Civil Rights: Separate is Unequal

Our discussions have brought us into the 1960s and this is the decade that saw the major victories in the Civil Rights Movement. However, you should not think that this movement began in the 1960s, it didn’t even begin in the 1940s or 50s. Efforts to improve the quality of life for African Americans (and other disenfranchised citizens) are as old as the United States itself.

By the time of the American Revolution in the late eighteenth century, abolitionists were already hard at work to bring an end to the institution of slavery and fight for racial equality. As we saw earlier this year, William Wilberforce worked most of his life in the British Parliament to end the African Slave Trade in the British Empire and he achieved his goal in 1807 with the complete outlaw of slavery in 1833.

In America, it would take several decades longer. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln used his war powers to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that all slaves in the confederate states were free. Two years later, in 1865, this was codified into law as the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This ammendment officially outlawed slavery in the United States.

After the Civil War, during the period known as Reconstruction, the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments established a legal foundation for the political equality of African Americans. Despite the abolition of slavery and legal gains for African Americans, “Separate but equal” racial segregation laws arose in the South. These Jim Crow segregation laws meant that Southern blacks would continue to live in conditions of poverty and inequality, with white supremacists denying them their hard-won political rights and freedoms.

The twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement emerged as a response to the unfulfilled promises of emancipation. This was in large part as a result of the experiences of black soldiers in and after the Second World War.

African Americans fought in a segregated military while being exposed to U.S. propaganda emphasizing liberty, justice, and equality. After fighting in the name of democracy in other countries around the world, many African American veterans returned to the United States determined to achieve the rights and prerogatives of full citizenship.

Civil rights and the Supreme Court

One of the earliest attempts to achieve this goal was centered in the courts, spearheaded by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Their strategy was to initiate lawsuits which would show that the “Separate but Equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) was inherently unequal. The landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas ruling of 1954 established that separate facilities were inherently unequal and thereby declared segregation in public education to be unconstitutional.

While this Supreme Court decision was a major victory for civil rights, a group of Southern congressmen issued the “Southern manifesto,” denouncing the court’s decision and pledging to resist its enforcement. Meanwhile, white supremacists in the South pledged “massive resistance” to desegregation. The worst of these resistors simply closed the public schools. Officials in Prince Edward County, Virginia closed its entire public school system instead of following the order to integrate. The entire public school system remained closed for the next five years.

In 1957, when mobs prevented the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, the Governor, Orval Faubus, used the Arkansas National Guard to block the entry of African American students to the high school. After meeting with President Eisenhower, Faubus agreed to withdraw the National Guard. However, a violent mob replaced them and surrounded the school. In response, President Eisenhower dispatched federal troops, to enforce the court’s ruling. Those federal troops remained for an entire school year in Little Rock until state officials closed the school instead.

These challenges continued into John F. Kennedy’s presidency. Twice in 1963, he was forced to federalize the Alabama National Guard to ensure that negro students would be allowed to enroll and attend the University of Alabama and later Tuskegee High School in Huntsville despite segregationist Governor George Wallace vowing to block it by physically standing in the way. The day after the University of Alabama incident, JFK addressed the nation on the issue of Civil Rights.

Violence Sparks Protest

In the wake of the Brown v Board decision, an egregious act of violence would capture the attention of the country and would incite outrage, protest, and deepen the division that was already evident. Emmett Till was just 14 years old when he was murdered by two white men in Money, Mississippi in the summer of 1955.

Emmett had traveled from his home in Chicago to Money, Mississippi, to visit relatives that summer. While at a store with some of his cousins, he whistled at a white woman working the counter. Her husband and his brother subsequently kidnapped Emmett from his relatives’ home, beat him, shot him in the head, tied a metal fan to his neck with barbed-wire, and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River.

Till’s mother chose to have an open-casket funeral in Chicago to show the world this travesty of justice. Over 100,000 attended the funeral. Jet magazine also published pictures of Till’s mutilated body. Black citizens of the South were angered and grieved over Till’s murder and used it as a motivation to protest segregation and the rules it forced them to live by.

The racist southern court system gave Emmett’s white killers an all-white jury at their trial and allowed their supporters to intimidate or block black witnesses from testifying in court. This ensured a “not guilty” verdict for the murderers who, after the trial was over, publicly admitted to killing Till.

Nonviolent protest and civil disobedience

Two months after the verdict, a black seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man. In 1955, city buses throughout the South were racially segregated. On crowded buses, blacks were required by a city ordinance to give up their seats to whites and move to the back of the bus. This woman, Rosa Parks, later said that when she was threatened on the bus, “I thought of Emmett Till, and I just couldn’t go back.”

Montgomery Bus Boycott

This reflected the growing resentment toward segregation and discrimination among African Americans, and the sense that the Supreme Court was now on their side. Parks’ refusal spawned a city-wide bus boycott by the black citizens of Montgomery. The Montgomery Improvement Association, led by a charismatic young minister named Martin Luther King Jr., was formed to continue the boycott.

The Montgomery bus boycott continued for over a year (381 days to be exact). Since most bus riders were black, and the buses were virtually empty, the loss of revenue for the city was significant. Angry whites bombed many of the leaders’ homes. The boycott drew national attention and triggered the desegregation of buses in other southern cities, but Montgomery city officials refused to desegregate the buses. The boycott finally ended after the Supreme Court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that segregated seating on city buses was unconstitutional.

In the wake of this victory, Martin Luther King Jr. expanded his influence by helping to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). They began to encourage the black community to reject segregation through non-violent protest. Other organizations quickly popped up or gave support to the cause such as student organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and labor unions such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL-CIO). Their many protests, lunch counter sit-ins, and boycotts raised awareness and accelerated the momentum for the passage of federal civil rights legislation.

Freedom Riders

In May 1961, seven African Americans and six whites boarded a Greyhound bus in Washington, D.C., embarking on a bus tour of the American south to protest segregated bus terminals. They were testing the 1960 decision by the Supreme Court in Boynton v. Virginia that declared the segregation of interstate transportation facilities unconstitutional. They became known as Freedom Riders.

They faced violence from both police officers and white protesters. On Mother’s Day 1961, the bus reached Anniston, Alabama, and a mob mounted the bus and threw a bomb into it. The riders escaped the burning bus only to be badly beaten. Photos of the bus engulfed in flames were widely circulated, and the Freedom Riders resumed their journey under police escort after U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (brother of John F. Kennedy) got involved. After a white mob brutally attacked the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, Kennedy replaced the police with federal marshals.

Hundreds of new Freedom Riders were drawn to the cause, and the rides continued. In the fall of 1961, under pressure from the Kennedy administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued regulations prohibiting segregation in interstate transit terminals.

March on Washington

In 1963, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom combined the forces of all of these varied organizations into the largest civil rights protest in US history. 250,000 protestors converged on the National Mall in Washington, DC to demonstrate in favor of full civil, political, and economic rights for African Americans. It was the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and one of the major themes of the rally was that the promises of emancipation remained unfulfilled.

The march began at the Washington Monument and ended at the Lincoln Memorial, where representatives of the sponsoring organizations delivered speeches. The last speaker of the day was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who delivered what became the most famous speech of the entire civil rights era, the “I Have a Dream” speech, which envisioned a world in which people were judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Imagine you are standing on the steps of the Lincoln memorial in front of a quarter of a million people. What is your dream? Do you think Martin Luther King Jr. would be pleased with the level of equality he sees today? What about the kinds of protests?