The History of Segregation in

America

(Abridged)

Reconstruction 1865-77 After the Civil War 1861-1865, the

federal government made strides toward equality.

Blacks voted, held many political offices.

The Freedmen’s Bureau was a gov’t program to help Blacks find land, it established schools and colleges.

Reconstruction

The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed all citizens with equal protection under the law.

The Fifteenth Amendment said the right to vote shall not be denied on the basis of race.

However… Jim Crow laws required that

Blacks have separate facilities.The Jim Crow laws were racial

segregation laws enacted between 1876 and 1965 in the United States at the state and local level. They mandated de jure (in law) racial segregation in all public facilities in Southern states of the former Confederacy, with, starting in 1890, a "separate but equal" status for African Americans.

In the Northern states they practiced de facto (in practice) segregation. Segregation was practiced, but not enforced by law.

After the post-Civil War Reconstruction period ended in 1876, white supremacy was largely restored across the South, and the segregationist policies known as Jim Crow soon became the law of the land. Southern blacks were forced to make their living working the land as part of the sharecropping system, which offered little in the way of economic opportunity, especially after a boll weevil epidemic in 1898 caused massive crop damage across the South. And while the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) had been officially dissolved in 1869, it continued underground after that, and intimidation, violence and even lynching of black southerners were not uncommon practices in the Jim Crow South.

On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy boarded a car of the East Louisiana Railroad that was designated for use by white patrons only. Although Plessy was born a free person and was one-eighth black and seven-eighths white, under a Louisiana law enacted in 1890, he was classified as Black, and thus required to sit in the "colored" car. When Plessy refused to leave the white car and move to the colored car, he was arrested and jailed.

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), is a landmark United States Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in private businesses (particularly railroads), under the doctrine of "separate but equal".

In a 7 to 1 decision the Court rejected Plessy's arguments based on the Fourteenth Amendment, seeing no way in which the Louisiana statute violated it. Instead, it contended that the law separated the two races as a matter of public policy.

14th Amendment: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

As a result, states could legally operate under segregation so long as opportunities and amenities were “separate, but equal.”

But, things weren’t always equal…

White elementary school in South Boston (1930s).

African American school, Halifax County (1930s).

NAACP

Founded in 1909 by W.E.B. Dubois Fought for equality

NAACP fought in the courts Thurgood Marshall was hired by the

NAACP to argue in the Supreme Court against school segregation. He won.

He was later the 1st Black Supreme Court Justice.

Thurgood Marshall

Images of Segregation

Texas sign

Dallas Bus Station

Harry Truman 1945-53

Ordered the armed forces AND the government to be desegregated.

The named plaintiff, Oliver L. Brown,  African American. Brown's daughter Linda, a third grader, had to walk six blocks to her bus stop to ride to Monroe Elementary, her segregated black school one mile away. But Sumner Elementary, a white school, was only seven blocks from her house.

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954),[1] was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students and denying black children equal educational opportunities unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 which permitted segregation. 

The key holding of the Court was that, even if segregated black and white schools were of equal quality in facilities and teachers, segregation by itself was harmful to black students and unconstitutional. They found that a significant psychological and social disadvantage was given to black children from the nature of segregation itself. This aspect was vital because the question was not whether the schools were "equal", which under Plessy they nominally should have been, but whether the doctrine of separate was constitutional. The justices answered with a strong "no."

School Integration

The attitude of many states after the 1954 Brown decision was:

COME COME MAKE ME!!MAKE ME!!

The Struggle

Many African Americans and whites risked their lives and lost their lives to remedy this situation.

Rosa Parks was not the first, but she was the beginning of something special.

Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955

Rosa Parks was arrested for violating the segregation laws of Montgomery, Alabama.

In Response. . .

For over a year, Blacks boycotted the buses.They carpooled and walked through all weather conditions

Many were arrested for an “illegal

boycott” including their leader. . .

Martin Luther King Jr.

Gandhi inspired King to be direct and nonviolent towards Whites.

•King was arrested thirty times in his 38 year life.•His house was bombed or nearly bombed several times•He faced death threats constantly

Federalism

When Federal troops are sent to make states follow federal laws

The Civil Rights Movement struggle was mostly getting the federal government to make state governments to follow federal law.

States were not following federal law, so Feds were sent in.

James Meredith, University of Mississippi, escorted to class by U.S. marshals and troops. Oct. 2, 1962.

James Meredith tried to enroll at the University of Mississippi.

He arrived on campus with 500 federal marshals and was met by 2,500 violent protesters.

President Kennedy went on national television to announce that he was sending in troops.

The troops ended the protest but hundreds had been injured and two killed.

A small force of marshals remained to protect Meredith until he graduated in 1963.

Freedom RidersOn May 4, 1961, a group of 13 African-American and white civil rights activists launched the Freedom Rides, a series of bus trips through the American South to protest segregation in interstate bus terminals. The Freedom Riders, who were recruited by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a U.S. civil rights group, departed from Washington, D.C., and attempted to integrate facilities at bus terminals along the way into the Deep South. African-American Freedom Riders tried to use “whites-only” restrooms and lunch counters, and vice versa. The group encountered tremendous violence from white protestors along the route, but also drew international attention to their cause. Over the next few months, several hundred Freedom Riders engaged in similar actions. In September 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued regulations prohibiting segregation in bus and train stations nationwide.

On May 14, 1961, the Greyhound bus was the first to arrive in Anniston, Alabama. There, an angry mob of about 200 white people surrounded the bus, causing the driver to continue past the bus station. The mob followed the bus in automobiles, and when the tires on the bus blew out, someone threw a bomb into the bus. The Freedom Riders escaped the bus as it burst into flames, only to be brutally beaten by members of the surrounding mob. The second bus traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, that day, and those riders were also beaten by an angry white mob, many of whom brandished metal pipes. Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor (1897-1973) stated that, although he knew the Freedom Riders were arriving and violence awaited them, he posted no police protection at the station because it was Mother’s Day.

Police use dogs to quell civil unrest in Birmingham, Alabama in May of 1963. Birmingham's police commissioner "Bull" Connor also allowed fire hoses to be turned on young civil rights demonstrators.

March on Washington 1963

White America saw 500 kids get arrested and attacked with dogs.

There was much support now for civil rights legislation.

The event was highlighted by King's "I Have a Dream" speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial. August 28, 1963.

“I have a dream… a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed:

‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created

equal.”

Lyndon B. Johnson ’63-’68

Pushed Civil Rights Act through Congress

Passed more pro-civil rights laws than any other president

Civil Rights Act of ’64

Civil Rights Act of ’68

Voting Rights Act of ’65

24th Amendment banning poll taxes

March on SelmaOn 25 March 1965, Martin Luther King led thousands of nonviolent demonstrators to the steps of the capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, after a 5-day, 54-mile march from Selma, Alabama, where local African Americans, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had been campaigning for voting rights. King told the assembled crowd: ‘‘There never was a moment in American history more honorable and more inspiring than the pilgrimage of clergymen and laymen of every race and faith pouring into Selma to face danger at the side of its embattled Negroes’’

The campaign in Selma and nearby Marion, Alabama, progressed with mass arrests but little violence for the first month. That changed in February, �however, when police attacks against nonviolent demonstrators increased. On the night of 18 February, Alabama state troopers joined local police breaking up an evening march in Marion. In the ensuing melee, a state trooper shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old church deacon from Marion, as he attempted to protect his mother from the trooper’s nightstick. Jackson died eight days later in a Selma hospital.

In response to Jackson’s death, activists in Selma and Marion set out on 7 March, to march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery. While King was in Atlanta, his SCLC colleague Hosea Williams, and SNCC leader John Lewis led the march. The marchers made their way through Selma across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where they faced a blockade of state troopers and local lawmen commanded by Clark and Major John Cloud who ordered the marchers to disperse. When they did not, Cloud ordered his men to advance. Cheered on by white onlookers, the troopers attacked the crowd with clubs and tear gas. Mounted police chased retreating marchers and continued to beat them.

Television coverage of ‘‘Bloody Sunday,’’ as the event became known, triggered national outrage. Lewis, who was severely beaten on the head, said: ‘‘I don’t see how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam—I don’t see how he can send troops to the Congo—I don’t see how he can send troops to Africa and can’t send troops to Selma,’’

James Meredith, right, pulled himself to cover against a parked car after he was shot by a sniper. Meredith had been leading a march to encourage African Americans to vote. He recovered from the wound, and later completed the march. June 7, 1966

The Assassination of Dr. KingApril 3,1968

Left to right: Hosea Williams, Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. Ralph David Abernathy on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel Memphis hotel, a day before King's assassination.

Aides of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King point out to police the path of the assassin's bullet. Joseph Louw, photographer for the Public Broadcast Laboratory, rushed from his nearby motel room in Memphis to record the scene moments after the shot. Life magazine, which obtained exclusive rights to the photograph, made it public. April 4, 1968.

The end of the movement… For many people the civil rights movement

ended with the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968.

Others believe it was over after the Selma March, because there have not been any significant changes since then.

Still others argue the movement continues today because the goal of full equality has not yet been achieved.