Source A

Capricious humiliation

When did I become an activist?  Was it that day when I was twelve years old and bent over to pump air into my bicycle tires at a Gulf station on Terry Road, and a big white guy skipped up from behind and kicked me over? 

When I turned to ask, ‘Why’ his smug answer, ‘Cause I wanted to’, made a lasting impression...  I soon started doing small things to defy the system.

Mississippi doctor Gilbert R Mason, remembering an incident from his youth.

Source B

I spent four years in the Army to free a bunch of Dutchmen and Frenchmen, and I’m hanged if I’m going to let the Alabama version of the Germans kick me around when I get home.  No sireebob!

I went into the army a nigger; I’m coming out a man.

Unnamed Alabama discharged army Corporal.

Source C

If you're white, you're right; if you're brown stick around; if you're black, stay back.

A Black folk-saying featured as a line in Black, Brown and White by Big Bill Broonzy (1946).

The Fight for Civil Rights, 1945-65

The events of the fight for Black civil rights in America form one of the most momentous and inspiring stories in history.  However, for GCSE you only need to know the key events, which please find listed below (green for legal achievements/ red for opposition, black for actions). 
If you click on the on the orange arrows (u) I have provided explanatory accounts of what happened. 

   

• 1946: Truman set up the civil rights committee
  • President Truman (1945-53) was racist in private, and had once joined the KKK, but now he made a number of speeches supporting Civil Rights, particularly for returning black soldiers.  He gave black workers equality in the armed forces and the civil service, and ruled that government contracts could not be given to companies which refused to employ black workers. 
  • In 1946, Truman set up a civil rights committee which recommended anti-lynching laws, voting rights, an end to discrimination in interstate travel, a Fair Employment Board, and a permanent Commission on Civil Rights.  However, Congress refused to enact its recommendations into law.
• 1954: Brown v Topeka
  • In 1954, the NAACP fought the Board of Education of Topeka (Kansas) in the Supreme Court.  NAACP lawyers asserted the right of black Church Minister Oliver Brown to send his daughter to the nearby white school, rather than a black school far away.  In a landmark ruling, Chief Justice Warren stated that ‘separate but equal’ was unconstitutional and that segregated schools were psychologically harmful to children.
• 1955: Revival of the KKK
  • Brown v Topeka brought the Ku Klux Klan back to life, led by Robert Shelton and the ‘White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan’.  Shelton declared desegregation ‘communist’, thus linking two fears of white southerners – the third being that black men might violate white women.
  • The Klan received passive support from southern whites, especially Protestant churches.  The organisation was racist and violent.  Murders and bombings increased.
  • Klansmen who did these things were often protected by the police, who were themselves members of the Klan.  In addition, juries made up of white people were reluctant to find people guilty of Klan activities. 
  • In the South, White Citizens Councils went through the same voters’ lists finding excuses to delete the names of black voters.  ‘Uppity’ blacks were fired.  And a number of southern states outlawed the NAACP
• 1955: Montgomery bus boycott:
  • In December 1955, Rosa Parks sat on a bus on her way home from work in Montgomery, Alabama.  The bus was full, and when a white man got on, the driver ordered Rosa to stand up.  She refused and was arrested. 
  • Rosa was a trained NAACP activist.  Her stand was taken on purpose, after a number of incidents of rudeness and discrimination against blacks on Montgomery’s buses. 
  • Choosing a young local preacher named Martin Luther King as their leader, the black people of Montgomery decided to boycott the buses.  Thousands of black people walked to work, while the city’s 210 black cab-drivers offered seats for the cost of the bus fare.  A car-pool of supporters of the boycott was also organise to get black people to work.  The boycott lasted 381 days. 
  • King and his supporters called themselves the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA).  The MIA also hired NAACP lawyers to take the case to the Supreme Court. 
  • The MIA deliberately sought only reasonable reforms – black drivers on black routes, and that white bus drivers be polite to blacks.  It did not even challenge the idea of segregation, asking only that seats on city buses be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis, with black people filling up seats from the rear, white passengers from the front. 
  • The local White Citizen’s Council opposed the MTA’s proposals.  Its membership doubled.  It ordered local officials to harass boycott leaders – King was arrested for speeding.  In January 1956 his home was bombed by the KKK. 
  • But the boycott was ruining the bus company financially, and local businesses were losing custom (local shopkeepers lost $1 million). 
  • On 13 November, the city chiefs – claiming that it was in effect a taxi service operating without a proper licence – got the car-pool stopped in the courts,.  It would have meant the defeat of the boycott, but it was rendered pointless when, that same day, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on buses was unconstitutional.  NAACP leader Thurgood Marshall remarked: ‘All that walking for nothing’. 
  • The boycott – and Rosa Parks – became an inspiration to the civil rights movement.  It demonstrated that, when Black Americans united, they could succeed, and that violent opposition only increased support. 
  • The success of the boycott increased black confidence – when the KKK, robed and hooded, drove through the black areas of town, blacks came out and waved at them.  There were copycat boycotts throughout the South. 
  • But the success was limited.  Everything else in Montgomery was still segregated.  And the boycott had revealed the depth of racism and determination of some whites.  Rosa and her husband lost their jobs.  She received death threats, and had to move to Detroit.  . 
• 1957: Civil Rights Act
  • After huge opposition in Congress, President Eisenhower passed a civil rights law which banned “intimidating, coercing or otherwise interfering with the rights of persons to vote” in Presidential or Congressional elections, and which allowed Black Americans to serve on Federal Juries. 
  • Against the advice of other Black leaders, Martin Luther King organised a ‘votes-for-all’ march in Washington in support of Eisenhower’s Bill.  It was attended by 20,000 people and was regarded as a success. 
• 1957: Little Rock School
  • By 1957, the Supreme Court’s Brown v Topeka ruling had not resulted in any immediate changes in schools.  It did not order segregated schools to be abolished – it just said they were wrong.  Most of the twenty segregated states simply ignored it.  The government did not force them to end segregation.  And where states did try to change, some schools closed rather than desegregate, and mobs gathered to stop black children going to white schools
  • On 23 September 1957, nine black students tried to attend Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.  A mob of 1,000 barred their way.  Two days later, the children went into school … protected by 11,000 soldiers.  The crowd shouted: ‘2, 4, 6, 8; we aren’t going to integrate’. 
  • In school, the black students were assaulted and abused.  Back in the black community, they faced the anger of those who said the ‘meddling nine’ were making life harder for black people. 
  • Little Rock is often presented in textbooks as a victory for civil rights, but really it was a defeat.  Few other schools dared to desegregate, and few black children wanted to face the danger.  In 1964, only 3% of America’s black children attended desegregated schools.  Little Rock itself was only fully desegregated in 1972.
• 1957: SCLC
  • Martin Luther King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).  But the SCLC was poorly organised, and at first failed to make an impact.  When the SCLC tried to organise the registration of 3 million new black voters in 1957 Act, they only managed to add 160,000 more names.
• 1960: Greensboro sit-ins
  • In 1960, in Greensboro, North Carolina, four college students went to the local Woolworths store, and sat down at the white section of the lunch counter.  The first day they were simply ignored, so they returned next day with 30 students; this time they got in the local newspaper.  Next day there were 66 black students, and after a week of escalating trouble – including a bomb threat – the store was forced to close. 
  • The protest immediately spawned copycat sit-ins all over the South, involving perhaps 50,000 students in all.  The protesters were humiliated and assaulted.  Not all of them managed not to fight back. 
  • The sit-ins were a new tactic for civil rights – they were ‘direct action’. 
  • At the end of the sit-ins, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC (‘Snick’) was formed.
• 1961: Freedom Rides
  • In May 1961, CORE organised the ‘Freedom Rides’, where young blacks tried to exercise their right in law to travel on segregated interstate buses.  It was a calculated martyrdom – the riders knew they would be attacked.  When a first bus reached Alabama, the tyres were slashed and the bus set on fire; the mob tried to hold the doors shut so that the passengers would be burned alive.  When a second bus reached Birmingham, Alabama, the police and KKK attacked the riders with clubs and chains as they left the bus.  White freedom riders were especially badly beaten by the mob. 
  • In all, there were 60 Freedom Rides, involving 450 very brave people.  Most were beaten and/or imprisoned.  While they waited for connections, the freedom riders would also go and break the rules in segregated restaurants and hotels. 
  • Many SNCC students participated in the Rides, which King supported.  CORE, SNCC and SCLC all ignored the government’s request to stop the Rides because they were causing civil unrest, and in the end Attorney General Robert Kennedy had to act to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision that segregation on interstate travel was illegal. 
• 1961: Albany campaign
  • In 1961, SNCC students began a campaign against desegregation in Albany, Georgia, including sit-ins and freedom rides.  Older civil rights leaders in the city invited King, who – much to the annoyance of the SNCC – led a march and met the City Council.
  • The police refused to use violence, and simply arrested and fined 1000 protestors.  Eventually, King ‘ran out’ of supporters prepared to be jailed.  Instead of desegregating its amenities, the Council closed parks, sold the swimming pool and took all the seats out of the library. 
  • King left believing that Albany was a failure.  However, after he left, a Black Voter Registration campaign was very successful, and in 1962 the city desegregated all its facilities.
• 1963: Birmingham campaign
  • King chose Birmingham because of its reputation for racism (it had even banned a book which showed black and white rabbits), and because the town’s police chief ‘Bull’ Connor was known to be hot-headed.  King called it ‘the most segregated city in America’.  He demanded the desegregation of eating places, and the employment of black sales staff.
  • Although King (as always) insisted on non-violence, his campaign was named ‘Project C’ – and the ‘C’ stood for confrontation.  The demonstrations began with sit-ins at lunch counters in downtown stores, and with a succession of marches, during one of which King was arrested.
  • Actually, initial support for King in Birmingham was poor, so on 3rd May he recruited a thousand school children to join one of the marches.  As expected, the police attacked with water hoses, dogs and batons.  There was a media outcry.  King was thrown into solitary confinement, and the KKK bombed his motel room (shortly after the state troopers guarding it mysteriously left). 
  • Blacks rioted, and the government was forced to step in.  The City authorities gave in and desegregated the restaurants; soon after they desegregated all Council facilities.
• 1963: Washington Freedom March – ‘I have a Dream’ speech
  • In August 1963 King organised a march which drew a quarter of a million people (including at least 75,000 white supporters) to hear his brilliant ‘I have a dream’ speech before the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.
  • Watched by million on live TV, to the cheers of the crowd, he finished with the words of the Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’
  • By the end of 1963, King had become the leader of the Civil Rights Movement.  He had proved he could manipulate the media, and he was the most famous Civil Rights campaigner.  Also the government supported him, because it realised he was more moderate than other agitators.
• 1963: Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital
  • George Simkins, a dentist and NAACP leader in Greensboro, North Carolina, bought n action against the hospital when it refused to treat one of his patients.  The Court of Appeals ruled that separate-but-equal hospitals were unconstitutional, thus ending segregation in hospitals.
• 1964: Civil Rights Act
  • President Johnson secured the Civil Rghts Act, outlawing discrimination based on race, color, religion, or gender.  It prohibited unequal application of voter registration, racial segregation in schools, and discrimination in public housing and federal programmes. 
  • The mechanisms to enforce the law were weak, but were strengthened as time went on.
• 1965: Voting Rights Act
  • Enforced the right to vote – notably, banning literacy tests.  This massively increased Black voter registration and turnout.
• 1965: Selma March
  • In 1965, King went to Selma Alabama.  Again, he chose it because its sheriff, Jim Clark, could be relied on to get violent.  King knew that non-violent protests ‘make people inflict violence on you’, whereby they give themselves bad publicity and destroy their own case.  So he provoked violence. 
  • On ‘Bloody Sunday’, 7 March 1965, brutality against the marchers was such that there was national outrage when it was shown on TV, and it became one of the reasons why Johnson’s Voting Rights Act passed through Congress in August that year.

  

Source E

We're through with tokenism and gradualism and see-how-far-you've-comeism.  We're through with we've-done-more-for-your-people-than-anyone-elseism.  We can't wait any longer.  Now is the time.

Martin Luther King, speaking in 1963, three weeks after the Birmingham campaign.

Consider:

1.  What is Source D saying about the situation of Black Americans in 1950?

2.  Studying the information on this page, make a list of 'successes' and 'failures' for the Civil Rights Movement 1945-65.  What areas of Black inequality had not been addressed AT ALL?

3.  How did Martin Luther's tactics differ from those of Thurgood Marshall (NAACP) and James Farmer (CORE)?  Which strategy in your opinion achieved the most for Black Civil Rights 1945-65 – justify your decision.