The American civil rights struggle is an ongoing fight for the personal
rights, protections, and privileges granted all U.S. citizens by the
Constitution and Bill of Rights. At the end of the American Civil War
(1861–65), constitutional amendments were enacted to protect African
Americans recently released from slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment
(1868) declared that all former slaves were U.S. citizens and received
equal protection under the laws of state and federal governments. The
Fifteenth Amendment (1870) assured equal voting rights to all citizens,
regardless of race. Until the 1950s, however, the civil rights of African
Americans were systematically denied, particularly in the South where
the majority of black Americans resided. A remarkable era of nonviolent African American activism began in 1954, known today simply as the
civil rights movement. It was launched by the Brown v. Board of
Education decision in 1954, in which the Supreme Court ruled that
segregation in the public schools was illegal. This phase of the civil
rights struggle ended with the passage in 1965 of the Voting Rights Act,
which—nearly a century after the Fifteenth Amendment had already
done so—once again assured voting rights to all citizens.
Background of the movement
After the Reconstruction Era (1865–77), a period after the Civil War in
which the federal government controlled the southern states that had seceded (withdrawn) from the Union, whites in the South enacted the Jim
Crow laws. These were a series of laws throughout the South that required segregation, the separation of the races in public places. White
southern state legislatures limited African American rights to own land,
to enter certain occupations, and to gain access to the courts. By 1900,
southern whites had accomplished the disfranchisement (exclusion from
voting) of most southern blacks.
In the early twentieth century, because it was too dangerous to effectively resist racial injustice in the South, most civil rights struggles were
carried out in the North. In 1905, black scholar and author W. E. B. Du
Bois (1868–1963) and other black leaders began the Niagara movement,
named after their meeting place near the Niagara River bordering the
United States and Canada, to fight racial injustice. Their organization
eventually became the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP), which fought for racial equality mainly
through the courts and the press. Until World War II (1939–45), the
NAACP’s progress was slow.
After the war, a new sense of urgency prevailed in American black
communities. Soldiers who had risked their lives to fight for the country
expected equal treatment when they returned home. More than one million African Americans migrated from the rural South to northern cities
in the first decades of the century. Over two million blacks had registered
to vote by the late 1940s. In December 1948, President Harry S.
Truman (1884–1972; served 1945–53) ran for his second term as president on a strong civil rights plank. Although some southern whites
quickly abandoned him, he received 70 percent of the northern black
vote and won the election. Two years later, he
began to desegregate the armed forces.
By the late 1940s, the NAACP’s chief legal
counsel, Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993),
brought the principle of segregation in public
education before the Supreme Court. Marshall
argued that segregation denied blacks equal protection of the laws as guaranteed by the
Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. In
1954, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled
against segregation in public schools in Brown v.
Board of Education.
The aftermath of Brown
Brown’s most immediate effect was to intensify
the resistance of white southerners to civil rights
progress. The Ku Klux Klan, a secret society of
white southerners in the United States that uses
terrorist tactics to suppress African Americans
and other minorities, stepped up its violent intimidation of African Americans. Southern congressmen and governors
vowed to resist desegregation. In 1957, when nine black students attempted to attend classes at a formerly all-white school in Little Rock,
Arkansas, federal troops were required to protect them from the furious
white mobs. (See Little Rock Central High School Desegregation.)
Even so, Brown provided the spark that ignited a movement. African
Americans across the country recognized that the highest court had upheld their rights; leaders began to prepare bolder assaults on segregation
in the South. One common form of protest is a boycott, an organized refusal to do business with someone. In December 1955, blacks in
Montgomery, Alabama, organized a bus boycott after the former
NAACP secretary of the Montgomery branch, Rosa Parks
(1913–2005), was arrested for refusing to yield her seat to a white man.
(See Montgomery Bus Boycott.) The boycott leader was Martin
Luther King Jr. (1929–1968). Only twenty-six years old, the minister
from Atlanta was an inspiring speaker who invoked Christian morality,
American ideals of liberty, and the ethic of nonviolent resistance in his
campaign against racial injustice. In November 1956, despite growing white violence, the bus boycott triumphed when a Supreme Court decision overturned Montgomery’s laws enforcing bus segregation.
Nonviolent activists organize
In 1957, Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act since the
Reconstruction Era. African Americans, however, had seen that court decisions and federal acts had consistently failed to make changes, so during the late 1950s they moved their struggle for equality to the streets.
In January 1957, King organized the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC), a network of nonviolent civil rights activists drawn
mainly from African American churches.
In 1960, four African American students began the sit-in movement, when they sat at the lunch counter at a Woolworth’s store in
Greensboro, North Carolina, which served only whites. The store closed
down the lunch counter. Later that year, several hundred student activists
gathered in Raleigh, North Carolina, to form the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”) to promote
nonviolent resistance to Jim Crow laws. By the summer of 1960, the sitins had desegregated dozens of lunch counters
and other public accommodations, mainly in
southern border states. Guided by King and
other nonviolent activist leaders, protesters
courageously endured insults, intimidation, violence, and arrest without striking back.
The Kennedy administration
Black protests intensified during the presidency
of John F. Kennedy (1917–1963; served
1961–63), a Democrat elected in 1960 with
heavy black support. Kennedy had started out
his administration avoiding civil rights measures
that might trigger southern white racial violence
and political retaliation. Civil rights leaders
stepped up campaigns to pressure Kennedy to
fulfill his campaign promises. In 1961, a nonviolent civil rights group called the Congress of
Racial Equality (CORE) organized the freedom
rides, in which volunteers rode buses through the South, testing compliance with a Supreme Court order to desegregate interstate bus terminal facilities. White mobs beat the riders in
Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama. As several hundred more volunteers stepped in to continue the project, Kennedy quietly persuaded
southern communities to desegregate their bus terminals.
In 1962, Kennedy again was forced into action. He sent federal marshals to protect a black student named James Meredith (1933–), who
had registered at the all-white University of Mississippi at Oxford. After
mobs killed two people at the campus and besieged the marshals, the
president reluctantly called in more troops to restore order.
In 1963, demonstrations throughout the South led to fifteen thousand arrests and widespread white violence. On May 3 and for several
days afterward, police in Birmingham beat and unleashed attack dogs on
nonviolent followers of King, in full view of television news cameras.
The resulting public revulsion over the Birmingham protests spurred
Kennedy to urge Congress to enact a strong civil rights law.
“I Have a Dream”
A coalition of African American groups and their white allies sponsored
a march on Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963, to advance the civil
rights bill then before Congress. Standing before the Lincoln Memorial,
King delivered his famous plea for interracial brotherhood in his “I Have
a Dream” speech, enthralling several hundred thousand blacks and
whites.
On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973;
served 1963–69) signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which barred segregation in public accommodations, ended federal aid to segregated institutions, outlawed racial discrimination in employment, sought to
strengthen black voting rights, and extended the life of the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights.
Voting rights in the South
In 1964, SNCC initiated Freedom Summer, a massive black voter registration and education campaign aimed at challenging white supremacy
in the deep South, starting in Mississippi. About one thousand college
students, most of them white, volunteered. The freedom workers were
not well received by a segment of Mississippi’s white population. Three volunteers were murdered by a mob led by the deputy sheriff of a
Mississippi town. Nevertheless, the project continued.
In 1965, King led a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to
extend voting rights to black Americans. State and local police almost
immediately attacked the black marchers, stopping the march. The televised scenes of violence brought about strong national support for the
protection of blacks attempting to vote. Ten days later, twenty-five thousand black and white marchers reached Montgomery escorted by federal
troops.
After the Selma-Montgomery march, Johnson signed a strong
Voting Rights Act, which authorized the attorney general to send federal
voting examiners to make sure that African Americans were free to register. The examiners were granted the power to enforce national law over
local regulations wherever discrimination occurred.
Black power
After 1965, the civil rights movement began to fragment, primarily over
the nonviolent tactics of King and his supporters and the goal of integration into the dominant society. Malcolm X (1925–1965), a leader of the
religious and sociopolitical group the Nation of Islam, questioned the
value of integration into a society that had exploited and abused African
Americans for centuries. He did not believe that the sit-ins, marches, or
other tactics of civil rights activists were effective tools with which to
gain rights, especially when confronted with violent resistance in the
South. In 1966, SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael (also known as
Kwame Ture; 1941–1998) ridiculed nonviolent efforts and demanded
“black power,” a militant slogan that alienated white liberals and divided
blacks. The focus of the Black Power Movement began to shift to economic injustices in the North. Violent ghetto riots began to break out in
large cities like Detroit and Los Angeles. On April 4, 1968, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. touched off riots that left Washington,
D.C., in flames for three days. The movement would continue, but this
initial remarkable phase of the nonviolent civil rights struggle was over.
A revolutionary movement
The central goal of the African American civil rights movement—full
equality between blacks and whites—remains a distant vision.
Neighborhoods, private schools, and jobs remain segregated along racial
lines; African American incomes remain significantly lower than those of
whites; and job and educational opportunities are not distributed
equally. Nonetheless, the civil rights movement of 1954–65 transformed
American race relations. In communities throughout the South, “whites
only” signs that had stood for generations vanished from hotels, restrooms, theaters, and other facilities. By the mid-1970s, school desegregation had become fact as well as law in more than 80 percent of all
southern public schools (a better record than in the North, where residential segregation remains pronounced). The protection of the right to
vote represents the civil rights movement’s greatest success: When
Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, barely 100 African
Americans held elective office in the country; by 2000 there were more
than 9,000.