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How effective was the Civil Rights Movement in abolishing discrimination? 1950-1965. The post-war era marked a period of unprecedented energy against the second class citizenship accorded to African Americans in many parts of the nation.
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How effective was the Civil Rights Movement in abolishing discrimination? 1950-1965
The post-war era marked a period of unprecedented energy against the second class citizenship accorded to African Americans in many parts of the nation. • Resistance to racial segregation and discrimination with strategies such as civil disobedience, non-violent resistance, marches, protests, boycotts, "freedom rides," and rallies received national attention as newspaper, radio, and television reporters and cameramen documented the struggle to end racial inequality. • There were also continuing efforts to legally challenge segregation through the courts.
Success crowned these efforts: the Brown decision in 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act in 1965 helped bring about the demise of the entangling web of legislation that bound blacks to second class citizenship. One hundred years after the Civil War, blacks and their white allies still pursued the battle for equal rights in every area of American life. • While there is always more to achieve in ending discrimination, major milestones in civil rights laws are on the books for the purpose of regulating equal access to public accommodations, equal justice before the law, and equal employment, education, and housing opportunities.
"By Executive Order--President Truman Wipes Out Segregation in Armed Forces."Chicago Defender, July 31, 1948. • Press release for Executive Order No. 9981, establishing the President's Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Forces.July 26, 1948.
Psychological Effects of Racism • In the "doll test," popularized by social psychologists Kenneth Bancroft Clark and his wife, Mamie Phipps Clark, children were given a black doll and a white doll and asked which one they preferred. • Most black children preferred the white doll, to which they also attributed the most positive characteristics. During court trials relating to segregated schools, the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund enlisted Kenneth Clark's services as an expert witness on the detrimental effects of racial exclusion and discrimination. • The Defense Fund lawyers also submitted a report that explained the test results to the Supreme Court as evidence in the Brown v. Board of Education case. In a unanimous ruling in 1954, the court found that separate schools were inherently unequal and specifically cited the Clark report.
Thurgood Marshall • Thurgood Marshall was the first African American to serve on the U. S. Supreme Court. His legal career began with the NAACP. Many of the NAACP's records reveal Marshall's grueling traveling and meeting schedule, as well as his acute sense of humor, even in the face of threats from whites and distrust by African Americans. After the inauspicious beginning of a case challenging the Texas primary, Marshall wrote this memo.
George E.C. Hayes, Thurgood Marshall, and James Nabrit, congratulating each other, following Supreme Court decision declaring segregation unconstitutional, 1954. • Beginning in 1950, the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorneys worked on a school desegregation case originating in Charleston, S.C. In 1952 the case came before the U.S. Supreme Court, whose members decided to hear it with cases from Delaware, Virginia, Kansas, and the District of Columbia under the collective title Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Thurgood Marshall and other NAACP lawyers argued the case and won. Brown marked a landmark victory in the fight for full citizenship, offering hope that the system of segregation was not unassailable.
Daisy Bates and The Little Rock Nine • Arkansas-born Daisy Bates worked as a crusading newspaper owner-journalist, becoming president of the Arkansas NAACP. • After the 1954 Brown school-desegregation decision, Little Rock school board officials decided to begin desegregation of Central High School in September 1957.
Arkansas governor Orval Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to preserve order, a euphemism for keeping the nine prospective African American students out. • However, on September 25, 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and deployed paratroopers to carry out the desegregation orders of the federal courts. Bates supported the students throughout the year and with them received the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1958. Daisy Bates to Roy Wilkins, December 17, 1957, on the treatment of the Little Rock Nine.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott • When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested in December 1955, she set off a train of events that generated a momentum the civil rights movement had never before experienced. • Local civil rights leaders were hoping for such an opportunity to test the city's segregation laws. Deciding to boycott the buses, the African American community soon formed a new organization to supervise the boycott, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). • The young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was chosen as the first MIA leader. The boycott, more successful than anyone hoped, led to a 1956 Supreme Court decision banning segregated buses.
James Meredith and Ole Miss • In September 1962, a federal court ordered the University of Mississippi to accept James Meredith, a twenty-eight-year-old Air Force Veteran, much to the consternation of segregationists. • Governor Ross Barnett said he would never allow the school to be integrated. After days of violence and rioting by whites, Meredith, accompanied by federal officials, enrolled on October 1, 1962. Because he had earned college credits elsewhere, Meredith graduated the following August without incident.
In 1966 Meredith began a 220-mile "March Against Fear" from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. He hoped to demonstrate a positive change in the racial climate, but he was shot soon after he commenced the march. Civil rights leaders rallied to the cause and came to continue the march from the point at which Meredith fell.
