Civil Rights Movement

Civil Rights Movement. The American civil rights movement encompasses more than three centuries of struggle against racial discrimination, and is best understood in this broad context.

Revolutionary Era through the Civil War.

The movement that culminated in the organized protests and civil rights legislation of the 1950s and 1960s drew upon the traditions and experiences of uncooperative and fugitive slaves, black and white abolitionists, and free blacks who resented second‐class citizenship. During the second half of the eighteenth century, the egalitarian rhetoric of the American and French Revolutions and Quaker (Society of Friends) religious doctrines produced a nascent antislavery movement that led to wholesale emancipation in the North and doubts about the future of slavery in the South. The outlawing of American involvement in the international slave trade in 1808 and the creation of the American Colonization Society in 1817 anticipated the abolitionist movement that arose in the 1820s and 1830s. Abolitionist activity, in turn, focused attention on the issue of civil rights, especially in northern cities where free black communities, many sustained by strong independent black churches, sheltered fugitive slaves, nurtured black abolitionist leaders such as Frederick Douglass, and agitated for equal treatment for themselves.

By the 1840s several elements that would characterize the post–World War II civil rights movement were already in place: interracial cooperation and conflict, patterns of community‐based protest, the political salience of black religious institutions, a reliance on Northern‐based national organizations, and the use different tactics in the North and South. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 intensified civil‐rights activism, as did the 1857 Dred Scott decision (Scott v. Sandford) and John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.

The Civil War itself posed new challenges for the civil rights struggle. In its early stages abolitionists failed in their efforts to infuse the war effort with antislavery or civil rights zeal. While the Abraham Lincoln administration eventually acknowledged that the war for the Union was also a war of emancipation, it generally resisted consideration of the broader implications of black citizenship. Nevertheless, blacks' service in the Union Army, the Emancipation Proclamation, and radical Republican proposals for a postwar reconstruction of the South ultimately forced reconsideration of the traditional and legal limitations on civil rights.

Civil War through World War II.

The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, but the actual meaning of emancipation remained vague. The struggle over the Civil Rights Act of 1866 convinced some Republican leaders that the Thirteenth Amendment provided an inadequate Constitutional foundation for civil rights; accordingly, they drafted the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, strengthening the equal protection and due process protections, and encouraged Congress to enact additional civil rights acts in 1870, 1871, and 1875. In 1883, however, the Supreme Court declared the 1875 Civil Rights Act unconstitutional, confirming white America's waning interest in civic equality. The generation that had ended slavery passed from the scene without resolving, or even honestly addressing, the underlying problems of white racism, discrimination, and inequality.

During the 1890s, black participation in the Populist revolt briefly revived the civil rights cause, but the demise of the Populist party left African Americans more vulnerable than ever. In the North, African American communities were too small to influence a political culture more concerned with immigrants than with native blacks. In the Jim Crow South, home to the vast majority of African Americans, a reign of terror inhibited challenges to the racial status quo. A few scattered civil rights protests occurred, including several boycotts of segregated streetcars, but most southern blacks adjusted to the indignities of disfranchisement, debt peonage, and rigid system of racial segregation reinforced by the “separate but equal” doctrine of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

In the early twentieth century Booker T. Washington's accommodationist philosophy dominated discussions of racial progress. But as white supremacist violence mounted, an alternative philosophy rooted in racial pride and earlier protest traditions reemerged. Following the 1906 Atlanta race riot and a racial massacre in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908, African American and liberal white intellectuals founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Two years later, a somewhat more conservative group formed the National Urban League (NUL). Although several decades passed before these organizations became fully effective, they provided an embryonic organizational base for the modern civil rights movement. The NAACP proved especially influential, primarily through the activities of W.E.B. Du Bois, the outspoken editor of Crisis magazine, and James Weldon Johnson, the NAACP's first black executive secretary. While the organizational center of the civil rights struggle remained in the North, the seeds of a southern movement were germinating, especially among railroad porters and other black union members, black teachers and professionals, and ministers.

During the 1920s, the civil rights cause attracted diverse supporters, including the black nationalist Marcus Garvey, writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, socialist and communist politicians, and black labor leaders such A. Philip Randolph. The struggle entered a new phase during the depression decade of the 1930s, setting the stage for a future national movement. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's political dependence on white southern Democrats and his single‐minded focus on the economic crisis left little room for attention to racial discrimination. But the New Deal's social‐justice orientation offered a measure of hope to civil rights activists who, for the first time since Reconstruction, regarded the federal government as a potential ally. The NAACP devoted almost all of its scanty resources to judicial and legislative reform. While Charles Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and other NAACP attorneys attacked the legal structure of racial segregation, executive secretary Walter White campaigned, for federal antilynching legislation.

The 1940s proved a pivotal decade. By threatening a mass march on Washington in 1941, A. Philip Randolph forced Roosevelt to create the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC), empowered to combat racial discrimination in wartime employment. As black servicemen and industrial workers proved critical to the war effort, Randolph and others promoted the “Double V campaign” for victory against both foreign enemies and racial discrimination at home. The campaign yielded mixed results. The armed forces remained rigidly segregated throughout the war, and interracial violence erupted in Detroit and other northern cities. Hints of change ahead, however, included a government propaganda campaign to discredit Nazi racial theories, a shift in racial attitudes among intellectuals, some influenced by Gunnar Myrdal's 1944 study of American race relations An American Dilemma; and Smith v. Allwight, a 1944 Supreme Court decision outlawing white primaries.

For most civil rights advocates, the Supreme Court's increasingly liberal trajectory validated the NAACP's legal approach. For a small but vocal minority, however, the rising expectations of wartime inspired more militant tactics, such as sit‐ins, economic boycotts, and protest marches. The emergence of direct action as a significant component of the civil rights struggle dates to the war years. The NAACP's Youth Councils and the Communist Party—USA fostered some direct action, but more important was the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an interracial organization of northern pacifists, labor activists, and left‐wing intellectuals founded in 1942.

World War II to 1968.

Civil‐rights activism intensified in the immediate postwar era. Jackie Robinson broke the color line in major‐league baseball, a CORE “Freedom Ride” through the upper South challenged segregation in interstate buses, the Supreme Court issued a series of encouraging rulings, and President Harry S. Truman desegregated the armed services and convened a presidential commission on civil rights. The NAACP, meanwhile, expanded its legal assault on Jim Crow, culminating in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision. Legal backsliding and political demagoguery, however, soon slowed the pace of the civil rights revolution. In a 1955 follow‐up to the Brown decision, the Supreme Court proposed an ambiguous timetable, allowing southern school districts to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” As segregationist White Citizens Councils spread across the South and as the lynching of Emmett Till, a black boy from Chicago visiting relatives in Mississippi, dominated the headlines, the prospects for civil rights seemed dim.

But the movement revived in December 1955, when an act of courage galvanized an entire black community. In Montgomery, Alabama, the arrest of Rosa Parks (1913– ), a seamstress and NAACP activist who violated a local segregation ordinance by refusing to move to the back of a city bus, sparked a thirteen‐month bus boycott that attracted national and international attention. Led by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who promoted a Gandhian strategy of nonviolent resistance, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) became the touchstone of the subsequent movement. A testing ground for differing theories of racial adjustment and social change, Montgomery demonstrated the economic and moral vulnerability of segregation, the inability of even moderate segregationists to compromise, the resolute courage of many Southern blacks, the political importance and emotional power of African‐American religion, and the viability of nonviolent direct action.

In 1957 the movement seemed to gain momentum, with King's formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), President Dwight D. Eisenhower's use of federal troops to desegregate Little Rock's Central High School, and the passage of the first federal civil rights law since Reconstruction. But the later 1950s proved disappointing, as the pace of school desegregation slowed and the weakness of the 1957 Civil Rights Act became apparent. Cold War politics dominated American public life, frustrating efforts to refocus national attention on civil rights.

Then in February 1960, four black college students staged an impromptu sit‐in at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. The movement soon spread to more than a hundred southern cities, prompting the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Although many NAACP and SCLC leaders were wary of SNCC's confrontational style, King's endorsement and the wise counsel of longtime activist Ella Baker helped sustain the new organization, which drew support from black college and high school students across the South.

In 1961, CORE sponsored another “freedom ride” testing a recent Supreme Court decision prohibiting segregation on interstate buses. When CORE suspended the action following white‐supremacist violence in Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama, SNCC activists vowed to complete the ride. Confrontations with state officials and other white supremacists in Alabama and Mississippi, prompted additional freedom rides, a full‐scale mobilization of the civil rights movement, and the belated intervention of the John F. Kennedy administration, which assured the riders' safe passage into Mississippi—although not their protection from imprisonment.

The Freedom Ride crisis deepened the Kennedy administration's fears of an uncontrolled mass movement. Attorney General Robert Kennedy urged civil rights leaders to redirect their efforts toward voter registration. But most, including King, refused to abandon an approach that enhanced the struggle's emotional energy and moral power, while providing a dramatic focus of media attention.

The nonviolent direct action strategy suffered a serious setback in Albany, Georgia, in 1962. Not only did Albany officials confound SCLC's efforts to fill the jails with protesters, but persistent tensions between SCLC leaders and local activists eventually convinced King to abandon the campaign. Later in the year, James Meredith's attempt to desegregate the University of Mississippi provoked such violence by white supremacists that some observers feared mass civil conflict in the Deep South. While applauding the Kennedy administration for enforcing the law at the University of Mississippi, civil rights advocates worried about the increasingly violent resistance.

The opposition reached a fever pitch in 1963, with the murder of Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers, Alabama governor George Wallace's demagogic “stand in the schoolhouse door,” Birmingham public‐safety commissioner Eugene (“Bull”) Connor's use of attack dogs and fire hoses against SCLC‐sponsored demonstrations, and the death of four black children in a Birmingham church bombing. But such excesses only strengthened a movement that relied on the public perception that the civil rights demonstrators possessed the courage and moral integrity to outlast their opponents. The movement's rising power was confirmed by a successful mass march on Washington in August and the Kennedy administration's long‐awaited endorsement of a comprehensive civil rights bill. Following President Kennedy's assassination in November, Lyndon B. Johnson used his legislative skills and the image of a martyred president to push through a civil rights act that outlawed state‐supported racial discrimination.

While the 1964 Civil Rights Act proved a milestone in the movement's history, King and other leaders continued to demand an end to the remaining vestiges of Jim Crow, especially black disfranchisement. A 1964 “Freedom Summer” voter‐registration campaign in Mississippi involving hundreds of college students and other volunteers revealed the depth of opposition to the movement—a harsh reality highlighted by the murder of three civil rights workers and by the failure of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to supplant the state's all‐white delegation at the Democratic National Convention. After continued agitation, however, including the Selma‐to‐Montgomery march of March 1965, Congress approved the Voting Rights Act of 1965, outlawing legally sanctioned disfranchisement and voter intimidation.

The euphoria did not last long. Among African Americans, the protracted struggle for equality brought a revolution of rising expectations that inevitably gave way to frustration and disillusionment. The growing realization that civil rights legislation did not end racial prejudice or alter the structural realities of race and social class exacerbated tensions within the movement. The limitations of the civil rights revolution became painfully clear in 1966 and 1967 when the focus shifted northward to cities such as Chicago and Detroit, where poverty, urban blight, and de facto segregation bred despair and rage. As the movement failed to make much headway in the North, many African Americans, especially the young, found the politics of racial pride and Black Nationalism increasingly attractive. A series of inner‐city riots in 1965–1968 exacerbated racial polarization and white backlash. As the commitment to nonviolence waned, the politics of law and order displaced the white liberalism that had been an important element of the civil rights coalition. At the same time, civil rights leaders differed sharply over King's efforts to broaden the movement to include anti‐poverty campaigns, opposition to the Vietnam War, and international agitation for human rights.

The Enduring Legacy.

By 1968, the year of King's assassination and the public's growing preoccupation with the Vietnam War, the classic phase of the civil rights movement was over, leaving its fragmented remnants to struggle over such issues as affirmative action, court‐ordered busing, economic inequality, and de facto segregation. They did so, however, in the political and cultural context of the “rights revolution”—an ever‐expanding struggle by a wide variety of groups seeking civic and social equality. At the end of the twentieth century and beyond, feminists, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, homosexuals, older Americans, abortion opponents, persons with disabilities, and other groups continued to draw upon the experiences, strategies, and rhetoric of the African‐American civil rights movement whose powerful legacy of civic activism and political empowerment continues to influence American culture.
See also Civil Rights Cases; Colonization Movement, African; Democratic Party; Feminism; Fifties, The; Gay and Lesbian Rights Movement; Malcolm X; New Deal Era, The; Riots, Urban; Sixties, The; Socialist Party of America; Suffrage; Trotter, William Monroe; Wells‐Barnett, Ida B.; Women's Rights Movements.].

Bibliography

C. Vann Woodward , The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3d ed., 1974.
Richard Kluger , Simple Justice, 1975.
Howell Raines, ed., My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered, 1977.
Sara M. Evans , Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left, 1979.
Clayborne Carson , In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, 1981.
David J. Garrow , Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1986.
Taylor Branch , Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963, 1988.
Peter J. Albert and Ronald Hoffman, eds., We Shall Overcome: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Black Freedom Struggle, 1990.
Charles Payne , I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, 1995.
John Lewis, with and Michael D'Orso , Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, 1998.
Mary Dudziak , Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, 2000.

Raymond O. Arsenault