I | INTRODUCTION |
Civil Rights Movement
in the United States, political, legal, and social struggle by black
Americans to gain full citizenship rights and to achieve racial equality. The
civil rights movement was first and foremost a challenge to segregation, the
system of laws and customs separating blacks and whites that whites used to
control blacks after slavery was abolished in the 1860s. During the civil rights
movement, individuals and civil rights organizations challenged segregation and
discrimination with a variety of activities, including protest marches,
boycotts, and refusal to abide by segregation laws. Many believe that the
movement began with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and ended with the Voting
Rights Act of 1965, though there is debate about when it began and whether it
has ended yet. The civil rights movement has also been called the Black Freedom
Movement, the Negro Revolution, and the Second Reconstruction.
II | SEGREGATION |
Segregation was an attempt by white
Southerners to separate the races in every sphere of life and to achieve
supremacy over blacks. Segregation was often called the Jim Crow system, after a
minstrel show character from the 1830s who was an old, crippled, black slave who
embodied negative stereotypes of blacks. Segregation became common in Southern
states following the end of Reconstruction in 1877. During Reconstruction, which
followed the Civil War (1861-1865), Republican governments in the Southern
states were run by blacks, Northerners, and some sympathetic Southerners. The
Reconstruction governments had passed laws opening up economic and political
opportunities for blacks. By 1877 the Democratic Party had gained control of
government in the Southern states, and these Southern Democrats wanted to
reverse black advances made during Reconstruction. To that end, they began to
pass local and state laws that specified certain places “For Whites Only” and
others for “Colored.” Blacks had separate schools, transportation, restaurants,
and parks, many of which were poorly funded and inferior to those of whites.
Over the next 75 years, Jim Crow signs went up to separate the races in every
possible place.
The system of segregation also included the
denial of voting rights, known as disfranchisement. Between 1890 and 1910 all
Southern states passed laws imposing requirements for voting that were used to
prevent blacks from voting, in spite of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution
of the United States, which had been designed to protect black voting rights.
These requirements included: the ability to read and write, which disqualified
the many blacks who had not had access to education; property ownership,
something few blacks were able to acquire; and paying a poll tax, which was too
great a burden on most Southern blacks, who were very poor. As a final insult,
the few blacks who made it over all these hurdles could not vote in the
Democratic primaries that chose the candidates because they were open only to
whites in most Southern states.
Because blacks could not vote, they were
virtually powerless to prevent whites from segregating all aspects of Southern
life. They could do little to stop discrimination in public accommodations,
education, economic opportunities, or housing. The ability to struggle for
equality was even undermined by the prevalent Jim Crow signs, which constantly
reminded blacks of their inferior status in Southern society. Segregation was an
all encompassing system.
Conditions for blacks in Northern states were
somewhat better, though up to 1910 only about 10 percent of blacks lived in the
North, and prior to World War II (1939-1945), very few blacks lived in the West.
Blacks were usually free to vote in the North, but there were so few blacks that
their voices were barely heard. Segregated facilities were not as common in the
North, but blacks were usually denied entrance to the best hotels and
restaurants. Schools in New England were usually integrated, but those in the
Midwest generally were not. Perhaps the most difficult part of Northern life was
the intense economic discrimination against blacks. They had to compete with
large numbers of recent European immigrants for job opportunities and almost
always lost.
III | EARLY BLACK RESISTANCE TO SEGREGATION |
Blacks fought against discrimination whenever
possible. In the late 1800s blacks sued in court to stop separate seating in
railroad cars, states' disfranchisement of voters, and denial of access to
schools and restaurants. One of the cases against segregated rail travel was
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which the Supreme Court of the
United States ruled that “separate but equal” accommodations were
constitutional. In fact, separate was almost never equal, but the Plessy
doctrine provided constitutional protection for segregation for the next 50
years.
To protest segregation, blacks created new
national organizations. The National Afro-American League was formed in 1890;
the Niagara Movement in 1905; and the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. In 1910 the National Urban League was created
to help blacks make the transition to urban, industrial life.
The NAACP became one of the most important
black protest organizations of the 20th century. It relied mainly on a legal
strategy that challenged segregation and discrimination in courts to obtain
equal treatment for blacks. An early leader of the NAACP was the historian and
sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, who starting in 1910 made powerful arguments in
favor of protesting segregation as editor of the NAACP magazine, The
Crisis. NAACP lawyers won court victories over voter disfranchisement in
1915 and residential segregation in 1917, but failed to have lynching outlawed
by the Congress of the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. These cases laid
the foundation for a legal and social challenge to segregation although they did
little to change everyday life. In 1935 Charles H. Houston, the NAACP's chief
legal counsel, won the first Supreme Court case argued by exclusively black
counsel representing the NAACP. This win invigorated the NAACP's legal efforts
against segregation, mainly by convincing courts that segregated facilities,
especially schools, were not equal. In 1939 the NAACP created a separate
organization called the NAACP Legal Defense Fund that had a nonprofit,
tax-exempt status that was denied to the NAACP because it lobbied the U.S.
Congress. Houston's chief aide and later his successor, Thurgood Marshall, a
brilliant young lawyer who would become a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court,
began to challenge segregation as a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense
Fund.
A | World War I |
When World War I (1914-1918) began, blacks
enlisted to fight for their country. However, black soldiers were segregated,
denied the opportunity to be leaders, and were subjected to racism within the
armed forces. During the war, hundreds of thousands of Southern blacks migrated
northward in 1916 and 1917 to take advantage of job openings in Northern cities
created by the war. This great migration of Southern blacks continued into the
1950s. Along with the great migration, blacks in both the North and South became
increasingly urbanized during the 20th century. In 1890, about 85 percent of all
Southern blacks lived in rural areas; by 1960 that percentage had decreased to
about 42 percent. In the North, about 95 percent of all blacks lived in urban
areas in 1960. The combination of the great migration and the urbanization of
blacks resulted in black communities in the North that had a strong political
presence. The black communities began to exert pressure on politicians, voting
for those who supported civil rights. These Northern black communities, and the
politicians that they elected, helped Southern blacks struggling against
segregation by using political influence and money.
B | The 1930s |
The Great Depression of the 1930s
increased black protests against discrimination, especially in Northern cities.
Blacks protested the refusal of white-owned businesses in all-black
neighborhoods to hire black salespersons. Using the slogan “Don't Buy Where You
Can't Work,” these campaigns persuaded blacks to boycott those businesses and
revealed a new militancy. During the same years, blacks organized school
boycotts in Northern cities to protest discriminatory treatment of black
children.
The black protest activities of the 1930s
were encouraged by the expanding role of government in the economy and society.
During the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt the federal
government created federal programs, such as Social Security, to assure the
welfare of individual citizens. Roosevelt himself was not an outspoken supporter
of black rights, but his wife Eleanor became an open advocate for fairness to
blacks, as did other leaders in the administration. The Roosevelt Administration
opened federal jobs to blacks and turned the federal judiciary away from its
preoccupation with protecting the freedom of business corporations and toward
the protection of individual rights, especially those of the poor and minority
groups. Beginning with his appointment of Hugo Black to the U.S. Supreme Court
in 1937, Roosevelt chose judges who favored black rights. As early as 1938, the
courts displayed a new attitude toward black rights; that year the Supreme Court
ruled that the state of Missouri was obligated to provide access to a public law
school for blacks just as it provided for whites—a new emphasis on the equal
part of the Plessy doctrine. Blacks sensed that the national government
might again be their ally, as it had been during the Civil War.
C | World War II |
When World War II began in Europe in 1939,
blacks demanded better treatment than they had experienced in World War I. Black
newspaper editors insisted during 1939 and 1940 that black support for this war
effort would depend on fair treatment. They demanded that black soldiers be
trained in all military roles and that black civilians have equal opportunities
to work in war industries at home.
In 1941 A. Philip Randolph, head of the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a union whose members were mainly black
railroad workers, planned a March on Washington to demand that the federal
government require defense contractors to hire blacks on an equal basis with
whites. To forestall the march, President Roosevelt issued an executive order to
that effect and created the federal Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC)
to enforce it. The FEPC did not prevent discrimination in war industries, but it
did provide a lesson to blacks about how the threat of protest could result in
new federal commitments to civil rights.
During World War II, blacks composed about
one-eighth of the U.S. armed forces, which matched their presence in the general
population. Although a disproportionately high number of blacks were put in
noncombat, support positions in the military, many did fight. The Army Air Corps
trained blacks as pilots in a controversial segregated arrangement in Tuskegee,
Alabama. During the war, all the armed services moved toward equal treatment of
blacks, though none flatly rejected segregation.
In the early war years, hundreds of
thousands of blacks left Southern farms for war jobs in Northern and Western
cities. In fact more blacks migrated to the North and the West during World War
II than had left during the previous war. Although there was racial tension and
conflict in their new homes, blacks were free of the worst racial oppression,
and they enjoyed much larger incomes. After the war blacks in the North and West
used their economic and political influence to support civil rights for Southern
blacks.
Blacks continued to work against
discrimination during the war, challenging voting registrars in Southern
courthouses and suing school boards for equal educational provisions. The
membership of the NAACP grew from 50,000 to about 500,000. In 1944 the NAACP won
a major victory in Smith v. Allwright, which outlawed the white
primary. A new organization, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), was founded
in 1942 to challenge segregation in public accommodations in the North.
During the war, black newspapers
campaigned for a Double V, victories over both fascism in Europe and racism at
home. The war experience gave about one million blacks the opportunity to fight
racism in Europe and Asia, a fact that black veterans would remember during the
struggle against racism at home after the war. Perhaps just as important, almost
ten times that many white Americans witnessed the patriotic service of black
Americans. Many of them would object to the continued denial of civil rights to
the men and women beside whom they had fought.
After World War II the momentum for racial
change continued. Black soldiers returned home with determination to have full
civil rights. President Harry Truman ordered the final desegregation of the
armed forces in 1948. He also committed to a domestic civil rights policy
favoring voting rights and equal employment, but the U.S. Congress rejected his
proposals.
D | School Desegregation |
In the postwar years, the NAACP's legal
strategy for civil rights continued to succeed. Led by Thurgood Marshall, the
NAACP Legal Defense Fund challenged and overturned many forms of discrimination,
but their main thrust was equal educational opportunities. For example, in
Sweat v. Painter (1950), the Supreme Court decided that the
University of Texas had to integrate its law school. Marshall and the Defense
Fund worked with Southern plaintiffs to challenge the Plessy doctrine
directly, arguing in effect that separate was inherently unequal. The U.S.
Supreme Court heard arguments on five cases that challenged elementary- and
secondary-school segregation, and in May 1954 issued its landmark ruling in
Brown v. Board of Education that stated that racially segregated
education was unconstitutional.
White Southerners received the
Brown decision first with shock and, in some instances, with expressions
of goodwill. By 1955, however, white opposition in the South had grown into
massive resistance, a strategy to persuade all whites to resist compliance with
the desegregation orders. It was believed that if enough people refused to
cooperate with the federal court order, it could not be enforced. Tactics
included firing school employees who showed willingness to seek integration,
closing public schools rather than desegregating, and boycotting all public
education that was integrated. The White Citizens Council was formed and led
opposition to school desegregation all over the South. The Citizens Council
called for economic coercion of blacks who favored integrated schools, such as
firing them from jobs, and the creation of private, all-white schools.
Virtually no schools in the South were
desegregated in the first years after the Brown decision. One county in
Virginia did indeed close its public schools. In Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957,
Governor Orval Faubus defied a federal court order to admit nine black students
to Central High School, and President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to
enforce desegregation. The event was covered by the national media, and the fate
of the Little Rock Nine, the students attempting to integrate the school,
dramatized the seriousness of the school desegregation issue to many Americans.
Although not all school desegregation was as dramatic as in Little Rock, the
desegregation process did proceed—gradually. Frequently schools were
desegregated only in theory, because racially segregated neighborhoods led to
segregated schools. To overcome this problem, some school districts in the 1970s
tried busing students to schools outside of their neighborhoods.
As desegregation progressed, the
membership of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) grew. The KKK used violence or threats
against anyone who was suspected of favoring desegregation or black civil
rights. Klan terror, including intimidation and murder, was widespread in the
South in the 1950s and 1960s, though Klan activities were not always reported in
the media. One terrorist act that did receive national attention was the 1955
murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy slain in Mississippi by whites
who believed he had flirted with a white woman. The trial and acquittal of the
men accused of Till's murder were covered in the national media, demonstrating
the continuing racial bigotry of Southern whites.
IV | POLITICAL PROTEST |
A | Montgomery Bus Boycott |
Despite the threats and violence, the
struggle quickly moved beyond school desegregation to challenge segregation in
other areas. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a member of the Montgomery,
Alabama, branch of the NAACP, was told to give up her seat on a city bus to a
white person. When Parks refused to move, she was arrested. The local NAACP, led
by Edgar D. Nixon, recognized that the arrest of Parks might rally local blacks
to protest segregated buses. Montgomery's black community had long been angry
about their mistreatment on city buses where white drivers were often rude and
abusive. The community had previously considered a boycott of the buses, and
almost overnight one was organized. The Montgomery bus boycott was an immediate
success, with virtually unanimous support from the 50,000 blacks in Montgomery.
It lasted for more than a year and dramatized to the American public the
determination of blacks in the South to end segregation. In November 1956 the
Supreme Court upheld a federal court decision that ruled the bus segregation
unconstitutional. The decision went into effect December 20, 1956, and the black
community of Montgomery ended its boycott the next day.
A young Baptist minister named Martin
Luther King, Jr., was president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the
organization that directed the boycott. The protest made King a national figure.
His eloquent appeals to Christian brotherhood and American idealism created a
positive impression on people both inside and outside the South. King became the
president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) when it was
founded in 1957. SCLC wanted to complement the NAACP legal strategy by
encouraging the use of nonviolent, direct action to protest segregation. These
activities included marches, demonstrations, and boycotts. The violent white
response to black direct action eventually forced the federal government to
confront the issues of injustice and racism in the South.
In addition to his large following among
blacks, King had a powerful appeal to liberal Northerners that helped him
influence national public opinion. His advocacy of nonviolence attracted
supporters among peace activists. He forged alliances in the American Jewish
community and developed strong ties to the ministers of wealthy, influential
Protestant congregations in Northern cities. King often preached to those
congregations, where he raised funds for SCLC.
B | The Sit-Ins |
On February 1, 1960, four black college
students at North Carolina A&T University began protesting racial
segregation in restaurants by sitting at “white-only” lunch counters and waiting
to be served. This was not a new form of protest, but the response to the
sit-ins in North Carolina was unique. Within days sit-ins had spread throughout
North Carolina, and within weeks they were taking place in cities across the
South. Many restaurants were desegregated. The sit-in movement also demonstrated
clearly to blacks and whites alike that young blacks were determined to reject
segregation openly.
In April 1960 the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded in Raleigh, North Carolina, to help
organize and direct the student sit-in movement. King encouraged SNCC's
creation, but the most important early advisor to the students was Ella Baker,
who had worked for both the NAACP and SCLC. She believed that SNCC should not be
part of SCLC but a separate, independent organization run by the students. She
also believed that civil rights activities should be based in individual black
communities. SNCC adopted Baker's approach and focused on making changes in
local communities, rather than striving for national change. This goal differed
from that of SCLC which worked to change national laws. During the civil rights
movement, tensions occasionally arose between SCLC and SNCC because of their
different methods.
C | Freedom Riders |
After the sit-ins, some SNCC members
participated in the 1961 Freedom Rides organized by CORE. The Freedom Riders,
both black and white, traveled around the South in buses to test the
effectiveness of a 1960 Supreme Court decision. This decision had declared that
segregation was illegal in bus stations that were open to interstate travel. The
Freedom Rides began in Washington, D.C. Except for some violence in Rock Hill,
South Carolina, the trip southward was peaceful until they reached Alabama,
where violence erupted. At Anniston one bus was burned and some riders were
beaten. In Birmingham, a mob attacked the riders when they got off the bus. They
suffered even more severe beatings by a mob in Montgomery, Alabama.
The violence brought national attention to
the Freedom Riders and fierce condemnation of Alabama officials for allowing the
violence. The administration of President John Kennedy interceded to protect the
Freedom Riders when it became clear that Alabama state officials would not
guarantee safe travel. The riders continued on to Jackson, Mississippi, where
they were arrested and imprisoned at the state penitentiary, ending the protest.
The Freedom Rides did result in the desegregation of some bus stations, but more
importantly, they demonstrated to the American public how far civil rights
workers would go to achieve their goals.
D | SCLC Campaigns |
SCLC's greatest contribution to the civil
rights movement was a series of highly publicized protest campaigns in Southern
cities during the early 1960s. These protests were intended to create such
public disorder that local white officials and business leaders would end
segregation in order to restore normal business activity. The demonstrations
required the mobilization of hundreds, even thousands, of protesters who were
willing to participate in protest marches as long as necessary to achieve their
goal and who were also willing to be arrested and sent to jail.
The first SCLC direct-action campaign
began in 1961 in Albany, Georgia, where the organization joined local
demonstrations against segregated public accommodations. The presence of SCLC
and King escalated the Albany protests by bringing national attention and
additional people to the demonstrations, but the demonstrations did not force
negotiations to end segregation. During months of protest, Albany's police chief
continued to jail demonstrators without a show of police violence. The Albany
protests ended in failure.
In the spring of 1963, however, the
direct-action strategy worked in Birmingham, Alabama. SCLC joined the Reverend
Fred Shuttlesworth, a local civil rights leader, who believed that the
Birmingham police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, would meet protesters with
violence. In May the SCLC staff stepped up antisegregation marches by persuading
teenagers and school children to join. The singing and chanting adolescents who
filled the streets of Birmingham caused Connor to abandon restraint. He ordered
police to attack demonstrators with dogs and firefighters to turn high-pressure
water hoses on them. The ensuing scenes of violence were shown throughout the
nation and the world in newspapers, magazines, and most importantly, on
television. Much of the world was shocked by the events in Birmingham, and the
reaction to the violence increased support for black civil rights. In Birmingham
white leaders promised to negotiate an end to some segregation practices.
Business leaders agreed to hire and promote more black employees and to
desegregate some public accommodations. More important, however, the Birmingham
demonstrations built support for national legislation against segregation.
E | Desegregating Southern Universities |
In 1962 a black man from Mississippi,
James Meredith, applied for admission to University of Mississippi. His action
was an example of how the struggle for civil rights belonged to individuals
acting alone as well as to organizations. The university attempted to block
Meredith's admission, and he filed suit. After working through the state courts,
Meredith was successful when a federal court ordered the university to
desegregate and accept Meredith as a student. The governor of Mississippi, Ross
Barnett, defied the court order and tried to prevent Meredith from enrolling. In
response, the administration of President Kennedy intervened to uphold the court
order. Kennedy sent federal marshals with Meredith when he attempted to enroll.
During his first night on campus, a riot broke out when whites began to harass
the federal marshals. In the end, two people were killed, and several hundred
were wounded.
When the governor of Alabama, George C.
Wallace, threatened a similar stand, trying to block the desegregation of the
University of Alabama in 1963, the Kennedy Administration responded with the
full power of the federal government, including the U.S. Army, to prevent
violence and enforce desegregation. The showdowns with Barnett and Wallace
pushed Kennedy, whose support for civil rights up to that time had been
tentative, into a full commitment to end segregation. In June 1963 Kennedy
proposed civil rights legislation.
F | The March on Washington |
The national civil rights leadership
decided to keep pressure on both the Kennedy administration and the Congress to
pass the civil rights legislation proposed by Kennedy by planning a March on
Washington for August 1963. It was a conscious revival of A. Philip Randolph's
planned 1941 march, which had yielded a commitment to fair employment during
World War II. Randolph was there in 1963, along with the leaders of the NAACP,
CORE, SCLC, the Urban League, and SNCC. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered a
moving address to an audience of more than 200,000 civil rights supporters. His
“I Have a Dream” speech in front of the giant sculpture of the Great
Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, became famous for how it expressed the ideals of
the civil rights movement.
After Kennedy was assassinated in November
1963, the new president, Lyndon Johnson, strongly urged its passage as a tribute
to Kennedy's memory. Over fierce opposition from Southern legislators, Johnson
pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress. It prohibited segregation
in public accommodations and discrimination in education and employment. It also
gave the executive branch of government the power to enforce the act's
provisions.
G | Voter Registration |
The year 1964 was the culmination of
SNCC's commitment to civil rights activism at the community level. Starting in
1961 SNCC and CORE organized voter registration campaigns in heavily black,
rural counties of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. SNCC concentrated on voter
registration, believing that voting was a way to empower blacks so that they
could change racist policies in the South. SNCC worked to register blacks to
vote by teaching them the necessary skills—such as reading and writing—and the
correct answers to the voter registration application. SNCC worker Robert Moses
led a voter registration effort in McComb, Mississippi, in 1961, and in 1962 and
1963 SNCC worked to register voters in the Mississippi Delta, where it found
local supporters like the farm-worker and activist Fannie Lou Hamer. These civil
rights activities caused violent reactions from Mississippi's white
supremacists. Moses faced constant terrorism that included threats, arrests, and
beatings. In June 1963 Medgar Evers, NAACP field secretary in Mississippi, was
shot and killed in front of his home.
In 1964 SNCC workers organized the
Mississippi Summer Project to register blacks to vote in that state. SNCC
leaders also hoped to focus national attention on Mississippi's racism. They
recruited Northern college students, teachers, artists, and clergy—both black
and white—to work on the project, because they believed that the participation
of these people would make the country more concerned about discrimination and
violence in Mississippi. The project did receive national attention, especially
after three participants, two of whom were white, disappeared in June and were
later found murdered and buried near Philadelphia, Mississippi. By the end of
the summer, the project had helped thousands of blacks attempt to register, and
about 1000 had actually become registered voters.
The Summer Project increased the number of
blacks who were politically active and led to the creation of the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). When white Democrats in Mississippi refused to
accept black members in their delegation to the Democratic National Convention
of 1964, Hamer and others went to the convention to challenge the white
Democrats' right to represent Mississippi. In a televised interview, Hamer
detailed the harassment and abuse experienced by black Mississippians when they
tried to register to vote. Her testimony attracted much media attention, and
President Johnson was upset by the disturbance at the convention where he
expected to be nominated for president. National Democratic Party officials
offered the black Mississippians two convention seats, but the MFDP rejected the
compromise offer and went home. Later, however, the MFDP challenge did result in
more support for blacks and other minorities in the Democratic Party.
In early 1965 SCLC employed its
direct-action techniques in a voting-rights protest initiated by SNCC in Selma,
Alabama. When protests at the local courthouse were unsuccessful, protesters
began a march to Montgomery, the state capital. As the marchers were leaving
Selma, mounted police beat and tear-gassed them. Televised scenes of that
violence, called Bloody Sunday, shocked many Americans, and the resulting
outrage led to a commitment to continue the Selma march. King and SCLC then led
hundreds of people on a five-day, 80-km (50-mi) march to Montgomery. The Selma
march created broad national support for a law to protect Southern blacks' right
to vote. President Johnson persuaded Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of
1965, which suspended the use of literary and other voter qualification tests.
Later amendments banned these tests, which often prevented blacks from voting.
In the three years following its enactment, almost a million more blacks in the
South registered to vote. By 1968 black voters were having a significant effect
on Southern politics. During the 1970s blacks were seeking and winning public
offices in majority-black electoral districts.
V | CHANGING METHODS |
After the passage of the Voting Rights Act of
1965, the focus of the civil rights movement began to change. Martin Luther
King, Jr., began to focus on poverty and racial inequality in the North. At the
same time, younger activists challenged his leadership of the civil rights
movement, criticizing his interracial strategy and his appeals to moral
idealism; they no longer believed that appeals to idealism would cause whites to
renounce racism.
In 1965 King joined protests against school
discrimination in Chicago. The next year he led marches against housing
discrimination in the same city. King's Chicago efforts resulted in little
positive change and were widely criticized. After 1965 King also focused on
economic issues, particularly black poverty, and advocated income
redistribution. In 1967 he began planning what he called the Poor People's
Campaign which included another march on Washington, D.C. It was intended to
pressure national lawmakers to address the issues of black poverty and violence
in cities. In 1968 King was supporting striking garbage workers in Memphis,
Tennessee when he was assassinated. The march on Washington for the Poor
People's Campaign took place in the spring of 1968 after King's death, but it
failed to achieve greater congressional commitment for addressing black poverty.
It became clear that race problems in the Northern cities were serious and
perhaps harder to address than segregation in the South because these problems
were not the results of specific laws that could be changed.
The main opponent of King's moderate policies
was SNCC, led by Stokely Carmichael, who popularized the term the Black
Power. Black Power advocates were influenced by Malcolm X, the Nation of
Islam minister who had been assassinated in early 1965. They viewed Malcolm's
black nationalist philosophy, which emphasized black separatism and
self-sufficiency, as more realistic for dealing with racism in the United
States. They also appreciated Malcolm's emphasis on black pride and
self-assertion.
The national media reported Black Power as a
new and dangerous development in the civil rights movement, and the slogan
immediately drew condemnation from whites for its racially separatist message.
Leaders of the other national civil rights organizations also denounced Black
Power. The slogan helped to undermine what had once been a national consensus
for civil rights.
In 1967 Carmichael and his successor as
chairman of SNCC, H. Rap Brown, became national symbols of black radicalism.
Whites condemned them as instigators of racial division and violence. Opposition
became stronger in 1968 when the Black Panther Party began promoting Black
Power. The Panthers advocated violence to achieve their goals and battled police
in Chicago and Oakland. Several of its leaders were killed, and others were
imprisoned for killing policemen.
VI | END OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT |
For many activists and some scholars, the
civil rights movement ended in 1968 with the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Others have said it was over after the Selma march, because after Selma the
movement ceased to achieve significant change. Some, especially blacks, argue
that the movement is not over yet because the goal of full equality has not been
achieved.
Racial problems clearly still existed in the
United States after King's assassination in 1968. Urban poverty represented a
continuing and worsening problem and remained disproportionately high among
blacks. A major controversy in the 1970s was desegregation of public education,
where achieving a racial balance often required busing students outside of their
school districts. A broader question concerned equal opportunity for blacks, an
issue which affirmative-action programs attempted to address. These programs,
which emerged in the 1970s, supported the hiring and promotion of minorities and
women. Their fairness continues to be debated and litigated.
Although full equality has not yet been
reached, the civil rights movement did put fundamental reforms in place. Legal
segregation as a system of racial control was dismantled, and blacks were no
longer subject to the humiliation of Jim Crow laws. Public institutions were
opened to all. Blacks achieved the right to vote and the influence that went
with that right in a democracy. Those were indeed long steps toward racial
equality.
In addition, some Southern states in the
late 1990s and the early part of the 21st century attempted to atone for some of
the killings perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan and other racists during the civil
rights movement. Many of the perpetrators were never brought to trial to face
state murder changes, leaving the South with a legacy of unpunished crimes.
In 1994 Ku Klux Klan member Byron de la
Beckwith was convicted of the 1963 murder of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers
in Jackson, Mississippi. In 1998 Ku Klux Klan imperial wizard Sam Bowers was
convicted of the 1966 murder of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer in Hattiesburg,
Mississippi. In 2001 and 2002 two men were convicted for their part in the 1963
bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young black
girls. In 2003 another Klan member was convicted of killing black sharecropper
Ben Chester White. In 2005 former Klan member Edgar Ray Killen was tried on
murder and manslaughter charges in the 1964 murders of three civil rights
activists—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—outside
Philadelphia, Mississippi. Killen was convicted on the manslaughter charges and
sentenced to 60 years in prison. See also African American History and
the Sidebar, “Interview with a Civil Rights Activist.”
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