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Six Degrees of Segregation: Teaching the Long Civil Rights Movement – Part 5 Voting Rights

Six Degrees of Segregation: Teaching the Long Civil Rights Movement – Part 5 Voting Rights. Yohuru Williams, PhD Vice President for History Education The American Institute for History Education. Part 6: Voting Rights.

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Six Degrees of Segregation: Teaching the Long Civil Rights Movement – Part 5 Voting Rights

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  1. Six Degrees of Segregation: Teaching the Long Civil Rights Movement – Part 5Voting Rights Yohuru Williams, PhD Vice President for History Education The American Institute for History Education

  2. Part 6: Voting Rights The 15th Amendment:Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. The Civil War Amendments 1865-1870 The Civil Rights Cases Plessy v. Ferguson 1883 1896 Residential Education Public Jim Crow Justice Voting Rights Employment Segregation Accommodations Disfranchisement Unfair labor

  3. 6# The Sixth Degree of Segregation Voting Rights • United States v. Reese (1876) • Poll Tax, Literacy Test, Grandfather Clause • Guinn v. United States (1915) • Nixon v. Herndon (1926) • The White Primary • The Election of 2000

  4. United States v. Cruikshank 1875 The 15th Amendment

  5. US v. Reese (1875) • Reese had refused to collect poll tax from Blacks, effectively barring them from registering to vote. In a narrow interpretation, the court found in favor of Reese saying in effect that the 15th amendment did not confer the right to vote on anyone, but only prevented discrimination by the state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Reese testified that he did not discriminate based on race. As far as the Court was concerned, the South was free to settle it problems as best it could. This opens the door for literacy tests, and other methods used to deny Negroes voting rights.

  6. Women’s Suffrage and Civil Rights (1907)

  7. Looking for the Six Degrees of Segregation • Documents: • Jim Crow Laws • Pauli Murray Recalls Segregation • Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)

  8. Historical Fingerprinting: Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail • “Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or. unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place.”

  9. Answering your essential questions . . . • Elementary and Middle School teachers “great personalities” will drive your discussion of Civil Rights. You can easily teach the Six Degrees of Segregation through their encounters with Segregation.

  10. Elementary Education • In the case of Civil Rights the Big Six are Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, WEB Dubois, A Phillip Randolph, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King.

  11. Also feel free to substitute important female Civil Rights Leaders . . . • Frederick Douglass (Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth) • Booker T. Washington (Margaret Murray Washington) • WEB Dubois (Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells • A. Phillip Randolph (Ella Baker) • Thurgood Marshall (Constance Baker Motley, Mary Bethune) • Martin Luther King (Rosa Parks)

  12. Slavery (1619-1860) Emancipation (1861-1877) Jim Crow (1877-1910) Jazz (1910-1940) Civil Rights 1940-1970 Frederick Douglass (circa 1818-1895) Booker T. Washington(1856-1915) WEB Dubois (1868-1963) A. Phillip Randolph (1889-1979) Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993) Martin Luther King (1929-1968) Using AIHE strategies like ESP you can cover the sweep of Civil Rights History through significant leaders

  13. Segregation: The long civil rights movement • Missouri Soldier Spotswood Rice (1864) • French Military Directive regarding Black Soldiers (1919) • Executive Order 8802 • Executive Order 9908

  14. Document # 1Pauli Murray Recalls Segregation,1956 • Anna (Pauli) Murray was born in Baltimore on 20th November, 1910. Both of her parents died when she was still very young. She and her five brothers and sisters were raised by relatives in Baltimore. Eventually she went to live with her aunt, Pauline Fitzgerald, a school teacher. After graduating from Hillside High School at the head of her class, she moved to New York City. Murray attended Hunter College and financed her studies with various jobs. However, after the Wall Street Crash, unable to find work, Murray was forced to abandon her studies. • In the 1930s Murray worked for the Works Projects Administration (WPA) and as a teacher in the New York City Remedial Reading Project. • Murray also became involved in the civil rights movement. In 1938 she began a campaign to enter the all-white University of North Carolina. With the support of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Murray's case received national publicity. However, it was not until 1951 that Floyd McKissick became the first African American to be accepted by the University of North Carolina. During this campaign she developed a life-long friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt. • A member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), Murray also became involved in attempts to end segregation on public transport and this resulted in her arrest and imprisonment in March 1940 for refusing to sit at the back of a bus in Virginia.

  15. Other Considerations: Virginia’s Anti-miscegenation Law • Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter had known each other since childhood in Central Point, Virginia. In 1958, the two traveled to Washington, D.C., to get married since they couldn’t legally marry in Virginia. They returned to Virginia, and a few months later, both were arrested and taken to jail. They plead guilty to “unlawful cohabitation.” The court suspended their one-year sentence in prison on the condition that they leave Caroline Country, Virginia, and not return together for twenty-five years.

  16. Mississippi Black Codes1865An Act to Confer Civil Rights on Freedmen, and for other Purposes • Section 3. All freedmen, free negroes or mullatoes who do now and have herebefore lived and cohabited together as husband and wife shall be taken and held in law as legally married, and the issue shall be taken and held as legitimate for all purposes; and it shall not be lawful for any freedman, free negro or mulatto to intermarry with any white person; nor for any person to intermarry with any freedman, free negro or mulatto; and any person who shall so intermarry shall be deemed guilty of felony, and on conviction thereof shall be confined in the State penitentiary for life; and those shall be deemed freedmen, free negroes and mulattoes who are of pure negro blood, and those descended from a negro to the third generation, inclusive, though one ancestor in each generation may have been a white person.

  17. If “Loving” you is wrong . . . • The Lovings moved to Washington and eventually appealed their convictions all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Virginia defended its anti-miscegenation laws on two grounds: • 1) The laws punished “equally both the white and the Negro participants in an interracial marriage, these statutes, despite their reliance on racial classifications, do not constitute an invidious discrimination based upon race”

  18. Racial Intermarriage Loving vs. Virginia 388 U.S. 1 (1967) • 2) Virginia further argued, assuming that the Equal Protection Clause did not void miscegenation statutes because of racial classifications, it fell under the logical exercise of the police powers of the state to do so in the interest of both races.

  19. Racial Intermarriage Loving vs. Virginia 388 U.S. 1 (1967) • In finding that Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law violated the Lovings’ constitutional rights, the court rejected both arguments. Racial classifications are suspect, and the state must demonstrate a “permissible state objective, independent of the racial discrimination which it was the object of the Fourteenth Amendment to eliminate.” • Post-Civil War legislation (Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments) was designed to remove the color line and declare all citizens equal before the law, and the court rejected the notion that the equal protection requirement was satisfied just because blacks and whites were penalized equally for intermarrying.

  20. Loving vs. Virginia 388 U.S. 1 (1967) • The court noted that the laws prohibited interracial marriage with whites, “designed to maintain White Supremacy.” Every other race could legally marry. The court also found that Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws violated the Due Process Clause: “To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law.”

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