Civil Rights Movement

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Civil Rights Movement

THE 1950s AND 1960s

Although America engaged in World War II (1939–1945) supposedly to make the world safe for democracy, in 1945 most of the limitations imposed upon African Americans by racial segregation remained intact in the United States. Major changes affecting the potential for black insurgency had built up within the black community decades before the war, but the war accelerated them. A review of some of these changes is necessary for understanding the later civil rights movement of the 1950–1960 period. Known for generations as Jim Crow, the practice of segregation and discrimination against blacks stamped a badge of inferiority, stigmatizing them as a group. Unapologetic racists disfranchised black voters across the South, having removed African Americans in overwhelming numbers from the political process since the 1890s. Jim Crow also perpetuated the subjugation of blacks economically in domestic service, agricultural, and entry-level industrial occupations.

THE WORLD WAR II ERA

World War II and immediate postwar sociopolitical developments primed the black community for renewed struggles against deeply rooted racism. In response to the suffocating effects of Jim Crow, African Americans by the hundreds of thousands fled the South for greater freedom and dignity and for economic and educational opportunities in urban regions of the North and West. But the Second Great Migration of the 1950s uncovered the realities of racial hostilities in locales outside the South. Northern de facto Jim Crow met the migrants with urban ghettos and widespread employment discrimination, which diluted the promise of economic opportunities. However, the migrants were no longer obsequiously dependent on agriculture or domestic service for livelihood, nor were their lives and limbs endangered because of political agitation. They were free to support racial uplift organizations and programs.

The hallmark of black protest during the World War II era and its immediate aftermath was best signified in the “Double V” campaign: victory at home and victory abroad. Promoted via black media outlets, the “Double V” campaigners insisted that as America fought to secure a victory over fascism abroad, the nation must also secure a victory over racism within its borders. The “Double V” campaign, supported by organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Urban League and supported by the black media, achieved some successes helping to drive the civil rights agenda well into the late 1940s. During the war itself, this campaign yielded some positive changes, at least in official governmental employment policies.

A. Philip Randolph, the outspoken labor radical and leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, an allblack union, led the charge for racial equality during the early 1940s. His March on Washington Movement (MOWM) pressed the federal government to end race discrimination in employment, particularly in defense industries and the military. In 1941 Randolph, Walter F. White of the NAACP, and other leaders threatened to convene 100,000 black marchers in Washington, D.C., if President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the federal government failed to respond to their demands.

Randolph sought a federal measure that would have forbade companies holding federal government contracts to practice racial discrimination. His desired bill called for the eradication of Jim Crow in defense-industry training and urged the total abolition of segregation in the armed forces. In addition, Randolph pushed for a law that would punish unions that refused membership and full union benefits to black workers.

Statistics suggest that by the time the United States entered the war, blacks made up only 5 percent of defense workers and less than 3 percent of the skilled work force in the construction industry. At the start of World War II the percentage of African Americans in industrial occupations was at a thirty-year low. In many respects, when the defense industry began its rapid expansion, African American workers remained marginalized from the upward mobility opportunities stemming from that growth.

In response to Randolph’s threat to protest on the lawns of the nation’s capital, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which created the Federal Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), requiring the federal government to address the problems of employment discrimination affecting black workers. The FEPC was a five-person understaffed and underfunded commission that, lacking strong enforcement powers, could only receive and investigate complaints, draft policy, hold public hearings, and rely on moral suasion and negotiations to stem job discrimination. Nevertheless, the FEPC, Executive Order 8802, and subsequent federal measures did offer some hope that the federal government would react broadly and continuously to persistent demands for African American employment equality. While the basic challenges to employment fairness remained, the exigencies of war and the expansion of the economy increased African American job opportunities. Blacks could be found in entry-level positions in most wartime industries, and they had slowly gained access to some limited benefits associated with membership within organized labor.

In November 1942, Randolph indicated that the MOWM had an agenda called the Program of the March on Washington Movement, which included a series of broader demands, the most comprehensive being “the end of Jim Crow in education, in housing, in transportation and in every other social, economic and political privilege.” Among the other demands were the elimination of the segregated military establishment, the enforcement of the due process provisions of the U.S. Constitution, and inclusion of blacks in all governmental policy agencies, including those “which will be sent to the peace conference so that the interests of all peoples everywhere may be fully recognized and justly provided for in the post-war settlement” (quoted in Aptheker 1973).

Randolph’s threat to assemble black workers in Washington in his relentless efforts to uproot economic discrimination before, during, and after World II marked the beginning of black mass protest that was to characterize the civil rights movement in later years. Along with attempts aimed at garnering voting rights, desegregated education, and an end to residential segregation, the civil rights community added employment equality to the list of issues as part of its collective platform. These developments emerging from the World War II era set the stage for more dramatic challenges to the racial status quo in future decades during the civil rights movement.

THE POST–WORLD WAR II ERA

Developments during the war invigorated the idea of equality in the consciousness of black veterans who returned having to contest racial inequality in housing and employment. World War II had increased income levels and thus standards of living, particularly for returning black soldiers in the South. When Congress passed the GI Bill of Rights, black veterans looked to benefit as a result of their having laid their lives on the line for the United States.

The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, known as the GI Bill, emerged out of Congress as a broad reform measure designed to provide veterans with generous education benefits, guaranteed home mortgage loans, and income adjustment allowances during their transition back to civilian life. Black veterans made the most of the measure, taking particular advantage of its education and mortgage benefits. Large numbers of black veterans were able to find employment opportunities either within federal employment circles or in nonagricultural pursuits. Although many benefited from the bill, the legislation represented yet another federal measure marred by the shortcomings of racial bias in its administration, a situation that helped prime ex-soldiers for civic action on the homefront. Scores of black servicemen attended college as a result of the bill, but these veterans were barred on account of race from attending the more prestigious white universities in the Deep South. The Veterans Administration (VA) joined with white universities in funneling black veterans into historically black colleges and universities and even encouraged black veterans to receive training in agricultural and technical trades, further emphasizing beliefs in black mental inferiority and in the relegation of blacks to menial, substandard jobs.

In the area of housing, whereas small numbers of black veterans were able to purchase homes under the GI Bill, most experienced discriminatory practices from banks, lending institutions, and mortgage agencies. The suburbanization of American housing for white veterans virtually excluded blacks, with real estate developers such as William Levitt and Sons seeking “white only” tenants in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Residential restrictive covenants confined most African Americans to the growing numbers of racially identifiable overcrowded and often deteriorating urban ghettos. Although the GI bill guaranteed unemployment benefits to veterans, the VA regularly denied benefits to black workers who refused employment at the exploitatively low wages typical of the Jim Crow era. Low wages caused many veterans to seek ever cheaper used housing that had been left behind by whites fleeing their presence.

In response to the effects of discrimination in the immediate post–World War II era, however, African American assaults on the racial practices of the United States actually were continuations of significant prewar influences such as the First Great Migration of World War I, the Garvey movement, the efforts of the NAACP, and the sociocultural activism of the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro Movement. Blacks were becoming less rural and more urban and aggressive. The social energies that fueled postwar activism had been built virtually out of sight of mainstream America. Understanding this earlier evolution of the black community helps one realize that it was not simply World War II exigencies that emboldened blacks to demand major changes in race relations.

In acts of individual resistance and as a means of obtaining better lives for their families, many southern blacks continued the trend of migrating to urban centers of the Northeast, Midwest, and West coast during the World War II era and beyond. This movement of blacks out of the South mirrored the earlier migration of the 1910s and 1920s. The Second Great Migration of black southerners, lasting from 1930 to 1950, was no small exodus. Black populations in the Northeast and Midwest nearly doubled during the twenty-year period, spurred largely by World War II industrial employment opportunities. Southern California and the San Francisco Bay area witnessed dramatic increases in their black urban populations because of job opportunities in the aircraft industry. As was the case during earlier migration years, once blacks arrived in these cities, racial tensions flared sporadically. By the 1950s sections of cities such as Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles increasingly became defined as ghettos populated by working-class blacks.

In response to this dramatic influx of black newcomers, white urbanites steadily fled cities to neighboring suburbs. Because of racially engineered residential segregation, blacks were typically locked into urban spaces while millions of whites sought refuge from blacks in burgeoning suburban areas on the margins of these cities. As early as the 1940s, the initial stages of white flight and white economic withdrawal had begun to affect the economies of urban spaces. White flight and residential segregation were fortified through agreements between insurance agencies and real estate agencies, and through policies stemming from the federal government. For example, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), in conjunction with real estate brokers and lenders, published documents that graded neighborhoods to determine how qualified their respective residents were for loans and mortgages; the higher the score, the greater likelihood of residents winning financial approval. Neighborhoods with even insignificant numbers of black residents were typically given lower scores.

Nonetheless, efforts to limit black opportunity continued to generate upsurges in the budding civil rights community. By 1945, the NAACP could brag of having an impressive 450,000 members, up from only 50,000 in 1941. Even the association’s southern chapters could boast of having an official membership of 150,000 across the region, with potentially greater numbers if unofficial membership had been tallied. For decades the NAACP worked to dismantle the legal underpinnings to Jim Crow through the efforts of its Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF), and in the immediate aftermath of World War II, such legal activism gained momentum.

THE ROLE OF THE COURTS

The successes of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, incorporated in 1940, are owed to the leadership of Charles Hamilton Houston, then later to his young protégé Thurgood Marshall. For decades the LDF engineered essential U.S. Supreme Court victories that weakened the precedence set by the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decision and its “separate-but-equal” doctrine. While LDF was a new component within the NAACP in 1940, Houston and Marshall had been the association’s legal brain trust for more than a decade. In addition, the organization had already accrued a great deal of experience in the realm of civil rights legal activism. As early as 1915 the NAACP had won its first significant victory in the landmark decision Guinn v. U.S. in which the Supreme Court found electoral grandfather clauses unconstitutional. Thus, by 1954 LDF staffers were veterans of legal battles who had earned significant Supreme Court victories over legally mandated racism. With Marshall at the helm, the LDF won the most historic decision of the twentieth century in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), in which racial discrimination in public education was ruled unconstitutional.

The LDF began its tactical assault on segregated education in the years prior to World War II, earning precedence-shaping victories on the road to Brown. In the following cases, LDF convinced federal courts to compel states to equalize their graduate and professional programs or be forced to admit qualified black applicants. The cases included: Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938), Sipuel v. Oklahoma State Regents (1948), McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950), and Sweatt v. Painter (1950). Thus, by the 1954 Brown decision, much of the legal support for segregated education had already been found unconstitutional by the nation’s highest tribunal as a result of the LDF’s school desegregation campaign.

LDF also earned noteworthy victories in areas still defined by the legality of Jim Crow but outside the realm of education. In the wartime decision Smith v. Allwright (1944), the LDF convinced the Supreme Court to declare unconstitutional the politically exclusive all-white primary election practices of the South. This victory aided in the slow march back to electoral and political participation on the part of African Americans. In Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), the LDF showed that racial restrictive covenants indeed violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

While the NAACP and the LDF won important victories in the decades of legal struggles leading up to the civil rights movement, these cases did little to change the routine denial of full equality to African Americans. But these victories did suggest that the law might eventually evolve to protect black people’s civil rights. The decade prior to the civil rights movement, which included these successes in the courtroom and enduring legacies from the World War II era, paved the way to the turbulent 1960s and the many social changes that followed.

To complement the efforts of leaders such as Randolph and organizations such as the NAACP in battling racism, James Farmer, Bernice Fisher, and Bayard Rustin formed the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1942, injecting a healthy dose of radical action into the civil rights community. CORE patterned its principles of nonviolent, direct action after Gandhian theories of civil disobedience. These theories and practices ultimately shaped much of the larger civil rights movement’s ideology and many of the movement’s protest tactics. CORE’s Freedom Rides of 1947 were precursors to the types of demonstrations the organization would help engineer during the 1960s. With the emergence of CORE and the growth of the NAACP, the civil rights movement had its two central organizations in place to effectively fight segregation, setting the stage for the nation’s second racial reconstruction.

CIVIL RIGHTS AND POPULAR CULTURE

Social, economic and legal demands for racial equality were not the sole expressions of resistance emerging out of black America in the immediate postwar era. Black writers, as extensions of the Harlem Renaissance, produced unabashed literary critiques of race and racism in the United States. This era of literary realism witnessed works by black writers such as Richard Wright (Native Son, 1940), Chester Himes (If He Hollers Let Him Go, 1945), Ann Petry (The Street, 1946), Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man, 1952), James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1953), and Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun, 1959), and in 1945 Ebony magazine began circulation, appealing to a wide array of blacks across the nation.

In other entertainment venues African Americans made similar demands for equality. As late as the 1940s media depictions of African Americans remained openly negative. Black filmmakers and actors responded to these and other racial stereotypes by creating more positive images of African Americans beyond the standard Sambos, coons, and mammies. With Gregory Peck’s Gentle-man’s Agreement (1947) on anti-Semitism, Hollywood paved the way for what has been called “social problem” movies. With black audiences larger and more urban than ever, the problem/theme movies appealed to more assertive black communities who rejected the images of black clowns, happy servants, or token entertainers. Among the movies showing blacks as individuals beyond stereotypes were Home of the Brave (1949) with James Edwards, NoWay Out (1950) with Sidney Poitier, Member of the Wedding (1952) with Ethel Waters, Carmen Jones (1954) starring Dorothy Dandridge, and Blackboard Jungle (1955) with Sidney Poitier, the new and dignified black actor of the era. For African audiences on the verge of the renewed civil rights movement, complacent mammies and lackadaisical handyman servants were literally Gone with the Wind (1939).

Racially polarized popular entertainment was not exempt from the mushrooming rebellion against racism. In professional sports African Americans met racial hurdles with momentous achievements. Of these achievements, none was more important than Jackie Robinson integrating the fiercely segregated Major League Baseball. Robinson, a former All-American running back at the university of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and member of the historic Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro League, was the first African American to break the racial barrier to the hallowed, all-white, male-dominated institution of professional baseball when he was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1946. One year later, legendary Negro League home-run hitter Larry Doby joined the Cleveland Indians, opening the floodgates for black ballplayers to join major league teams. Ultimately, however, these developments signaled the end of the historic Negro Baseball Leagues. In boxing, Joe Louis reigned as heavyweight champion from 1937 to 1949, winning decisive victories over a multitude of white challengers for blacks to applaud. The accomplishments of these athletes and the many that followed offered African Americans brief respites from the frustrations associated with the norms and practices of Jim Crow America.

THE 1950s AND 1960s

As the cold war entered the political consciousness of the nation, outspoken critics of the United States and especially those with Communist ties were victimized by a congressionally supported witch hunt to expel such subversive elements from the country. Scholar-activist W. E. B. Du Bois and artist-activist Paul Robeson were two of the more prominent African Americans targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the era of McCarthyism. Whereas Du Bois avoided penalties because claims against him were dismissed, Robeson refused to yield in his scathing criticisms of racial practices in America, nor did he denounce his Communist Party affiliations. With little support from civil rights leaders because of fears of being targeted themselves, Robeson, at the mercy of Senator Eugene McCarthy’s vicious assaults, was eventually deported. Paul Robeson is widely recognized as one of the most tragic fatalities of McCarthyism and anticommunist aggression in the United States.

By the middle of the 1950s, racial realities in the United States still thrived to block black equality and progress. However, developments from the post–World War II era propelled civil rights activism and coordination. With the 1954 victory in Brown and the encouraging success of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, led by members of the NAACP and CORE, the modern civil rights era was ignited. Jim Crow—America’s version of racial apartheid—would soon meet its death knell as well-coordinated protest movements pushed the civil rights agenda, ultimately engendering the consciousness of America.

In February 1960, the student protest movement began when four students at North Carolina A&T walked into a Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and sat down, refusing to move until served. Only days later, students across the South were leading numerous sitin movements against establishments clinging to the practices of Jim Crow. Within a month of the initiation of the sit-ins, hundreds of young radicals convened at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and created the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC radicals, black and white, infused a high degree of militancy into the civil rights movement, adding direct, confrontational action to the already successful legal movements and economic boycotts.

Alongside CORE, SNCC continued its direct-action, civil disobedience campaigns, exposing the lengths to which white southerners would go to preserve segregation, even in the face of laws proscribing such practices. CORE reinvigorated its 1947 Freedom Rides by teaming with members of SNCC in 1961 and leading an interracial group of riders through the South, challenging Jim Crow in interstate travel. The Freedom Riders were met with violence in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama. However, no stop along their ride through the South proved more dangerous than Montgomery, Alabama. In Montgomery, the protesters were met by more than 1,000 whites, with the police nowhere to be found. All the riders and a presidential aide assigned to monitor the crisis were injured by the mob and had to be hospitalized.

Under the coordination of the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., protest movements in Albany, Georgia (1961), and Birmingham, Alabama (1963), propelled the civil rights agenda as young and old joined forces to battle racism in the Deep South. In August 1963, the civil rights movement momentum peaked as nearly 250,000 marchers of many colors and faiths assembled in the nation’s capital for the famed March on Washington, where they heard King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream Speech.” However, soon after the march concluded, white racists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young black girls. Such violent responses were emblematic of the resentment and contempt whites held against blacks challenging racial norms.

Church bombings were only part of the violence directed at African American freedom fighters during the civil rights era. During Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, white terror surfaced against volunteers leading voter registration drives in the South’s most resistant communities. A collection of young, racially mixed activists from CORE, SNCC, SCLC, and the NAACP joined forces under the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) in an effort to restore and enhance political participation among blacks in Mississippi. Soon after Freedom Summer began, three volunteers disappeared. Two white volunteers in their early twenties—Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman—and James Chaney, a twenty-one-year-old black Mississippi native, were killed near Philadelphia, Mississippi. The efforts of COFO and Freedom Summer ultimately led to the highest political mobilization of blacks across the state since Reconstruction.

One year later, in 1965, SCLC organized a march from Selma to Montgomery to highlight the continued disfranchisement of African American voters in Alabama. As King and the marchers reached the Edmund Pettus Bridge, police officers met them with tear gas and proceeded to beat them before a national television audience. What became known as “Bloody Sunday” spurred Congress and President Lyndon Johnson to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, also named the Civil Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed mechanisms whites had used to disqualify black voters for nearly a century. Congress had also passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which brought an end to Jim Crow in public accommodations and employment and reaffirmed the congressional commitment to school desegregation.

In a roughly twenty-five year period after World War II, barely one generation, the civil rights community had effectively done away with Jim Crow. With much sacrifice, skillful protest, and charismatic leadership, legally sanctioned second-class citizenship, disfranchisement, and employment injustice reached a formal end.

SEE ALSO Baker, Ella; Baseball; Du Bois, W. E. B.; NAACP.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS

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Tushnet, Mark. 1987. The NAACP’s Legal Strategy against Segregated Education, 1925–1950. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.