Attempts by the African American community to achieve political and economic equality.
Although the Civil War ended with the freeing of all Africans from the institution of slavery and the passage of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, which ended slavery and defined citizenship, due process, and equal protection, blacks in the United States continued to experience discrimination. Jim Crow laws in the South between the 1880s and 1960s, which enforced segregation, and the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which determined that blacks must have equal facilities even if they were separate facilities, resulted in widespread discrimination against black citizens. Not until after World War II and the dismantling of the colonial empires of the world did the United States begin the slow process of ending segregation. In 1954, the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, in which attorneys for the plaintiffs argued that separate schools for black children could not provide an education equal to that available to white children. They based their arguments on a study conducted among black and white children in which the children invariably favored white dolls over black dolls because they were “prettier” or “richer” or “better.” The Supreme Court accepted the argument and ordered that the states desegregate the public schools. This decision was later extended to higher education. Access to better educational opportunities became a key economic tool for advancement by African Americans.
Brown v. Board of Education provided an impetus to the Civil Rights movement. On December 1,1955, Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Parks, a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was arrested. Blacks in Montgomery, led by a charismatic young preacher named Martin Luther King Jr., initiated a boycott of the Montgomery bus system that lasted for a year and ceased only after an edict was issued ending segregation on public transportation. The boycott’s success can be attributed to economic pressure placed on the municipality by loss of revenue, because blacks comprised the largest percentage of fare-paying passengers.
Nonviolent civil disobedience became the hallmark of the Civil Rights movement throughout the rest of the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s. Students engaged in sit-ins at lunch counters after being refused service based on the color of their skin. The first of these occurred in 1960 when students of the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College refused to leave a drugstore lunch counter or offer resistance when white patrons spat at them, poured drinks and catsup on them, and verbally harassed them. In the meantime, the lunch counter lost revenue because the seats were occupied.
The Civil Rights movement gained national attention in 1963 when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organized a campaign in Birmingham, Alabama. Television cameras captured the events as police used dogs, fire hoses, and clubs against nonviolent demonstrators, some of whom were children. The violence in Birmingham led President John F. Kennedy to push for legislation that would ensure rights for black citizens. After Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon B. Johnson secured passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination based on race, sex, or creed, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. After Johnson’s Great Society speech in which he demanded an end to poverty and injustice, many blacks believed that the federal government would move quickly to improve their economic plight. When new economic opportunities failed to materialize and both Martin Luther King and former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, a powerful supporter of civil rights, were assassinated in 1968, several U.S. cities experienced riots. After 1968, the Civil Rights movement became more violent with the rise of groups like the Black Panthers, who advocated a more militant approach.
During the 1970s, the Supreme Court once again became involved in civil rights, ordering school busing of children as a way of ending school segregation caused by “white flight,” in which great numbers of white families left cities to move to more expensive suburbs, leaving the urban core to poorer black families. Over the past several decades, the national Civil Rights movement has declined as more black Americans have achieved new levels of economic, social, and political acceptance.
