries, live in white neighborhoods, sit where they wished
on buses and trains, serve on police forces
F. In Brown v. Board of Education(1954), the Supreme Court
outlawed segregation in public places like schools
1. Many Texans resisted this change and the ruling was
not always enforced
2. It took another ten years for all the schools in Texas to
comply with the ruling
G. In 1966 African Americans held seats in the Texas Legislature
for the first time since Reconstruction
Mexican Texans
A. In 1921, Mexican Americans organized the Order of Sons of
America to fight for Civil Rights
B. Delgado v. Bastrop ISD(1949) made it illegal to deprive
Hispanic students equal facilities and education
C. By 1969, schools began offering to teach Spanish language
classes
D. In Hernandez v. Texas(1954) the US Supreme Court declared
that barring Mexican Americans from juries was illegal
E. In 1956, Henry B. Gonzales won a seat in the Texas Senate,
then, in 1960, he became the first Hispanic American to
represent Texas in the US House of Representatives