Transcript Part One: - Schoolwires

The Civil Rights Movement, 1945–1966
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
 The Montgomery Bus Boycott promoted
non-violence
 E.D. Nixon, the president of the Alabama
NAACP and also head of the local
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters who
used Rosa Parks’ 1955 arrest as an incident on
which blacks would take a stand on
segregation
 MIA- The Montgomery Improvement
Association was an organization of
Montgomery’s black ministers formed to
coordinate a black boycott system
 Robert Graetz, Glenn Smiley and Clifford Durr
worked to make the black boycott of
Montgomery’s busses a success
Origins of the Movement
 The WWII experiences of African Americans laid
the foundations for the subsequent struggle of
Civil Rights
 A mass migration to the North brought political
power to African Americans working through the
Democratic Party

Blacks migrated north in the 1940s for economic opportunity and
political freedom
 President Truman called for a President’s
Committee on Civil Rights

The Report To Secure These Rights (1947), called
for
 Legal
attack on segregated housing
 Protection of voting rights
 Permanent civil rights division in the Justice
Department
 In the 1948 election the State’ Rights Party
nominated Strom Thurmond
 They did not like that Truman was taking a
stance on Civil Rights
 Truman won re-election
 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 baseball
 Ralph Bunche’s winning a Nobel Peace prize
 United Nations diplomat won for arranging the ArabIsraeli Truce of 1948

 A new generation of jazz musicians created be-
bop

It was a more complex rhythm and extended
improvisation than previous jazz styles
 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
 African American poet Paul L. Dunbar wrote
“We Wear the Mask”
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades or eyes,
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
 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


This overturned the separate but equal doctrine of Plessy V.
Ferguson
This was a unanimous decision
 The court postponed ordering a clear timetable
to implement the decision
 Southern whites declared their intention to
nullify the decision.
Brown Decision
 Missouri v. ex.rel. Gaines

Stated that the University of Missouri law school
had to either admit African Americans or build and
equal school for them
 McLaurin V. Oklahoma State Regents (1950)

Court stated that the regulations forcing
segregation of blacks inevitably created a “badge
of inferiority”
 In Little Rock, Arkansas, a judge ordered
integration
 The governor Orval Faubus 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.
 During the Civil Rights Movement, the state
where the most incidents in the movement
occurred in Alabama
No Easy Road to Freedom,
1957–62
 Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged from the bus
boycott as a prominent national figure. A welleducated 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 AfricanAmerican church
 King founded the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference to promote
nonviolent direct action to challenge
segregation.
 King was greatly influenced by Mohandas
Gandhi
 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.
 On February 1, 1960, four black students from
the North Carolina Agricultural &
Technological College entered a Woolworth’s
store and ordered coffee and doughnuts from
the lunch counter, thereby beginning the
Greensboro sit-in
 This sit-in ended in July of 1960 because an
economic boycott of the stores targeted by
the sit-in severely reduced profits

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 sitins across the South,
mostly by college
students, demanding an
end to segregation in
restaurants and other
public places.
 The Nashville sit-in was organized by a black
minister James Lawson

He hoped to organize a community based on
Christian idealism and Gandhian principles
 The leader of the Atlanta sit-ins were
Martin Luther King
 Lonnie King
 Julian Bond
 Two Morehouse undergraduates

 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.

Consisted of young people under that age of 22
 The young activists were found at the forefront of
nearly every major civil rights battle.
 The race issue had moved to center-stage by 1960
 As vice president, Nixon had strongly supported civil rights.
 He minimized his own connection to the Civil Rights movement
because he wanted to attract southern white voters
 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.
 The National Director of CORE, James Farmer
announced in 1961 that an interracial group would
conduct a Freedom Ride into the South to test
Southern compliance with court orders banning
segregation in interstate travel
 The FBI and Justice Department knew of the plans
but were absent when mobs firebombed a bus and
severely beat the Freedom Riders.
 Freedom Ride of 1961
Unsuccessful
 Disbanded May 17, 1961
 Organized buy CORE
 They goal was to test compliance with court
orders banning segregation in interstate travel
 Designed to provoke the SOuth

 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
 Freedom Rides
 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

U.S. air force veteran James Meredith became the first blacks student
to attend “Ole Miss”
The Movement at High Tide
 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
 Replied to the claim that the campaign was illegal and reinforce that
freedom was never given voluntarily by the oppressor
 Respond to the clergy who had deplored the Birmingham protests
 Set out the moral issues at stake in Birmingham
 Defend the need for immediate action against the charger that the
Birmingham campaign was ill timed
 The Public Safety Commissioner Eugene
“Bull” Connor of Birmingham who
advocated the use of Billy clubs, water
cannons and police dogs
 A TV audience saw water cannons and
snarling dogs break up a children’s march.
 After the violence erupted, the Justice
Department arranged a truce that called



For an immediate end to the civil rights protests there
The creation of biracial city committee to oversee
desegregation of public facilities
The hiring of African Americans by city business
 George Wallace the Governor of Alabama
denounced the Justice Department truce in
Birmingham and threatened to personally
block the admission of black students to the
University of Alabama
 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
 Walter Reuther, A. Phillip Randolph and Joan Boez played a
role in the March
 JFK 1963 legislation
 End segregation In
public facilitates
 Bolster federal authority
for funding
 Ensure that blacks had
the right to vote
 Deny funds for
discriminatory programs
 March on Washington
 Walter Reuther
 Joan Boez
 John Lewis
 A. Phillip Randolph

All played a roled
 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




Authorized the Justice Department to institute suites to
desegregate public schools
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
Offered Federal aid to communities desegregating their schools
Outlawed discrimination in employment
 In 1964, civil rights activists targeted Mississippi for a
“freedom summer” that saw 900 volunteers come to
open up this closed society
 The leader of the Mississippi NAACP , Medgar Evers
was murdered outside his home in 1963
 Tensions developed between white
volunteers and black movement veterans
 The project riveted national attention on
Mississippi
 With an overwhelming Democratic victory
in the 1964 elections, movement leaders
pushed for federal legislation to protect
the right to vote.
 Many younger civil rights activists were drawn to the vision
of Malcolm X, who:



ridiculed integrationist goals
urged black audiences to take pride in their African heritage
break free from white domination
 The leading spokesman for the Nation of Islam in the 1950s
and early 1960s was Malcolm X
 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.
 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.
Civil Rights Beyond Black and White
 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.
 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.
 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
 In the 1978 Supreme Court case U.S. v. Wheeler
recognized tribal independence except where
limited by federal treaty or law
 Urban Indian groups arose and focused on civil
instead of tribal rights
 During the 1950s, Congress removed the old ban
against Japanese immigration and naturalization
 In 1965, a new immigration law increased
opportunities for Asians to immigrate to the
United States
 As a result, the demographics of the Asian-
American population drastically changed.