Civil Rights(Abridged PPT)

Key Concept 8.2: Liberalism, based on anticommunism abroad and a firm belief in the efficacy of governmental and especially federal power to achieve

social goals at home, reached its apex in the mid- 1960s and generated a variety of political and cultural responses.

• I. Seeking to fulfill Reconstruction-era promises, civil rights activists and political leaders achieved some legal and political successes in ending segregation, although progress toward equality was slow and halting. (ID and POL)– A. Following World War II, civil rights activists utilized a variety of strategies —

legal challenges, direct action, and nonviolent protest tactics — to combat racial discrimination.

- Fannie Lou Hamer, John Lewis, Thurgood Marshall– B. Decision-makers in each of the three branches of the federal government

used measures including desegregation of the armed services, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to promote greater racial justice.

– C. Continuing white resistance slowed efforts at desegregation, sparking a series of social and political crises across the nation, while tensions among civil rights activists over tactical and philosophical issues increased after 1965.

• III. C. Groups on the left also assailed liberals, claiming they did too little to transform the racial and economic status quo at home and pursued immoral policies abroad.

- Black Panthers

Desegregating American Society

• America's black community in 1950s– 15 million African American citizens in 1950• Two-thirds of whom lived in South• Jim Crow laws

Desegregating American Society

– Segregation tarnished America's international image• African American entertainers Paul Robeson and

Josephine Baker toured world recounting horrors of Jim Crow• Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma exposed

scandalous contradiction between • “American Creed” of liberty and• Nation's shameful treatment of black citizens

Desegregating American Society– International pressure combined with grassroots and

legal activism propelled some racial progress in North during and after WWII

• equal access to public accommodations

• Jackie Robinson cracked baseball's color barrier when Brooklyn Dodgers signed him in 1947

Brown v. Board of Educationof Topeka, Kansas

• 1954• Argued by Thurgood Marshall, lawyer for the NAACP (will

become first African American Supreme Court Justice in 1967)

• Separate is not equal• Overturned Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)• Desegregation must go ahead with “all deliberate speed”• Resisted by Deep South

– Ten years later, fewer than 2% of eligible blacks in Deep South in classrooms with whites

Montgomery bus boycott

1955-1956Led by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

– His oratorical skill, strategic savvy, mastery of biblical and constitutional conceptions of justice, and devotion to nonviolent principles of India's Mohandas Gandhi thrust him to forefront of black revolution.

King formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957

• Mobilized black churches on behalf of black rights• Churches were largest and best-organized black

institutions

Little Rock

• Eisenhower reluctant to promote integration– His personal attitudes helped restrain him• Felt Court's ruling upset “customs and convictions of

at least two generations of Americans”• Refused to issue public statement endorsing Court's

conclusion

– September 1957, Ike forced to act:• Orval Faubus, governor of Arkansas, mobilized

National Guard to prevent 9 black students from enrolling in Little Rock's Central High School• Ike sent troops to escort children to their classes

Sit-Ins

• launched Feb. 1, 1960• By four black college freshmen in Greensboro, NC

– Demanded service at whites-only Woolworth's lunch counter

• Swelled into wade-ins, lie-ins, and pray-ins to compel equal treatment• April 1960: southern black students formed Student

Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)– Gave more focus to these efforts– Impassioned, young SNCC members would eventually:

» Lose patience with tactics of SCLC» And even more deliberate legalism of NAACP

Freedom Riders

• 1961• Wanted to end segregation in facilities serving

interstate bus passengers– When local governments wouldn't stop violence,

Washington dispatched federal marshals to protect Freedom Riders

John Lewis

• Participated in Freedom Rides• Chairman of Student Nonviolent Coordinating

Committee (SNCC)• Led march across Edmund Pettus Bridge in

Selma• Elected to CongressIn 1986

• JFK appealed to black voters in 1960, but moved slowly on civil rights because needed support of southerners in Congress for New Frontier

• Kennedy administration reluctantly joined hands with civil rights movement:– Kennedy wary about political associates of Martin Luther King,

Jr.• Some thought King's advisers had communist links• Robert Kennedy ordered FBI to wiretap King's phone in 1963• Relationship between King and Kennedys overall fruitful one

– Voter Education Project inaugurated to register South's historically disfranchised blacks

JFK

James Meredith

• Veteran James Meredith encountered violent opposition when he attempted to register for the University of Mississippi in October 1962

• JFK forced to send in 400 federal marshals and 3,000 troops to enroll Meredith in his first class

The Struggle for Civil Rights

• Since 1957, attempts to crack racial barriers there produced more than 50 cross burnings and 18 bomb attacks• Violence occurred as police used attack dogs and high

pressure hoses on demonstrators – all shown on TV • Caused JFK to deliver televised speech to nation on

June 11, 1963:– Called situation a “moral issue” and committed his personal

and presidential prestige to finding a solution– Declared the principle at stake “is as old as the Scriptures and

is as clear as the American Constitution”– Called for new civil rights legislation to protect black citizens

• March on Washington (August 1963):– King led more than 200,000 on a peaceful march• In speech at Lincoln Memorial, King declared, “I have a

dream…”

• 1963 White gunman murdered Medgar Evers, a black Mississippi civil rights worker

• September 1963, Baptist church bombing in Birmingham, killed four black girls

• Kennedy's civil rights bill stalled in Congress

Civil Rights Act of 1964

• LBJ President• Civil Rights Act of 1964: – Gave federal government more muscle to

enforce school-desegregation orders– And to prohibit racial discrimination in public

accommodations and employment• Problem of voting remained:

– Mississippi: only 5% of eligible blacks registered to vote– Similar throughout South

Battling for Black Rights

• 1964: voting become chief goal of black movement– Twenty-fourth Amendment, ratified January 1964,

abolished poll tax in federal elections• Freedom Summer 1964: blacks joined with whites in

massive voter-registration drive in Mississippi– In June, one black and two white civil rights workers murdered

» Mississippi officials refused to prosecute those responsible

Selma March

• 1965• Alabama state troopers assaulted marchers• Heavy media coverage of this and similar

events helped stir the nation’s conscience about civil rights and led to passage of the historic Voting Rights Act in 1965.

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Voting Rights Act of 1965

• Johnson shepherded through Congress landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965

• Outlawed literacy tests• Sent federal voter registrars into several southern states• Overtime brought dramatic change to southern politics

and businesses• Soon blacks began to migrate into South for first time

since emancipation

• Last major legislative victory of southern-focused, integrationist, nonviolent civil rights movement

Black Power

• Increased focus on struggles in urban North against discrimination and police brutality

• Watts riot (LA) 1965• Heralded shift to militancy, radicalism, and separatism

• Leadership of Malcolm X:– inspired by militant black nationalists in Nation of Islam

• Like Nation's founder—Elijah Muhammed (born Elijah Poole), Malcolm changed his surname to advertise lost African identity in white America

• Malcolm X trumpeted black separatism• Later broke with Elijah Muhammed's separatism; moved toward

mainstream Islam• Early 1965, killed by Nation of Islam gunmen

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Black Power• Socialist Black Panther party used “citizens'

patrols” to resist police brutality• In 1966, Stokely Carmichael, SNCC leader:

• Began to preach doctrine of Black Power• Like Garvey of 1920s, Carmichael breathed separatist

meaning into concept of Black Power– Emphasized African American distinctiveness– Promoted “Afro” hairstyles and dress– Shed “white” names for new African identities– Demanded black studies programs in education

Black Power• 1967: more riots in black urban ghettos– Newark, New Jersey (killed 25 people)– Detroit, Michigan (killed 43 people)• As in Watts (1965), rioters torched neighborhoods• Attacked police officers and even firefighters

– Riots angered many white Americans, who threatened to retaliate

– Riots baffled northerners who considered racial problems a “southern” question

Black Power

– African-Americans faced residential discrimination, white outmigration to suburbs, and deindustrialization• Black unemployment nearly double that of whites

– Despair deepened when Martin Luther King, Jr., murdered on April 4, 1968• Triggered more riots

– Rioters made news, but thousands of other blacks quietly made history• Black voter registration in South shot upward

Black Power

– By late 1960s, several hundred blacks held elected office in Old South

– Cleveland, Ohio and Gary, Indiana elected black mayors

– By 1972, nearly half of southern black children in integrated schools

– More schools integrated in South than North

– About a third of blacks had risen into middle class• King left shining legacy of racial progress, but he was

cut down when job far from done