Chapter 28 The Civil Rights Movement 1945 -1966 Chapter 28 The Civil Rights Movement 1945 -1966 OUT OF MANY A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE © 2009 Pearson

Chapter 28The Civil Rights Movement

1945 -1966

Chapter 28The Civil Rights Movement

1945 -1966

OUT OF MANY

A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

© 2009 Pearson Education, Inc.

Part One:

Introduction

2© 2009 Pearson Education, Inc.

Chapter Focus Questions

What were the legal and political origins of the African American civil rights struggle?

What accounts for Martin Luther King’s rise to leadership?

How did student protesters and direct action shape the civil rights struggle in the South?

How did the civil rights movement intersect with national politics in the 1950s and 1960s?

What did the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 accomplish?

How did America’s other minorities respond to the African American struggle for civil rights?


Part Two:

American Communities: The Montgomery Bus Boycott:

An African-American Community Challenges Segregation


American Communities: The Montgomery Bus Boycott: An African-American Community

Challenges Segregation

In 1955, Montgomery’s black community mobilized when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat and comply with segregation laws.

Led by Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist minister, a boycott of buses was launched.

A network of local activists organized carpools using private cars to get people to and from work.

Leaders endured violence and legal harassment, but won a court ruling that the segregation ordinance was unconstitutional.


Part Three:

Origins of the Movement


Civil Rights After World War II

A mass migration to the North brought political power to African Americans working through the Democratic Party. The NAACP grew in numbers and its Legal Defense Fund initiated a series of lawsuits to win key rights. Key ways the African Americans were breaking color barriers included:

Jackie Robinson’s entrance into major league baseballRalph Bunche’s winning a Nobel Peace prize

A new generation of jazz musicians created be-bop.


Charlie Parker (alto sax) and Miles Davis (trumpet) with their group in 1947, at the Three Deuces Club in New York City. Parker and Davis were two creative leaders of the “bebop” movement of the 1940s. Working in northern cities, boppers reshaped jazz music and created a distinct language and style that was widely imitated by young people. They challenged older stereotypes of African American musicians by insisting that they be treated as serious artists.


The Segregated South

In the South, segregation and unequal rights were still the law of the land. Law and custom kept blacks as second-class citizens with no effective political rights. African Americans had learned to survive and not challenge the situation.


Signs designating “White” and “Colored” rest rooms, waiting rooms, entrances, benches, and even water fountains were a common sight in the segregated South. They were a constant reminder that legal separation of the races in public spaces was the law of the land.


Brown v. Board of Education

The NAACP initiated a series of court cases challenging the constitutionality of segregation. In Brown v. Board of Education, newly appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren led the court to declare that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. The court postponed ordering a clear timetable to implement the decision.


Crisis in Little Rock Southern whites declared their intention to nullify the decision. In Little Rock, Arkansas, a judge ordered integration. The governor ordered the National Guard to keep African-American children out of Central High. When the troops were withdrawn, a riot erupted, forcing President Eisenhower to send in more troops to integrate the school.


© 2009 Pearson Education, Inc. 13

Four African American students walk swiftly past barricaded sidewalks as they integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1957. Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division, sent to Little Rock by President Eisenhower, protect the students during the tense racial confrontation.

Seeing History Civil Rights on the World Stage


Part Four:

No Easy Road to Freedom,

1957–62


No Easy Road to Freedom, 1957-62

Map: The Civil Rights Movement


MAP 28.1 The Civil Rights Movement Key battlegrounds in the struggle for racial justice in communities across the South.


Martin Luther King and the SCLC

Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged from the bus boycott as a prominent national figure. A well-educated son of a Baptist minister, King taught his followers nonviolent resistance, modeled after the tactics of Mohandas Gandhi. The civil rights movement was deeply rooted in the traditions of the African-American church. King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to promote nonviolent direct action to challenge segregation.


Sit-Ins: Greensboro, Nashville, Atlanta

African-American college students, first in Greensboro, North Carolina, began sitting in at segregated lunch counters.

Nonviolent sit-ins were:widely supported by the African-American community,

accompanied by community-wide boycotts of businesses that would not integrate.


The second day of the sit-in at the Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth lunch counter, February 2, 1960. From left: Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Billy Smith, and Clarence Henderson. The Greensboro protest sparked a wave of sit-ins across the South, mostly by college students, demanding an end to segregation in restaurants and other public places.


SNCC and the “Beloved Community”

A new spirit of militancy was evident among young people. 120 African American activists created the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to promote nonviolent direct challenges to segregation. The young activists were found at the forefront of nearly every major civil rights battle.


The Election of 1960 and Civil Rights

The race issue had moved to center-stage by 1960.As vice president, Nixon had strongly supported civil rights.But Kennedy pressured a judge to release Martin Luther King, Jr. from jail. African-American voters provided Kennedy’s margin of victory, though an unfriendly Congress ensured that little legislation would come out. Attorney General Robert Kennedy used the Justice Department to force compliance with desegregation orders.


Freedom RidesThe Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sponsored a freedom ride of biracial teams to ride interstate buses in the South. The FBI and Justice Department knew of the plans but were absent when mobs firebombed a bus and severely beat the Freedom Riders. There was violence and no police protection at other stops. The Kennedy administration was forced to mediate a safe conduct for the riders, though 300 people were arrested. A Justice Department petition led to new rules that effectively ended segregated interstate buses.


A Freedom Riders’ bus burns after being firebombed in Anniston, Alabama, May 14, 1961. After setting the bus afire, whites attacked the passengers fleeing the smoke and flames. Violent scenes like this one received extensive publicity in the mass media and helped compel the Justice Department to enforce court rulings banning segregation on interstate bus lines. 24© 2009 Pearson Education, Inc.

The Albany Movement: The Limits of Protest

Where the federal government was not present, segregationists could triumph.In Albany, Georgia, local authorities kept white mobs from running wild and kept police brutality down to a minimum. Martin Luther King, Jr. was twice arrested, but Albany remained segregated. When the federal government intervened, as it did in the University of Mississippi, integration could take place.


Part Five:

The Movement at High Tide, 1963-65


Birmingham

In conjunction with the SCLC, local activists in Birmingham, Alabama, planned a large desegregation campaign. Demonstrators, including Martin Luther King, Jr., filled the city’s jails. King drafted his Letter From a Birmingham Jail. A TV audience saw water cannons and snarling dogs break up a children’s march.A settlement was negotiated that desegregated businesses. Birmingham changed the nature of the civil rights movement by bringing in black unemployed and working poor for the first time.


JFK and the March on Washington

The shifting public consensus led President Kennedy to appeal for civil rights legislation.

A. Philip Randolph’s old idea of a march on Washington was revived.

The march presented a unified call for change and held up the dream of universal freedom and brotherhood.


Part of the huge throng of marchers at the historic March on Washington for “jobs and freedom,” August 28, 1963. The size of the crowd, the stirring oratory and song, and the live network television coverage produced one of the most memorable political events in the nation’s history.


LBJ and the Civil Rights Act of 1964

The assassination of John Kennedy threw a cloud over the movement as the new president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, had never been a good friend to civil rights.

LBJ used his skills as a political insider to push through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that put a virtual end to Jim Crow.


Mississippi Freedom Summer

In 1964, civil rights activists targeted Mississippi for a “freedom summer” that saw 900 volunteers come to open up this closed society. Two white activists and a local black activist were quickly killed. Tensions developed between white volunteers and black movement veterans. The project riveted national attention on Mississippi.


Bob Moses of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was one of the driving forces behind the 1964 Freedom Summer Project. Here he instructs student volunteers gathered in Oxford, Ohio, before they leave for voter registration and other community organizing work in Mississippi. Moses, who had been working for voting rights in Mississippi since 1961, played a key role in persuading SNCC to accept white volunteers from the North.


Malcolm X and Black Consciousness

Many younger civil rights activists were drawn to the vision of Malcolm X, who:

ridiculed integrationist goalsurged black audiences to take pride in their African heritagebreak free from white domination

He broke with the Nation of Islam, made a pilgrimage to Mecca, and returned to America with changed views. He sought common ground with the civil rights movement, but was murdered in 1965. Even in death, he continued to point to a new black consciousness.


Born Malcolm Little, Malcolm X (1925–65) took the name “X” as a symbol of the stolen identity of African slaves. He emerged in the early 1960s as the foremost advocate of racial unity and black nationalism. The Black Power movement, initiated in 1966 by SNCC members, was strongly influenced by Malcolm X.


Selma and the Voting Rights Act of 1965

In Selma, Alabama, whites had kept blacks off the voting lists and brutally responded to protests. A planned march to Montgomery ended when police beat marchers. Just when it appeared the Selma campaign would fade, a white gang attacked a group of Northern whites who had come to help out, one of whom died. President Johnson addressed the nation and thoroughly identified himself with the civil rights cause, declaring “we shall overcome.” The march went forward.In August 1965, LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act that authorized federal supervision of voter registration in the South.Map: Impact of the Voting Rights Act of 1965


MAP 28.2 Impact of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 Voter registration among African Americans in the South increased significantly between 1960 and 1971.



Part Six:

Civil Rights Beyond Black and White


Mexican Americans & Mexican Immigrants

Mexican Americans formed groups to fight for their rights and used the courts to challenge discrimination.

Legal and illegal Mexican migration increased dramatically during and after WWII. During the 1950s, efforts to round up undocumented immigrants led to a denial of basic civil rights and a distrust of Anglos.


Delegates to the 1948 National Convention of the League of United Latin American Citizens met in Kingsville, Texas. After World War II, LULAC grew to about 15,000 members active in 200 local councils, mostly in Texas and California.


Puerto Ricans

Although Puerto Rican communities had been forming since the 1920s, the great migration came after WWII.

Despite being citizens, Puerto Ricans faced both economic and cultural discrimination.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the decline in manufacturing jobs and urban decay severely hit them.


Japanese Americans

During the 1950s, Congress removed the old ban against Japanese immigration and naturalization.

By 1965 some 46,000 immigrant Japanese had taken citizenship oaths.


Indian Peoples

During the 1950s, Congress passed a series of termination bills that ended tribal rights in return for cash payments and division of tribal assets. Indian activists challenged government policies leading to court decisions that reasserted the principle of tribal sovereignty. Reservation Indians remained trapped in poverty. Indians who had left the reservation lost much of their tribal identities.Urban Indian groups arose and focused on civil instead of tribal rights.


Remaking the Golden Door: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965

In 1965 Congress abolished all origin quotas and substituted overall hemispheric limits.

The consequences for the Asian American community were profound.


A Korean couple working behind the counter of their newly opened restaurant in Los Angeles, ca. 2000. In the thirty-five years after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the city’s Asian American population had grown to over 1.2 million, including the largest Korean community outside of Korea.


Part Seven:

Conclusion



Documents

Chapter 28 The Civil Rights Movement 1945 -1966 Chapter 28 The Civil Rights Movement 1945 -1966 OUT OF MANY A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE © 2009 Pearson