A Hundred-Year
Struggle
Black Americans’ quest for official racial equality
began the moment Reconstruction ended
in the late 1870s. Even though Radical
Republicans had attempted to aid blacks by passing the Civil
Rights Act of 1866, the Ku Klux
Klan Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1875,
as well as the Fourteenth Amendment and Fifteenth
Amendment, racist whites in the South ensured that blacks
remained “in their place.” The black codes, for example, as
well as literacy tests, poll taxes, and widespread violence kept
blacks away from voting booths, while conservative Supreme Court
decisions ruined any chances for social equality. The Compromise
of 1877 effectively doomed southern
blacks to a life of sharecropping and second-class
citizenship.
The Early Movement
In 1896, in
the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the
conservative Supreme Court upheld the racist policy of segregation
by legalizing “separate but equal” facilities for blacks
and whites. In doing so, the court condemned blacks to more than
a half century more of social inequality. Black leaders nonetheless
continued to press for equal rights. For example, Booker T.
Washington, president of the all-black Tuskegee Institute in
Alabama, encouraged African Americans first to become self-sufficient
economically before challenging whites on social issues. W.
E. B. Du Bois, a Harvard-educated black historian and sociologist,
however, ridiculed Washington’s beliefs and argued that blacks should
fight for social and economic equality all at once. Du Bois also
hoped that blacks would eventually develop a “black consciousness” and
cherish their distinctive history and cultural attributes. In 1910,
he also helped found the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People(NAACP) to challenge the Plessy decision
in the courtroom.
The
Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance
Between World War I and World War II, more than a million
blacks traveled from the South to the North in search of jobs, in
what became known as the Great Migration. The Harlem neighborhood
of New York City quickly became the nation’s black cultural capital and
housed one of the country’s largest African-American communities,
of approximately 200,000 people. Even
though most of Harlem’s residents were poor, during the 1920s,
a small middle class emerged, consisting of poets, writers, and
musicians. Artists and writers such as Langston
Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston championed the “New
Negro,” the African American who took pride
in his or her cultural heritage. The flowering of black artistic
and intellectual culture during this period became known as the Harlem
Renaissance.
Marcus Garvey
Meanwhile, Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant
and businessman, worked hard to promote black pride and nationalism.
He founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association,
which emphasized economic self-sufficiency as a means to overcome
white dominance. He also encouraged blacks to leave the United States and
resettle in Africa. Although most of Garvey’s business ventures failed
and he was eventually deported back to Jamaica, his message influenced
many future civil rights leaders.
World War II
More than a million black men served in the Allied forces
during World War II, mostly in segregated noncombat
units. At home, black leaders continued to push for racial equality
and campaigned for the “Double V”—victory both at home
and abroad. In 1941, A.
Philip Randolph, the president of the National Negro
Congress, threatened to lead thousands of black
protesters in a march on Washington to demand the passage of more
civil rights legislation. President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, afraid that the march might disrupt the war effort,
compromised by signing Executive Order 8802 to
desegregate war factories and create the Fair Employment Practices
Committee. As a result, more than 200,000 blacks
were able to find top jobs in defense-related industries. After
the war, President Harry S Truman created the President’s
Committee on Civil Rights and desegregated the military with Executive
Order 9981.
Brown v. Board
of Education
In 1954,
after decades of legal work, Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP’s
chief counsel, finally managed to overturn the “separate but equal”
doctrine (established in Plessy v. Ferguson) in Brown
v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Sympathetic
Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren convinced
his fellow justices to declare unanimously that segregated public
schools were inherently unequal. The Brown decision outraged
conservative southern politicians in Congress, who protested it
by drafting the Southern Manifesto.
The Little Rock Crisis
In 1957,
Arkansas governor Orval Faubus chose to ignore a federal court
order to desegregate the state’s public schools and used the National
Guard to prevent nine black students from entering Central High
School in Little Rock. Although President Dwight
D. Eisenhower personally opposed the Brown decision,
he sent federal troops to integrate the high school by
force and uphold federal supremacy over the state.
Martin Luther King
Jr.
In 1955,
the modern civil rights movement was effectively launched with
the arrest of young seamstress Rosa Parks in Montgomery,
Alabama. Police arrested Parks because she refused to give up her
seat to a white man on a Montgomery city bus. After the arrest,
blacks throughout the city joined together in a massive rally outside
one of the city’s Baptist churches to hear the young preacher Martin
Luther King Jr. speak out against segregation, Parks’s arrest,
and the Jim Crow law she had violated. Blacks also
organized the Montgomery bus boycott, boycotting city
transportation for nearly a year before the Supreme Court finally
struck down the city’s segregated bus seating as unconstitutional.
In 1957, King formed the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference(SCLC) to
rally support from southern churches for the civil rights movement.
Inspired by Indian political activist Mohandas Gandhi, King
hoped the SCLC would lead a large-scale protest movement based on
“love and nonviolence.”
The Student Movement
Although the SCLC failed to initiate mass protest, a new
student group called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee(SNCC) accomplished
much. The SNCC was launched in 1960 after
the highly successful student-led Greensboro sit-in in
North Carolina and went on to coordinate peaceful student protests
against segregation throughout the South. The students also helped
the Congress of Racial Equality(CORE) organize Freedom
Rides throughout the Deep South. In 1961,
groups of both black and white Freedom Riders boarded
interstate buses, hoping to provoke violence, get the attention
of the federal government, and win the sympathy of more moderate
whites. The plan worked: angry white mobs attacked Freedom Riders
in Alabama so many times that several riders nearly died. Still,
many of the students believed that the media attention they had
received had been worth the price.
The Birmingham
Protest
The overwhelming public support from the North for Freedom
Riders prompted Martin Luther King Jr. to launch more peaceful protests, hoping
to anger die-hard segregationists. In 1963, King
focused all of his energy on organizing a massive protest in the
heavily segregated city of Birmingham, Alabama. Thousands
of blacks participated in the rally, including several hundred local
high school students who marched in their own “children’s
crusade.” Birmingham’s commissioner, “Bull”
Connor, cracked down on the protesters using clubs, vicious
police dogs, and water cannons. King was arrested along with hundreds
of others and used his time in jail to write his famous “Letter
from Birmingham Jail” to explain the civil rights movement
to critics.
Kennedy
and the March on Washington
The violence during the Birmingham protest shocked northerners even
more than the violence of the Freedom Rides and convinced President John
F. Kennedy to risk his own political future and fully endorse
the civil rights movement. Meanwhile, in 1963,
King and the SCLC joined forces with CORE, the NAACP, and the SNCC
in organizing the March on Washington in August. More
than 200,000 blacks
and whites participated in the march, one of the largest political
rallies in American history. The highlight of the rally was King’s sermonic “I
have a dream” speech.
Federal Help
Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963,
but the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, honored his
predecessor’s commitment to the civil rights movement. Johnson actually
had opposed the movement while serving as Senate majority leader
but changed his mind because he wanted to establish himself as the
leader of a united Democratic Party. He therefore pressured Congress
to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
an even tougher bill than Kennedy had hoped would pass. The act
outlawed discrimination and segregation based on race, nationality,
or gender.
The same year, the Twenty-Fourth Amendment to
the U.S. Constitution was ratified, outlawing poll taxes as a prerequisite
for voting in federal elections. Furthermore, SNCC activists traveled
to Mississippi that summer on the Freedom Summer campaign
to register more black voters, again hoping their actions would
provoke segregationist whites.
The Voting Rights
Act
Violent opposition to the Freedom Summer campaign convinced Martin
Luther King Jr. that more attention needed to be drawn to the fact
that few southern blacks were actually able to exercise their right
to vote. Springing into action, King traveled to the small town of Selma,
Alabama, in 1965,
to support a local protest against racial restrictions at the polls.
There, he joined thousands of blacks peacefully trying to register
to vote. Police, however, attacked the protesters on “Bloody
Sunday,” killing several activists in the most
violent crackdown yet. The same year, an outraged Lyndon B. Johnson
and Congress responded by passing the Voting Rights Act to
safeguard blacks’ right to vote. The act outlawed literacy tests
and sent thousands of federal voting officials into the South to
supervise black voter registration.
Malcolm
X and the Nation of Islam
However, a growing number of black activists had begun
to oppose integration altogether by the mid-1960s. Malcolm
X of the Nation of Islam was the most vocal
critic of King’s nonviolent tactics. Instead, Malcolm X preached
black self-sufficiency, just as Marcus Garvey had four decades earlier.
He also advocated armed self-defense against white oppression, arguing
that bloodshed was necessary for revolution. However, Malcolm X
left the Nation of Islam after numerous scandals hit the organization,
and he traveled to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, on a religious pilgrimage
in 1964.
In the course of his journey, he encountered Muslims of all nationalities
who challenged his belief system and forced him to rethink his opinions regarding
race relations. When Malcolm X returned to the United States, he
joined forces with the SNCC in the nonviolent fight against segregation
and racism. However, he was assassinated in early 1965.
Black Power
Despite Malcolm X’s untimely death, his original message
of race separation (instead of integration) lived on and inspired
many students in the SNCC, who also expressed dissatisfaction with
the gains made through peaceful protests. Although the Civil Rights
Act and Voting Rights Act were landmark laws for the civil rights
movement, young activists such as Stokely Carmichael felt
they had not done enough to correct centuries of inequality. In 1967,
Carmichael argued in his book Black Power that
blacks should take pride in their heritage and culture and should
not have anything to do with whites in the United States or anywhere
else. In fact, Carmichael even promoted one plan to split the United
States into separate black and white countries.
The Black Panthers
Frustrated activists in Oakland, California, responded
to Stokely Carmichael’s “black power” theories and formed the Black
Panther Party for Self-Defense. The Black Panthers, armed
and clad in black, operated basic social services in the urban ghettos,
patrolled the streets, and called for an armed revolution. Although
the Black Panthers did provide valuable support to the community,
their embrace of violence prompted a massive government crackdown
on the group, leading to its dissolution in the late 1960s
and early 1970s.
The Collapse
of the Movement
Black revolutionaries such as Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael,
and the Black Panthers, along with the scores of race riots that
rocked America between 1965 and 1970,
frightened many white Americans and alienated many moderates who
had supported peaceful protest. President Lyndon B. Johnson had
also become suspicious of civil rights activists and ordered the
FBI to begin investigations of Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam, and
even Martin Luther King Jr. himself for their alleged ties to Communist organizations.
Then, in 1968, a young white man named James
Earl Ray shot and killed King as he addressed a crowd gathered
in Memphis, Tennessee. King’s death, combined with the increasing
amount of violence, effectively ended the civil rights movement
of the 1950s and 1960s.
