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How did the NAACP, the SCLC, and the SNCC work differently and similarly?
Although the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), and SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) were all committed to nonviolence and peaceful means of protesting racial inequality, they used different strategies to desegregate the South. Despite the fact that the SCLC and SNCC received more media attention in the 1950s and 1960s, it was the NAACP’s legal victories that were most successful in fundamentally overturning the South’s system of Jim Crow laws.
How did the SCLC work towards desegregation?
In 1957, Martin Luther King Jr. formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to coordinate peaceful protests—akin to the Montgomery bus boycott that had taken place two years earlier—against southern Jim Crow laws. He hoped that the peaceful-protest movement would gather momentum and that he would be able to rally the support of Black churches—a tactic that worked well, because of the central role that the church played in the southern Black community. King found his inspiration in the nonviolent protest tactics of Mohandas Gandhi and realized that “passive resistance” would attract national media attention, particularly since segregationists were likely to attack peaceful protests. King knew that the movement would need media-generated sympathy from moderate whites to have any lasting effect.
How did the SNCC work towards desegregation?
Whereas King organized southern Black churches, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) brought together like-minded students. Ella Baker, an SCLC director, formed the SNCC along with a group of activist students after the highly successful sit-in in 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina. The SNCC worked diligently to mobilize Black and white students in the North and South to work and protest for the civil rights cause. The SNCC organized hundreds of sit-ins, boycotts, and other peaceful protests across the country to end segregation in restaurants, stores, public transportation, and other common areas. The SNCC’s tactics were highly successful and gave the movement a helpful boost after the SCLC was not drawing enough media attention. The SNCC organized or participated in nearly every major civil rights campaign of the 1960s.
How did the NAACP work towards desegregation?
Even though the SCLC and SNCC led successful campaigns, the courtroom victories of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had the most sustained effect on the movement’s goal to desegregate the South. Had the NAACP not won these victories, it is doubtful that the movement would ever have gained as much momentum as it did. Thurgood Marshall, a brilliant lawyer working for the NAACP, attacked the “separate but equal” doctrine from the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson that justified segregation, winning several significant cases, including Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938), Morgan v. Virginia (1946), and Sweatt v. Painter (1950).
Marshall finally scored a direct hit on the “separate but equal” doctrine in 1954 with the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. Marshall won a unanimous verdict with the help of Chief Justice Earl Warren, a conservative appointee who proved more sympathetic to the civil rights movement than expected. The Brown v. Board of Education ruling stated that segregated public schools were inherently unequal and should be integrated as soon as possible—effectively reversing the Plessy v. Ferguson, which had made and kept “separate but equal” law. This legal victory sent a message to activists throughout the country that sweeping civil rights reform was possible and imminent, prompting both Black and white activists such as King, Rosa Parks, James Meredith, and student volunteers in the SNCC to take a stand and fight for integration.
What was the “Great Migration” of Black Americans that began after World War I?
Unemployment and poverty in the South and greater opportunity in the more industrial North prompted as many as 2 million Blacks Americans to leave their homes in search of jobs in northern cities in the years after World War I. The Great Depression and the invention of the mechanical cotton picker in the 1940s exacerbated these job shortages in the South by virtually eliminating white planters’ need for sharecroppers and field hands. Additionally, as more and more Black Americans migrated north to the cities, more and more white northerners left the cities for the suburbs, thus transforming inner cities into predominantly Black neighborhoods. Nonetheless, exposure to the much higher standard of living in northern cities also made Black Americans aware of the degree of income inequality that existed between North and South, Black and white. As a result, more and more northern Black Americans began demanding jobs, education, and social services—a cry that helped launch the modern civil rights movement as well as the Great Society.
What impact did World War II and the Cold War have on the Civil Rights movement?
World War II had a dramatic effect on Black Americans, as Black civil rights leaders publicized their “Double V” campaign for victory both abroad and at home. After civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph threatened to organize a march on Washington, D.C., to protest racial inequality, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 to desegregate defense industries. This action alone allowed more than 200,000 northern Black Americans to find jobs in various defense industries, boosting their average income considerably. President Harry Truman later desegregated the military with Executive Order 9981 and created the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, one of the first government committees since Reconstruction seriously devoted to tackling racial issues.
In the years after World War II, as the Cold War began, activists wondered how the United States could fight for freedom abroad when so many still lacked freedom at home. Foreign dignitaries from the USSR asked this question too and accused the United States of hypocrisy. Growing international pressure helped convince President John F. Kennedy to endorse the civil rights movement fully in the early 1960s.
Why did the civil rights movement gain momentum in the 1950s and 1960s?
Although Black Americans had been struggling for equal rights since the end of Reconstruction, their fight for civil rights picked up speed in the 1950s and 1960s because of the combined effects of the Great Migration, and World War II. Despite these earlier factors, the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision was the most important momentum builder for the civil rights movement. In declaring that segregated schools were inherently unequal, the decision opened a floodgate for more challenges to southern Jim Crow laws. Empowered by the far-reaching court decision, Black activists such as Rosa Parks and James Meredith took increasingly bolder steps to end segregation.
