The Fight for Racial Justice

Jim Crow: Legal separation of blacks from whites on public conveyances, in public facilities, and in housing. Long the custom in parts of the country, the South established de jure segregation; i.e. segregation “in law.” Blacks had to ride in separate cars on trains, in the back of trolleys and streetcars; had to sit in the balcony at a theater; and, later, could not live in certain neighborhoods. De facto segregation (i.e. in fact but not in law) existed in other parts of the country, particularly as related to housing.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): Case involving segregation in Louisiana. Homer Plessy was removed from a segregated train car because he was black despite the fact that he had a proper ticket. The Supreme Court ruled that as long as blacks were provided equal accommodations, the state could segregate the races, establishing the “separate but equal” doctrine.

Lynching was used to intimidate and restrict the rights of African Americans. Many white victims of lynching were helping blacks. In what year were the greatest number of African Americans victims of lynching?

LYNCHINGS DURING THE 1890S

YEAR WHITES BLACKS TOTAL

1890 11 85 96

1891 71 113 184

1892 69 161 230

1893 34 118 152

1894 58 134 192

1895 66 113 179

1896 45 78 123

1897 35 123 158

1898 19 101 120

1899 21 85 106

A 1892B 1894C 1895D 1897

Educator, writer, and leading black statesman of his day; he established Tuskegee Institute in Alabama; wrote an autobiography, Up from Slavery; and became the leading advocate for improving the living and social conditions of blacks through education and learning a useful trade. In 1895, he delivered an important speech at the Atlanta Exposition: in it, he called on blacks to stay in the South; to get along with whites; to concern themselves with economic self-improvement, and not to worry about political rights. His conservative, from the bottom up, approach caused many civil rights advocates to call him an accommodationist, a black person willing to let blacks remain second-class citizens

Booker T. Washington (1856-1915):

Black writer from Boston, educated at Harvard; author of Souls of Black Folk. A leading foe of Washington’s plan for gradual improvement of conditions for blacks, he argued instead for a top down approach where black leaders—the talented tenth—led the race to social equality. He co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Racially integrated, middle-class organization that used litigation and lobbying legislatures to achieve social justice, ending segregation and gaining civil rights for blacks. Many branches were established to combat segregation in housing. Other goals included federal anti-lynching laws and ensuring voting rights.

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963):

Buchanan v. Warley, (1917): Louisville case brought by the NAACP to challenge segregation, specifically laws that prohibited blacks from moving into white neighborhoods and vice versa. Despite the Plessy precedent, the Supreme Court found the zoning laws unconstitutional. The ruling caused some cities to find other ways to maintain residential segregation, such as with restrictive covenants—clauses written into deeds prohibiting homeowners from reselling their property to blacks (or Jews and Italians). Some cities just ignored the ruling and dared blacks to challenge the system.

Great Migration: Mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North, beginning around 1917. More than 3 million blacks left their homes in the South to escape racial violence and discrimination and find opportunity in war industries in northern cities. There are more job opportunities in the North, but it was no “Promised Land.” Racial violence and discrimination also existed: notably in the 1919 Chicago Race Riot—13 days of violence that left 38 dead, 537 injured and more than 1,000 homeless

Harlem Renaissance: Artistic movement among blacks in New York. It included: musicians, Louis Armstrong – trumpet; Duke Ellington – piano; Bessie Smith –singer; writers, Zora Neale Hurston – Their Eyes were Watching God; Langston Hughes – poetry; Alain Locke – essays, such as “The New Negro”; and political leaders, Marcus Garvey – the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA): seen as a radical, he called for pan-Africanism, unity among all black people of the world

Roosevelt “Black Cabinet”: Created by Mary McLeod Bethune and Robert C. Weaver, it was an informal adviser to the Roosevelt administration (through Bethune’s friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt with respect to African-American issues. It succeeded in getting blacks placed in increasingly important positions of the federal government and helped to end discrimination against blacks in employment in federal projects, most notably housing projects.

Double V Campaign: During World War I, black American troops were often forced to fight under French command because the U.S. Army was segregated. During that war, blacks had contributed in war production. But after the war, they lost their jobs and were forced to live in segregated neighborhoods. As WWII began, black leaders were adamant that this time they would benefit from doing their patriotic duty. The Double V Campaign told blacks to contribute to the war effort, but to make sure that they gained more equality as a result. It represents the most important element in leading to the civil rights movement.

A. Philip Randolph: Leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping-Car Porters, he became a civil rights leader in the 1940s when he threatened to hold a “March on Washington” to protest discrimination against blacks in the war industries. Rather than see a potential increase in racial tensions in wartime, President Roosevelt agreed to create the Fair Employment Practices Committee to reduce discrimination.

Second Great Migration: With the U.S. entry into war, millions of Americans moved to find work in war production factories. After the creation of the FEPC, blacks joined the flood of people relocating in different parts of the country. An estimated 700,000 blacks moved out of the South to the West Coast or northern cities. Many more followed after the war. As blacks moved into northern and western cities, they often faced housing shortages, job discrimination, and white racism.

Executive Order 9981, (1948): Signed by Harry Truman in the Presidential election campaign of 1948, it created the President’s Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services and led to the eventual integration of the military services in September 1954 when the last all-black unit had been abolished; represents a major step forward toward equal opportunity for blacks and foreshadows the advances of the “Civil Rights Movement” of the 1950s

Shelley v. Kraemer, 1948: St. Louis case involving restrictive covenants. The Supreme Court had earlier ruled covenants constitutional because they were private contracts, but the Fred Vinson Court altered that decision, finding their enforcement to be state action and therefore unconstitutional. Some property contracts still contain restrictive covenants, but they have no power in law. As a result of the Shelley decision, blacks began moving into homes they could afford in white neighborhoods and an extreme wave of white-on-black violence over housing ensued.

PLESSY v. FERGUSON (1896)•Declared segregation constitutional•Established the “separate-but-equal” doctrine•Confirmed an 1883 decision that had overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875•Gave rise to Jim Crow laws legalizing segregation, especially in the South

BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION (1954)•Declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional and in violation of the 14th Amendment•Stated that separate public educational facilities were “inherently unequal”•Marked the beginning of a massive movement by blacks to challenge segregation in all forms

CIVIL RIGHTS SUPREME COURT DECISIONS

How did the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education agree or disagree with the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision?

A It agreed by stating that segregation is in keeping with the Civil Rights Act of 1875.B It disagreed by stating that segregation violated the Fifteenth Amendment.C It agreed by stating that separate facilities are equal. D It disagreed by stating that separate educational facilities are unequal.

Brown I (1954): Case brought by the NAACP, argued by Thurgood Marshall, involving school segregation cases in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous decision. Using the 13th Amendment(“badge of slavery”) and 14th Amendment equal protection clause, the Court overturned the Plessy precedent, arguing that “separate but equal” can never be equal because of the negative stigma separation gives blacks

Brown II (1955): Second ruling after studying the history of the Civil War Amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to find a remedy in school segregation cases. Court rules that states must act “with all deliberate speed” to admit students to schools on a racially nondiscriminatory basis. In shaping relief, Courts may consider a school’s physical condition, school administration, personnel, busing, and revision of school districts, local laws, and regulations.

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS

Jim Crow America

Southern Manifesto: 1956 statement by Southern Governors, Congressmen, and Senators. It condemned the Court’s action in Brown II, calling it a “clear abuse of judicial power [that] is creating chaos and confusion in the states.” The signers pledged themselves “to use all lawful means to bring about a reversal of this decision . . . and to prevent the use of force in its implementation.” It was an example of the South’s intent to use “massive resistance” to stop desegregation.

Little Rock Central High School:

An example of southern massive resistance to block civil rights advances. Whites protested at the school and made it too dangerous for the young black students (Little Rock Nine) to go to Central High School in 1957. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus backed himself into a corner when he supported the white supremacists blocking integration. He sent the National Guard to keep the peace and keep the children out of the school. Pressure on Faubus to follow a court order to integrate grew as the story made national headlines. To save himself politically, he asked President Eisenhower to send federal troops to carry out the integration. The 101st Airborne escorted the children into the school.

Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Ed., (1971): North Carolina case to find if county must integrate schools by busing students outside their neighborhoods to overcome established residential patterns. Court noted, “All things being equal, with no history of discrimination, it might well be desirable to assign pupils to schools nearest their homes. But all things are not equal in a system that has been deliberately constructed and maintained to enforce racial segregation.” The county must bus students to eliminate “one-race schools” even if the ride was, on average, 35 minutes.

Milliken v. Bradley, (1974): Michigan case involving busing students from Detroit to suburbs, combining 53 school districts into a single nonracial school system in the region. Court ruled that it could not force independent suburban districts to correct Detroit’s history of segregation. This effectively ended the Court’s active participation in integrating schools.

Regents of University of California v. Bakke, (1978): Allen Bakke applied for admission to UC-Davis School of Medical. UC-Davis had a quota system where 16% of places in class were set aside for minorities, causing minorities with lower test scores to be admitted before Bakke. When he learned of this, Bakke claimed he was a victim of reverse discrimination, that he had been denied admission to medical school because he is white The Court, in a 5-4 decision, agreed with Bakke; it called the quota unconstitutional for violating the 14th Amendment equal protection clause. The Court, however, also ruled that affirmative action and considering a race in college admission are legal because of the goal to achieve diversity. Affirmative action for gender equity purposes was upheld in Johnson v. Santa Clara County (1987)

The Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 The fight for civil rights (legal rights guaranteed to all citizens by the Constitution) for African Americans and other minorities dates back to the colonial era when religious minorities fought for toleration: such as the Baptists challenge to the Anglican authority in Virginia in the 1700s. And the challenge on behalf of African Americans dates to the days of slavery. But the civil rights movement is a specific event, with a beginning and an end, and with a specific cast of characters (heroes and villains), that dates from the beginning the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown in May 1954 to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1968.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had fought for civil rights since its formation in 1909. It worked in courts and in legislatures to change laws. A focus of its fight was segregation, the legal policy of separating blacks and whites on buses, in restaurants, schools, neighborhoods, etc. The NAACP, led by general counsel Thurgood Marshall, won a major victory against segregation in public education in 1954. In the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS, the Supreme Court ended a nearly sixty-year old legal doctrine of “separate but equal” (the legal rule that said states could segregate the races as long as the schools, trains, etc. were equal) established in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson. The victory in Brown was the major court success in the movement, but it did not lead to integration (combining of the races) because white southerners ignored the court and fought back. Southern white massive resistance to integration would continue into the 1970s.

The grassroots civil rights movement began a year after the NAACP’s victory in Brown. It began in Montgomery, Alabama, where facilities were segregated by race. On buses, blacks had to ride at the back and if there were no seats in the black section, then they had to stand—even if there were empty seats in the white section of the bus. On December 1, 1955, a black seamstress, who happened to be a civil rights activist trained in the tactic of nonviolence, named Rosa Parks, decided it was time to fight back. Tired from a day’s work and loaded down with groceries, she sat down in the black section of a bus. The white section filled up. When a white man told her to give him her seat she refused. Parks was arrested and spent the night in jail. When the black community learned of the incident, it began a boycott of the bus company: blacks refused to ride the buses, instead walking or car-pooling to work. The boycott lasted for more than a year ending when the Supreme Court ruled the segregation unconstitutional. The boycott brought forward a unifying leader of the civil rights movement.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: Born in Atlanta, King was an intelligent, articulate, and charismatic head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a coalition of southern religious leaders. He was the main spokesman for the tactic of “militant non-violent direct action”: wherein blacks protested segregation by purposely putting themselves in harm’s way to provoke a violent response by police or other whites, and then would not fight back. This way they focused attention on discrimination and won the sympathy of moderate and liberal whites throughout the country.

The SCLC’s most effective use of nonviolent direct action occurred in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. After a week of protest little resulted, except that King was put in jail and wrote his famous plea for justice, “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” The Letter was a response to a New York Times editorial advertisement in which several nationally-renowned clergymen called on King to wait and let racial tensions settle for a time. King rejected the suggestion, declaring: “This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see . . . that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”

In the second week of protest, the SCLC recruited school children to draw attention to discrimination. Thousands of children marched and were arrested—at one point some 700 children were in jail. When they met to march one day in early May, the Birmingham police tried to break-up the demonstration. Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor ordered the police to use dogs and the fire department to use fire hoses to stop the protest. Graphic newsfilm shows the viciousness of the attacks—little children being pushed across Kelly Ingram Park by the force of water sprayed by fire hoses. On the evening newscasts, viewers across the country and around the world saw how fierce massive resistance could become. It was a terrible day, but a major victory for the tactic of nonviolence.

Many organizations joined the NAACP and the SCLC in the fight for justice. Young blacks formed the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), pronounced, “snick). SNCC adopted tactics used by NAACP youth members. It would hold what was called a “sit-in.” Black students would enter a restaurant and sit down at the counter and wait for service. They would remain there, taking abuse from whites and not being served, until the police carted them off to jail. The famous early lunch counter sit-in occurred in 1960 in Greensboro and was led by students from UNC A&T.

SNCC’s most prominent action, Freedom Summer, occurred in 1964. Hundreds of students, led by Robert Moses, spent the summer in Mississippi registering blacks to vote. They formed a political party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, to challenge the white-controlled Democratic Party. And brought national attention to the voting rights issue. Freedom Summer also saw one of the worst tragedies of the movement. Three SNCC activists, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, disappeared while driving in eastern Mississippi. Searchers discovered the bodies of the young men buried in a levee. The experience of Freedom Summer led many of SNCC activists to reject integration and kick whites out of the organization.

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), created a different tactic. CORE’s white and black student members held a “Freedom Ride:” a bus trip through the South to integrate bus stations in 1961. The trip caused tension throughout the South, but it flared into violence in Anniston, Alabama, and led to a near riot when the demonstrators got to Montgomery.

Despite occasional disagreement and jealousy among the civil rights groups, they came together for a day in 1963. On August 28, 1963, all the leading groups (except the Black Muslims and their main spokesman Malcolm X, opponents of integration and non-violent resistance) led a March on Washington to protest discrimination and force the Kennedy administration to enact a meaningful civil rights law. More than 250,000 people, black and white, joined in the event on the brutally hot summer day.

They marched from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial (recognizing the importance of the Great Emancipator) where they gathered and listened to speeches, including the most famous: Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream.” The march marked the high point of the civil rights movement, both in its unity and its effectiveness.

Two weeks later, however, the movement would fracture and begin its slow decline into factionalism, when four young girls were killed and several others were injured in the Klan bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

Cynthia Wesley Addie Mae Collins Carole Robertson Denise McNair

Bloody Sunday, Selma, Alabama: On March 7, 1965, SCLC and SNCC marchers began a march from Selma to the state capital, Montgomery, demanding voting rights and to ask Governor George Wallace to protect blacks trying to register to vote. As John Lewis, Hosea Williams, and the nearly 600 marchers crossed the Edmund Pettis Bridge, Dallas County police and Alabama State Troopers blocked their way and told them to disperse. The non-violent marchers declared their right to march and the police attacked them. Using tear gas, whips, and clubs, the police wailed on the marchers for several minutes.

The shocking police attack was filmed and played-back on news programs that evening and for the next several weeks. Public opinion was outraged. A second march, with Martin Luther King in attendance was planned, but stopped because of the murder of the Rev. James Reeb, a white minister who had joined the march, causing further outrage. A third march began the following week, reaching Montgomery on the 24th. But it too was not without violence. Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit woman who had joined the march after seeing the events of “Bloody Sunday,” was run off the road and murdered by Klansmen while taxiing marchers back to Selma.

By the summer of 1965, Congress had passed Lyndon Johnson’s proposal for a Voting Rights Act.

The civil rights movement moved north after its victories of 1964 and 1965

In 1964 and 1965 the civil rights movement bore fruit. Partly in response to the murder of John F. Kennedy and because of the leadership of Lyndon Johnson, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (forbidding discrimination on account of race in public facilities, among other things) and Voting Rights Act of 1965 (guaranteeing minorities full right of participation in elections: removing literacy tests and other hurdles).

Father James Groppi and the NAACP Youth Council

By 1965, the mood of many blacks had changed. Many were tired of the battles and the struggle and of the violence that they were having to put up with. More radical voices started to yell out to meet white violence with black violence. Just days after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, a minor incident in Watts, the black section of Los Angeles, blew up into a major riot. African Americans rioted in the streets, burning cars, smashing windows and looting stores, and shooting at police and firemen. The Watts riot marked the beginning of the decline of the civil rights movement. It was followed by riots in the “long, hot summers” of 1966 and 1967. Race riots in Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit in 1967 destroyed millions of dollars of property, left many dead and most clearly expressed the mood that blacks were tired of waiting for their rights, tired of police brutality, tired of not having a job and not being able to get one.

New leaders emerged, calling for Black Power to fight white power. A militant organization called the Black Panthers took up weapons (machine guns) to threaten the overthrow of the white establishment.

Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)

Amid the urban racial violence and tension, Congress enacted the Housing and Urban Development Act to provide nearly $3 billions for urban renewal and public housing. In 1966, a new cabinet-level agency was created, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Everyone new it was time to appoint an African-American to cabinet; so President Johnson named a longtime-housing advocate to the post. Robert C. Weaver, co-founder of the informal Roosevelt Black Cabinet, became the first African American in the federal cabinet.

1968, a crucial year for many reasons, marked the final gasp of the civil rights movement and the tactic of nonviolence. Blacks continued to demonstrate, this time in northern cities and this time to end housing discrimination. They won the last piece of major civil rights legislation: Civil Rights Act of 1968 (better known as the Fair Housing Act), which prohibited discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. But on April 4th, the movement lost its great leader. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated by a white Alabamian, James Earl Ray, in Memphis. Upon King’s death, blacks throughout the country took to the streets in riot. Washington, DC, saw some of the worst of it.

Some of King’s colleagues tried to continue the movement, notably with the Poor People’s March in 1968, but it had lost its focus and its force. The Supreme Court limited the scope of laws ordering busing to integrate public schools. In 1978, the policy of government, business, and educational institutions giving special preference to minority applicants to redress past discrimination—affirmative action—came under fire. The court ruled that schools could not use quotas to ensure racial representation in student bodies in the Bakke case. But the Court upheld the idea of affirmative action for purposes of creating diversity in the University of Michigan cases in 2003.

In the end, the civil rights movement can be viewed as a major success if we look at its initial strategy: to end segregation by law (de jure segregation) in the South and elsewhere and to give blacks the same political rights as whites. If we look at it as a movement to improve race relations throughout the U.S. and to create a society wherein a person is judged by the “content of his character” rather than the color of his skin (as Martin Luther King, Jr., declared), then the movement was a mixed success. Things improved for blacks (politically and economically) but whites resisted social equality. Rather than live peaceably with blacks many whites fled increasingly black cities to live in “lily-white” suburbs. The residential segregation that resulted made integration of schools more difficult and kept the races apart. The race war of the late 1960s became an uncomfortable truce that flares into conflict from time to time—whether in the example of the O.J. Simpson trials, the Rodney King incident, or the Cincinnati riots of 2001. The “color line” has been America’s great problem, throughout its history, and it is still not solved.