Civil Rights Movement

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CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

The twentieth century's Civil Rights movement was, like the nineteenth century's Civil War, its central domestic watershed, but the parameters of the movement are less well defined than those of the Civil War. The origins of the Civil Rights movement lie in the early twentieth-century African-American struggle against the racial discrimination, disfranchisement, and segregation that prevailed in the years after Reconstruction. After 1900, African-American migration from the rural to the urban South and from the urban South to the urban North created institutions for organizing opposition to racial discrimination. In the urban South, African Americans boycotted newly segregated public transportation systems. The organization of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and the National Urban League in 1911, with local affiliates in Northern and Southern cities, made possible longer-term campaigns for civil rights and economic opportunity. After World War I, the NAACP's lobbying and a long series of legal cases slowly built the challenge to peonage, residential segregation, disfranchisement, and discrimination in public education and transportation.

protests, world war ii to the mid-1950s

By World War II, some African Americans were exploring nonviolent direct action as alternatives to lobbying

and litigation. A. Philip Randolph's call for a March on Washington in 1941 reclaimed an older tradition of leveraging better conditions for African Americans in a time of national crisis. A year later, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized sit-ins at Chicago lunch counters and other facilities. In 1947, CORE and the Fellowship of Reconciliation sponsored a Journey of Reconciliation to test segregation of interstate public transportation. Between World War II and the Korean War, the armed forces of the United States were desegregated and, in a series of executive orders, President Harry Truman established a President's Commission on Civil Rights and a Fair Employment Practice Commission to encourage equal employment opportunity in the civil service. As Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union increased, tensions between the rhetoric of equality and the reality of segregation in the United States took center stage.

By 1950, NAACP legal appeals to the United States Supreme Court, masterminded by the attorney Thurgood Marshall, were chipping away at disfranchisement and racial segregation in residential zoning, interstate transportation, and public graduate and professional schools. These successes encouraged the NAACP to challenge segregated elementary and secondary education as well. In 1954, the Court found the old "separate but equal" doctrine unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Yet the Court's order that segregated school systems begin the process of desegregation with "deliberate speed" allowed many school districts to delay implementation of the order into the 1960s. In 1955, African Americans in Montgomery, Alabama, protested racial discrimination on the city's buses with a dramatic boycott. Martin Luther King, the new pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, won national recognition as their eloquent spokesperson. Shortly after the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of Mont-gomery's buses, King and his allies in churches across the South organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to extend nonviolent forms of social protest throughout the region.

Yet the SCLC's early efforts floundered and it was college students who launched the sit-in movement in 1960. Between 1957 and 1960, scattered sit-ins took place in cities from North Carolina and Florida to Oklahoma, but it was a sit-in at Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960 that burst like wildfire across cities in the upper and peripheral South. By March, demonstrations had taken place in thirty-one Southern cities. On March 19, San Antonio, Texas, became the first Southern city to desegregate its lunch counters. In April, students gathered in Raleigh, North Carolina, to organize the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to coordinate their efforts. In May 1961, CORE revisited its 1947 Journey of Reconciliation with a Freedom Ride from Washington, D.C., through the Carolinas and on into Alabama. The Freedom Rides showed both that interstate public transportation in the South violated rulings by the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Supreme Court and that citizens who tested those rulings would meet brutally violent opposition in the deep South.

As the NAACP continued to press its agenda of lobbying and litigation between 1953 and 1965, local movements mounted a variety of direct-action protests against racial discrimination in cities across the South. In Dividing Lines, historian Mills Thornton argues that direct action occurred in communities where local African Americans pursued local grievances by taking advantage of cleavages in the community's white power structure and conversely that direct action did not emerge in communities where African-American leaders saw no such opportunity. The argument challenges any notion of a national Civil Rights movement. Nonetheless, such local movements reached a crescendo in Birmingham, Alabama; Cambridge, Maryland; Greensboro, North Carolina; Jackson, Mississippi; Savannah, Georgia; and elsewhere during 1963. In August 1963, they coalesced in a national March on Washington, where some 250,000 participants heard Martin Luther King intone the themes of his "I Have a Dream" speech.

After President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, his successor, Lyndon Johnson, launched a war on poverty and made the passage of new Civil Rights legislation a high priority. Six months later, Congress passed and Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which barred discrimination in public accommodations, strengthened voting rights guarantees, and established an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Yet opposition to and strains within the powerful coalition behind that legislation were evident in Alabama governor George Wallace's campaigns in presidential primaries in Maryland, Wisconsin, and Indiana; in the Republicans' nomination for president of an opponent of the legislation, Senator Barry Goldwater; in the murder of three Civil Rights workers at the outset of Freedom Summer in Mississippi; and in Johnson's refusal to seat a delegation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged an all-white delegation at the Democratic National Convention. Three more Civil Rights workers were murdered during 1965's campaign in Selma, Alabama, for voting rights. The refusal of SNCC to endorse the SCLC's march from Selma to Montgomery indicated additional strains within the movement, but the movement found vindication in the Voting Rights Act, which was enacted in 1965 and authorized federal over-sight of voting in the South.

climax and decline

By 1966, the Civil Rights movement had crested and begun to disintegrate. The Vietnam War was a major factor in its disintegration. The conservative wing of the movement, the Urban League and the NAACP, which continued to pursue their work and valued their alliance with the Johnson administration, backed the war. To them, the U.S. armed forces were a model of equal opportunity and social mobility. The radical wing of the movement, including CORE and SNCC, grew increasingly critical of the Johnson administration and called the war "a white man's fight and black man's war." As the movement fragmented, SCLC seemed to flounder again. Martin Luther King expanded his efforts, addressing new issues in a frustrating campaign in Chicago and criticizing of America's engagement in Vietnam. In the years prior to his death, King became one of the most prominent critics of the American prosecution of the war.

After Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968, the leadership of the SCLC passed to his friend Ralph Abernathy. Many stalwarts of the radical wing of the movement, CORE and SNCC, left them to new leaders, including Floyd McKissick, Stokely Carmichael, and H. Rap Brown, who increasingly spoke about "black power" and alternately allied with and struggled against Nixonian black capitalism and the claims of left-nationalist ideological purity. The movement had won an end to legal segregation and in many cases challenged de facto segregation. In 1966, Massachusetts Republican Edward W. Brooke became the first African-American member of the United States Senate since Reconstruction and Robert C. Weaver became the first African-American member of a presidential cabinet. Thurgood Marshall became the first African-American member of the Supreme Court in 1967. Increasingly, the movement's struggle took the form of political activity, leading to a realignment of political parties in the South, where African-American voters became a major constituency of the Democratic Party and massive numbers of white voters resuscitated the Republican Party in the region. A successfully desegregated armed forces gave the appearance abroad that racial tensions had been resolved, which was far from the reality at home.

In the hundred years that followed the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement ebbed and flowed. The twentieth century's major wars, as well as the Cold War, energized the struggle for equal rights as Americans sought to achieve at home the ideals they fought for abroad.

bibliography

Borstelmann, Thomas. The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Dittmer, John. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Dudziak, Mary L. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: Morrow, 1986.

Kluger, Richard. Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality. New York: Knopf, 1975.

Lawson, Steven F. Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976.

Lawson, Steven F. In Pursuit of Power: Southern Blacks and Electoral Politics, 1965–1982. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism, 1941–1973. 2 vols. New York: Library of America, 2003.

Thornton, J. Mills, III. Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002.

Tushnet, Mark V. Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936–1961. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Ralph E. Luker