The Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1972
The Cases and Incidents That Galvanized a Movement
In the town of Topeka, Kansas, in 1950, there were two elementary schools, one for African American children, the other for white children. Seven year-old Linda Brown , African American of ethnicity, lived just four blocks from the school for white for children but across town from the school for black kids. Linda Brown’s father lost a case filed in behalf of his daughter in the lower courts, but his attorneys persisted with an appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States, which accepted the case and assigned its appellation in joint consideration of similar cases that had been referred on appeal to the Supreme Court. In 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the case for the unanimous opinion in favor of Brown and by extension those who had filed the other cases, asserting that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal
In August 1955 a fourteen year-old African American Emmett Till of Chicago, visiting relatives in Mississippi, sustained a fatal shot to the head from two white men who claimed that the youth had “talked fresh” to a white woman. Till was beaten so badly that his face was unrecognizable, as gained wide notice when photos were fun in Jet magazine, the Chicago Defender (a prominent and venerable black-owned newspaper), and in time the mainstream white media.
On 1 December 1955, a department store seamstress named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat at the front of the black section of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, as requested by a white person. When she was arrested, her connections as a local civil rights worker sent forth a concatenation of responses, including those from African American community leader E. D. Nixon, attorney Cliffor Durr, and Alabama State College English Professor Jo Ann Robinson. Montgomery pastor Martin Luther King, who led Dexter Avenue Baptist Church responded reluctantly to the call to head a movement that burgeoned into a 12-month boycott that culminated in the 13 November 1956 decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that determined that Montgomery’s segregated bus system was unconstitutional.
Martin Luther King, who had been satisfied with developing himself professionally as a local pastor, knew that his gifts now had to be employed in a wider effort that became the Civil Rights Movement. He assumed the position at the helm of the southern Christian Leadership Conference, employing a disciplined nonviolent approach adapted from the satyagraha movement of Mohandas K. Gandhi that had played a major role in winning independence for India from Great Britain in 1947.
Multiple Assertions of African American Rights, 1957-1963
The years 1957-1963 were replete with nonviolent actions meant to induce changes in practices that had continued for at least eighty years in the Jim Crow South, as well as for many decades in the urban North:
In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower called in the National Guard to protect the entry of nine African American high school students (Minniejean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Gloria Ray, Terrance Roberts, Jefferson Thomas, and Carlotta Walls) into Central High School of Little Rock, Arkansas. Hatemongering whites had mounted a massive intimidation effort that called forth heroic feats of courage on the part of local NAACP president Daisy Bates and others, but not until Eisenhower sent in the troops did the white antagonists have to relent.
The students who came to be known as the Little Rock Nine entered the halls of Central High School, and senior Ernest Green moved forward to graduation in spring 1958.
Martin Luther King continued to be the most prominent Civil Rights leader, but other organizations formed to work for the cause of African American Rights:
The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE, formed back in 1942 by James Farmer) worked out of a head office in Chicago and was at the forefront of many sit-ins for the desegregation of public lunch counters, restrooms, parks, theaters, and schools.
In 1960, 300 students came together at the behest Ellas Baker, a militant member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). By 1962, a Harvard-educated SNCC teacher by the name of Robert Moses came was heading SNCC, organizing a highly effective and disciplined staff working to ensure the right to vote in the South.
Late in 1960, Martin Luther King was arrested on a charge of disturbing the peace in Birmingham, Alabama. A call from Robert Kennedy, brother of John Kennedy, made a call that culminated in King’s release. This action did a great deal to swing the black vote in the 1960 presidential election toward Democrat John Kennedy in his race against Republican Richard Nixon, thereby garnering the support of needed votes in a close contest.
In 1961 came the Freedom Rides that produced such a dangerous showdown in Birmingham, Alabama, and impelled Robert Kennedy, Attorney General in his brother’s administration, to pressure southern bus companies and state governments to comply with federal law so as to comply with follow desegregated and nondiscriminatory policy regarding public transportation
In 1962 the National Guard in Mississippi was called in to protect the right of African American student James Meredith to enter the University of Mississippi. Meredith had National Guard escorts to classes, and at their peak troops stationed on the university’s campus totaled 20,000. Troops were still necessary when Meredith (who arrived as a transfer student with numerous previously earned credits) went through the graduation ceremony in August 1963.
Then in that very month, on 28 August 1963, came the March on Washington which catapulted Martin Luther King to even higher national prominence. Following the original vision of A. Philip Randolph, the various groups working in the Civil Rights Movement worked with meticulous effectiveness to bring forth 250,000 people, who gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to hear a litany of speakers on the cause of civil rights. Of the many eloquent speakers, Martin Luther King shown brightest of all with his ringing oratory in what has come to be known as the “I Have a Dream” speech. This piece of oratory moved many people in the United States who were watching on television or listening on the radio. The speech was a mighty call for the logical extension of morality and justice embedded in both the Bible and the United States Constitution to the realms of law and human relationships, envisioning among many other stirring images that day when “right down there in Alabama, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, little black boys and black girls will join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk as sisters and brothers.”
These many events from the momentous years 1957-1963, culminating in the enormously powerful March on Washington inspired Lyndon Baines Johnson to use all of his political skills to induce the United States Congress to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, giving statutory enforcement power to guarantees of citizenship in the 14th Amendment; and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, similarly making clear the imperative for all states to follow the 15th Amendment guaranteeing voting rights for all citizens. The assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963; and Fannie Lou Hamer’s unsuccessful but heroic effort to seat black members among the Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic Convention; each in its own way impelled Congress to act favorably on the vigorous requests from President Johnson.
Additions to Legal Foundation for African American Rights, 1966-1972
In the course of the late 1960s, the Johnson administration moved to establish the basis for a Great Society in which poverty would be radically reduced and racism would recede. Johnson secured passage of legislation to establish the Medicaid program to provide health care for people of low income, and Medicare to take care of the health needs of elderly people. He oversaw the provision of food stamps to people of low income for the purpose of purchasing nutritious food; additionally, the program for Women, Infants, and Children (W. I. C.) provided milk and other items vital to the health of pregnant women, infants, and young children.
Fair housing laws also went into effect, making residentially accessible areas in cities that had previously operated under restrictive housing covenants denying home purchases to people of certain national origins and races. And the Johnson administration founded the Job Corps to provide training
in work skills to people of low income. Johnson had won decisively against republican Barry Goldwater in 1964 but took stock of his political situation in the context of an increasingly unpopular Vietnam War and declined to run for president in 1968. Action to found social programs ebbed during the years of the President Richard M. Nixon administration, but in 1972 a Democratic-controlled Congress to enact the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Act and the Equal Opportunity Act, the “affirmative action bills” that had the effect of vigorously promoting job and higher educational opportunity for all United States citizens. The affirmative action bills immediately resulted in the appearance of many more women and people of color in the companies and colleges of the United States, and many more at the head of their own business establishments.
In the course of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, there came a voluble call for the assertion of Black Power. Out of the mouths and in the action of some African Americans this was a testimony of strength and solidarity that resonated with the call of the Godfather of Soul, James Brown to ,”Say it aloud: I’m black and I’m proud.” For others such as Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Toure) as head of CORE; and Bobby Seal, Huey Newton, and Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers; the assertion of Black Power came with a suggestion of violent means for establishing African American control over both established institutions and new, revolutionary organizations. This attitude had been present in the movement of the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims) whose demonstrations and promulgations in the early and middle 1960s had added to the political and social pressures that culminated in passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Malcolm X, after a pilgrimage to Mecca that turned him away from extreme racial antipathy for white people and toward a more conventional form of Islam, formed the Organization of Afro-American Unity that nevertheless also held out the possible use of violence under an “any means necessary” assertion of African American rights.
The Black Power Movement coincided with the Black Arts Movement, a leading articulator of which was Imamu Amiri Baraka, the name taken by the poet and essayist who was born Leroi Jones. Through the media of his several volumes of poetry, numerous essays, and plays staged in Berlin, Dakar, Paris, and the United States (his drama, Dutchman, was an Obie Award winner in 1964), Baraka became a leading proponent of Black Nationalism and Afro-Islamic culture.
The assassinations of Malcolm X (1965) and Martin Luther King (1968) seemed to energize the Black Power Movement. But by 1972, the energy of the movement had lost fervor. Conservative America seemed resurgent in the victory of Richard Nixon over George McGovern in the 1972 presidential contest. The shooting and death of Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in his own apartment at the hands of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) came at a time when the Black Panther organization was suffering from internal contentiousness and strain. Gains had been made and would be forthcoming in the political halls of the establishment and in community organizations for addressing the practical needs of people; African Americans Shirley Chisolm, Jessie Jackson, Carl Stokes, Thomas Bradley, Maynard Jackson, and Andrew Young would all rise to prominence in such mainstream political and social contexts.
But the advocacy for revolutionary change had waned by 1972, and year ahead, despite the advances for the African American middle class and establishment figures had left an angry and restive contingent of people still languishing in poverty, violence, and desperation at the urban core, the inner cities of the United States.
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