Truman arrives to address the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1947, the first US president to do so

A racially integrated Army unit fighting in Korea

Segregated drinking water in Georgia, c. 1953

Linda Brown, the little girl in Topeka, Kansas, whose father filed suit after the school board forced her to go to a school more than a mile from her home when an all-white school was seven blocks away

Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court which ruled in May of 1954 that “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” beginning the end of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson precedent

Emmett Till, a 14-year old Chicago boy who dared to whistle at a white woman

Emmett Till’s savagely beaten body—the price a black boy paid for whistling at a white women in the supposedly progressive America of the

1950s

Rosa Parks being arrested

Empty busses during the Montgomery Bus boycott

Section from the Montgomery municipal code requiring city

busses to segregate

Montgomery, Alabama, Klan members warn of the grave dangers of letting black people sit next to white people on busses

Montgomery Bus BoycottMontgomery Bus Boycott

Demonstrated blacks deeply desired freedom and equality and were willing to personally sacrifice to achieve itUnified blacks from different classes, different shades of skin colorDemonstrated power of organizing, civil protests, and the strength in numbers

Laughed at the Klan rather than feared them

Brought to national prominence a new leader for black civil rights

Martin Luther King speaking at bus boycott rally, 1956

The 26-year old Reverend Martin Luther King, arrested during the Montgomery Bus Boycott

•Decidedly non-radical, reasonable leader, but passionate and inspiring

•Doctorate from Boston University in theology

•Believed civil rights would be won through Christian love and non-violent resistance

"If we are arrested every day, if we are exploited every day, if we are trampled every day, don't ever let anyone pull you so low as to hate them. We must use the weapon of love. We must have compassion and understanding for those who hate us. We must realize so many people are taught to hate us that they are not totally responsible for their hate."

--Martin Luther King

Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, who rejected the Supreme Court’s ruling that all U.S. schools must integrate

Soldiers escorting the Little Rock Nine into Central High School

Four college freshmen stage a spontaneous sit-in at the whites only section of Woolworth lunch counter in

Greensboro, North Carolina, February 1960

Advice for lunch counter sit-in participants

In 1963 whites try to force both the black and white participants in the Woolworth sit-in in Jackson, Mississippi, to leave by dumping food on them, burning them with cigarettes, etc. The Tougaloo College NAACP organizer,

James Salter, is on the left. Anne Moody on far right?

Routes of the 1961 Freedom Rides

A Freedom Rides bus is attacked and set on fire by a mob in Anniston, Alabama

One of the Freedom Riders beaten by a white mob in Montgomery, Alabama, armed with baseball bats and lead pipes

Two other victims of mob violence in Montgomery—local ambulances refused to take victims to hospital

Birmingham, Alabama, police (many of whom were white supremacists) use dogs to attack peaceful protestors

Mississippi NAACP organizer Medgar Evers at home with his wife and two children

Evers’s own driveway, where Beckwith murdered him by shooting him in the back on June 12, 1963

Sunday morning, September 15th, 1963, the KKK bombs the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham,

Alabama

The three civil rights workers murdered in 1964 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, with the cooperation of the local police force

Malcolm X, the charismatic spokesman for the Nation of Islam, and an early advocate of black power, separatism, and nationalism

Malcolm X is assassinated in February of 1965, most likely by members of the Nation of Islam who resented his break with and increasing criticism of

the organization

The remains of burned and vandalized buildings following the violent Watts Riots in August of 1965

Questions?Questions?