THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT


Many things influenced the changes in U.S. race relations after World War II. The anti-Nazi propaganda generated during the war increased the realization by many Americans of the conflict between ideals and the reality of racism in their own country. The concentration of large numbers of blacks in cities of the North and West increased their potential for political influence. It also projected the problems related to race as national rather than regional. The establishment of the United Nations headquarters in the United States made American racial inequality more visible to a world in which the United States sought to give leadership during the Cold War with the USSR. The growth of a white minority willing to speak out against racism provided allies for blacks. Most important in altering race relations in the United States, however, were the actions of blacks themselves.


Legal Action Against Racism

The first major attack by blacks on racism was through the courts. In a series of cases involving professional and graduate education, the Supreme Court required admission of blacks to formerly all-white institutions when separate facilities for blacks were clearly not equal. The major legal breakthrough came in 1954. In the case of BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA, KANSAS, the Supreme Court held that separate facilities are, by their very nature, unequal.

In spite of this decision, more than a decade passed before significant school integration took place in the South. In the North, where segregated schools resulted from segregated housing patterns and from manipulation of school attendance boundaries, separation of races in public schools increased after 1954. A second major breakthrough in the fight against segregation grew out of the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott in 1955. The boycott began when Rosa Parks, a black woman, refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white person. Her arrest resulted in a series of meetings of blacks in Montgomery and a boycott of buses on which racial segregation was practiced. The boycott, which lasted for more than a year, was almost 100 percent effective. Before the courts declared unconstitutional Montgomery's law requiring segregation on buses, Martin Luther KING, Jr., a Baptist minister, had risen to national prominence and had articulated a strategy of nonviolent direct action in the movement for CIVIL RIGHTS.


Nonviolent Direct Action

Nonviolent direct action, born in the boycott, was taken up by blacks and white supporters throughout the country. It was applied at sit-ins and freedom rides, aimed at ending segregation in public places, and also at protest demonstrations of all kinds. Among these activities were the march on Washington of Aug. 28, 1963, in which more than 200,000 blacks and whites protested continued segregation and discrimination, and large-scale demonstrations in Birmingham, Ala. (April 1963), and Selma, Ala. (March 1965). These civil rights activities were directed by long-established groups such as the NAACP and CORE (the CONGRESS OF RACIAL EQUALITY, founded 1942), by newly formed national groups such as the SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE and SNCC (the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee), and by such local groups as the Dallas County (Ala.) Voters League and the Princeton (N.J.) Association for Human Rights. The response of segregationists to the demonstrations was to blame outside agitators for causing the trouble. Many law officials took strong, often brutal measures to halt demonstrations or else refused to protect the right of demonstrators to protest peacefully.


Violence against black and white civil rights activists was commonplace. Three civil rights workers were brutally murdered in Philadelphia, Miss., in 1964; four black children were murdered in the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963; and dozens of black churches throughout the South were burned or bombed. Two whites and one black were murdered during the 1965 demonstrations in Selma, Ala. In 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., the recognized leader of the civil rights movement, was assassinated.


The federal response to the violent reaction of segregationists was the passage of several new laws, the most important of which were enacted in 1964 and 1965. The CIVIL RIGHTS ACT (1964) undermined the remaining structure of Jim Crow laws and provided federal protection in the exercise of civil rights. The Voting Rights Act (1965) provided for federal action to put an end to actions by local governments and individuals that interfered with the right of blacks to register and vote. Both these laws were upheld in challenges before the U.S. Supreme Court.


Urban Unrest and Militant Protest


During the middle and late 1960s, black leadership spoke increasingly of the limits of political successes, of the absence of accompanying economic change, and of the relationship between problems of race at home and affairs in which the United States was engaged abroad. Opposition also grew to the strategy of nonviolent resistance as its failure to alter significantly the lives of ghetto dwellers was perceived by some blacks. Unrest among urban blacks resulted in a series of riots beginning in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965. Attacks were mainly against white property and symbols of white authority in the ghetto.


When Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in 1968, a new wave of riots spread across the country. A report by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, appointed by President Lyndon Johnson, identified more than 150 riots between 1965 and 1968. In 1967 alone, 83 people were killed (most of them black), 1,800 were injured, and property valued at more than $100 million was destroyed.


The growing black consciousness movement and the aggressive civil rights activism of the late 1960s resulted in what some have termed the white backlash. White supporters of moderate black organizations and activities declined. Harassment of some activists, especially the BLACK PANTHER PARTY and BLACK MUSLIMS, became common. Federal programs beneficial to poor ghetto youth were cut back, and the direction taken by the Supreme Court weakened the base for progress set under Chief Justice Earl WARREN. Evidence began to leak out that the FBI had sought to discredit and destroy Martin Luther King, Jr., as a leader and had participated in efforts to reduce the effectiveness of some black organizations.


Black Pride


The riots, the white backlash, and new developments within the black community during the late 1960s brought to an end one phase of the civil rights movement. The chief characteristic of the black experience in the 1970s and early 1980s was the development of black consciousness and black pride. These values found renewed vigor as increasing numbers of blacks came to believe that the key to dealing with problems of race in the United States was the way they felt about themselves as individuals and as a group.


The concept of black pride had been earlier articulated in such slogans as black is beautiful and black power. The latter term, introduced (1966) by Stokely Carmichael, the chairman at that time of SNCC, became the rallying cry for the more radical civil rights activists of the latter half of the 1960s. It found organizational expression in the Black Panther party, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, the Black Muslims, and other groups. Leading spokespersons of the concept of racial pride included MALCOLM X, Imamu Amiri BARAKA (formerly LeRoi Jones), Ron Karenga, and Huey Newton. This concept frightened some whites who perceived it as racism.



Copyright 1995 by Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.