Civil Rights Movement in the United States (1954-1965)

“Reconstruction” was the process of re-integration of the southern states into the United States, following the Civil War. Although they had been defeated, the southern states and their White citizens resisted Reconstruction, sometimes violently, because it involved making laws for the equal treatment of African Americans. For example, an organization called the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was formed to terrorize African Americans as well as lawmakers who were implementing Reconstruction.

At the end of Reconstruction in 1877, the government removed its troops from the southern states and the southern states, freed from federal control and oversight, began to reinstate laws that disadvantaged African Americans. These laws are called “Jim Crow” laws. These laws were aimed at separation of African Americans and Whites; this separation is called “segregation”. A second aim of the Jim Crow laws was disenfranchisement. Disenfranchisement took away the right to vote from African Americans. This was done by a variety of methods, including poll taxes (fees that had to be paid in order to vote), literacy tests, and the “grandfather clause” which said that only those whose grandfathers could vote would be allowed to vote.

A major court case related to the process of segregation is Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), a supreme court ruling in which the court stated the principle that separate facilities can be equal, and thus constitutional. This decision opened the floodgates for all kinds of separate facilities for Blacks and Whites, including bathrooms, restaurants, drinking fountains, seating on buses, and separate schools. African Americans formed organizations to protest these laws; an important organization was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909. This organization focuses on achieving civil rights for African Americans, for example by filing lawsuits to try to overturn Jim Crow laws.

In addition to disenfranchisement and segregation, African Americans in the South also suffered economic disadvantages and social oppression and violence. Many African Americans worked as sharecroppers, a form of agricultural labor in which farmers rent land and pay a portion of their crops to the landowner; this system was often abused in the South, and the tenant farmers lived in extreme poverty. African Americans were also often victims of rape, lynching (extrajudicial killing), and other violence. The murder of Emmett Till, a 14 year old boy, in 1955, is an example of a lynching that was a factor in the beginning of the civil rights movement. Emmett Till’s murderers were put on trial, but acquitted by an all-White jury.

A few months after Emmett Till’s murder, Rosa Parks, an activist in Montgomery, Alabama, was asked to give her seat on a public bus to a White man, and she thought about Emmett Till and what had been done to him. She refused to stand up and was arrested. This led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-1956). In the boycott, African Americans in Montgomery refused to take the public buses until they were desegregated. Instead, African Americans walked or organized carpools to get to their destinations.

Martin Luther King Jr., the 26-year-old pastor of a Montgomery church, played a major role in organizing the boycott. After a little over a year, the US Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that segregated bus seating was unconstitutional. In the wake of this victory, Martin Luther King and others created the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to continue to press for civil rights for African Americans, and Martin Luther King became its first president.

Another early but critical moment in the struggle for civil rights is the 1954 US Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board. This ruling involved a case in Topeka, Kansas, where African American and White children attended segregated schools. In Brown v. Board, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in education was unconstitutional. However, in a second case the following year, Brown v. Board II, the Supreme Court stated that local areas must desegregate their schools “with all deliberate speed.”

This gave school districts an excuse to delay desegregation because to do something “deliberately” can mean “slowly.” Thus, many southern schools did not open their doors to African American children. An example is the high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, which was still segregated in 1957. In the fall of that year, 9 children were enrolled in the high school by the NAACP. The city and state authorities prevented the children from entering and, as the conflict continued, it evolved into a test of the power of the federal government versus the power of state government.

In the end, President Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and forced the school to admit the children. Despite the victory of activists in Montgomery, Alabama, in desegregating the local buses, there remained a question whether interstate buses (and the facilities associated with them such as waiting rooms and bathrooms), were accessible to African Americans. To test this, the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organized the “Freedom Rides” of 1961, in which groups of young people, both Black and White, would ride buses from the North through the South and use segregated facilities to test whether the law was being enforced.

The result was violence by the Ku Klux Klan, as well as by local authorities, against the students. This led to headline news across the United States and shined a light on the inequality and brutality to which African Americans were subjected. Hundreds of Freedom Riders were also arrested and sentenced to prison terms. As a consequence of activism like this, including the Birmingham Campaign of 1963 and the March on Washington that same year, the federal government was put under massive pressure to enact civil rights legislation. The result was the 1964 Civil Rights Act, passed under President Lyndon B. Johnson, which guaranteed the equality of all Americans, regardless of factors such as race, religion, and gender.

Despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act, however, violence and discrimination continued in the South. In 1964, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee trained volunteers and sent them into the South in “Freedom Summer,” an effort to educate African Americans in the South and to register them to vote. This, too, led to violence against African Americans and activists, and three activists James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, were murdered in Mississippi. In response, in 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act and it was signed by President Johnson. The Voting Rights Act outlawed practices such as literacy tests and put in place protections that prevented access to voting rights by African Americans.

While most Civil Rights activists focused on direct action (protests and marches) and emphasized peaceful protest, with the goal of integration of Black and White society, some African Americans were drawn to other forms of advocacy. For instance, Malcolm X, a member of the Nation of Islam, an organization of Black Muslims, argued that the goal of African Americans should be equality but not integration, and criticized Martin Luther King’s non-violent approach.