People Agains African American Civil Rights

Learning Objectives

By the end of this department, you lot will be able to:

• Explain how Presidents Truman and Eisenhower addressed civil rights issues
• Discuss efforts past African Americans to end bigotry and segregation
• Depict southern whites' response to the ceremonious rights motility

In the aftermath of Globe War II, African Americans began to mount organized resistance to racially discriminatory policies in forcefulness throughout much of the United States. In the Southward, they used a combination of legal challenges and grassroots activism to begin dismantling the racial segregation that had stood for almost a century post-obit the finish of Reconstruction. Community activists and civil rights leaders targeted racially discriminatory housing practices, segregated transportation, and legal requirements that African Americans and whites be educated separately. While many of these challenges were successful, life did non necessarily ameliorate for African Americans. Hostile whites fought these changes in whatsoever mode they could, including by resorting to violence.

Early VICTORIES

During World State of war II, many African Americans had supported the "Double-5 Campaign," which chosen on them to defeat foreign enemies while simultaneously fighting against segregation and bigotry at abode. After World War Two ended, many returned domicile to discover that, despite their sacrifices, the United States was not willing to extend them any greater rights than they had enjoyed before the war. Particularly rankling was the fact that although African American veterans were legally entitled to draw benefits under the GI Beak, discriminatory practices prevented them from doing so. For example, many banks would not give them mortgages if they wished to purchase homes in predominantly African American neighborhoods, which banks ofttimes considered too risky an investment. However, African Americans who attempted to purchase homes in white neighborhoods oftentimes found themselves unable to do so considering of real manor covenants that prevented owners from selling their holding to blacks. Indeed, when a blackness family purchased a Levittown house in 1957, they were subjected to harassment and threats of violence.

For a wait at the experiences of an African American family unit that tried to motion to a white suburban community, view the 1957 documentary Crunch in Levittown.

The postwar era, however, saw African Americans brand greater apply of the courts to defend their rights. In 1944, an African American woman, Irene Morgan, was arrested in Virginia for refusing to give up her seat on an interstate bus and sued to have her conviction overturned. In Morgan v. the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1946, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the confidence should exist overturned because it violated the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution. This victory emboldened some civil rights activists to launch the Journeying of Reconciliation, a bus trip taken past eight African American men and eight white men through the states of the Upper South to examination the South'southward enforcement of the Morgan conclusion.

Other victories followed. In 1948, in Shelley v. Kraemer, the U.S. Supreme Court held that courts could not enforce real estate covenants that restricted the purchase or auction of holding based on race. In 1950, the NAACP brought a instance before the U.Southward. Supreme Court that they hoped would assistance to undermine the concept of "separate merely equal" every bit espoused in the 1896 determination in Plessy v. Ferguson, which gave legal sanction to segregated school systems. Sweatt v. Painter was a example brought by Herman Marion Sweatt, who sued the University of Texas for denying him admission to its law school because country police force prohibited integrated education. Texas attempted to grade a separate law school for African Americans just, but in its decision on the case, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected this solution, property that the divide school provided neither equal facilities nor "intangibles," such equally the power to form relationships with other future lawyers, that a professional school should provide.

Not all efforts to enact desegregation required the apply of the courts, however. On Apr 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson started for the Brooklyn Dodgers, playing first base of operations. He was the first African American to play baseball in the National League, breaking the color barrier. Although African Americans had their own baseball teams in the Negro Leagues, Robinson opened the gates for them to play in direct contest with white players in the major leagues. Other African American athletes also began to challenge the segregation of American sports. At the 1948 Summer Olympics, Alice Coachman, an African American, was the only American woman to accept a gold medal in the games. These changes, while symbolically significant, were mere cracks in the wall of segregation.

Baseball fable Jackie Robinson (a) was active in the civil rights move. He served on the NAACP's lath of directors and helped to institute an African American-owned bank. Alice Coachman (b), who competed in track and field at Tuskegee University, was the first black woman to win an Olympic gilded medal.

DESEGREGATION AND INTEGRATION

Until 1954, racial segregation in education was not only legal but was required in seventeen states and permissible in several others. Utilizing evidence provided in sociological studies conducted by Kenneth Clark and Gunnar Myrdal, however, Thurgood Marshall, then principal counsel for the NAACP, successfully argued the landmark case Brown v. Board of Didactics of Topeka, Kansas before the U.South. Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Marshall showed that the do of segregation in public schools made African American students feel junior. Fifty-fifty if the facilities provided were equal in nature, the Court noted in its determination, the very fact that some students were separated from others on the ground of their race fabricated segregation unconstitutional.

This map shows those states in which racial segregation in public education was required past law before the 1954 Chocolate-brown v. Board of Education decision. In 1960, four years afterward, fewer than 10 percentage of southern African American students attended the same schools as white students.

Thurgood Marshall on Fighting Racism

Every bit a law student in 1933, Thurgood Marshall was recruited by his mentor Charles Hamilton Houston to assist in gathering information for the defense of a black man in Virginia defendant of killing two white women. His continued shut clan with Houston led Marshall to aggressively defend blacks in the court system and to use the courts every bit the weapon by which equal rights might be extracted from the U.S. Constitution and a white racist system. Houston also suggested that it would be important to institute legal precedents regarding the Plessy five. Ferguson ruling of dissever but equal.

In 1956, NAACP leaders (from left to right) Henry L. Moon, Roy Wilkins, Herbert Hill, and Thurgood Marshall present a new poster in the campaign against southern white racism. Marshall successfully argued the landmark case Brown five. Board of Didactics (1954) earlier the U.S. Supreme Court and afterward became the court's start African American justice.

By 1938, Marshall had go "Mr. Civil Rights" and formally organized the NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational activity Fund in 1940 to garner the resources to take on cases to break the racist justice arrangement of America. A direct result of Marshall's energies and commitment was his 1940 victory in a Supreme Court case, Chambers v. Florida, which held that confessions obtained by violence and torture were inadmissible in a court of law. His virtually well-known case was Brown v. Board of Instruction in 1954, which held that state laws establishing split public schools for black and white students were unconstitutional.

Later in life, Marshall reflected on his career fighting racism in a speech at Howard Law Schoolhouse in 1978:

Be aware of that myth, that everything is going to be all right. Don't give in. I add together that, because it seems to me, that what nosotros need to exercise today is to refocus. Back in the 30s and 40s, we could become no place but to courtroom. We knew then, the court was non the final solution. Many of us knew the final solution would take to be politics, if for no other reason, politics is cheaper than lawsuits. So now we take both. We accept our legal arm, and we take our political arm. Let'south use them both. And don't listen to this myth that it can be solved by either or that information technology has already been solved. Take it from me, it has not been solved.

When Marshall says that the problems of racism have not been solved, to what was he referring?

Plessy v. Fergusson had been overturned. The challenge at present was to integrate schools. A twelvemonth afterward, the U.South. Supreme Court ordered southern school systems to begin desegregation "with all deliberate speed." Some school districts voluntarily integrated their schools. For many other districts, notwithstanding, "deliberate speed" was very, very slow.

In 1957, U.S. soldiers from the 101st Airborne were called in to escort the Fiddling Rock Nine into and around formerly all-white Key High School in Little Stone, Arkansas.

It presently became articulate that enforcing Brown 5. the Lath of Education would crave presidential intervention. Eisenhower did not agree with the U.Southward. Supreme Court's decision and did non wish to strength southern states to integrate their schools. However, as president, he was responsible for doing so. In 1957, Key High Schoolhouse in Piddling Rock, Arkansas, was forced to accept its outset 9 African American students, who became known as the Trivial Rock Ix. In response, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus called out the state National Guard to forbid the students from attending classes, removing the troops only after Eisenhower told him to do and then. A subsequent attempt by the nine students to attend school resulted in mob violence. Eisenhower then placed the Arkansas National Guard nether federal control and sent the U.S. Ground forces'southward 101st airborne unit to escort the students to and from schoolhouse also as from class to class. This was the first time since the terminate of Reconstruction that federal troops once more protected the rights of African Americans in the South.

Throughout the course of the schoolhouse year, the Little Rock Nine were insulted, harassed, and physically assaulted; nevertheless, they returned to school each day. At the cease of the school year, the outset African American student graduated from Cardinal Loftier. At the beginning of the 1958–1959 school year, Orval Faubus ordered all Little Rock's public schools airtight. In the stance of white segregationists, keeping all students out of school was preferable to having them attend integrated schools. In 1959, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the schoolhouse had to be reopened and that the process of desegregation had to go along.

WHITE RESPONSES

Efforts to desegregate public schools led to a backlash amidst almost southern whites. Many greeted the Brown decision with horror; some World State of war II veterans questioned how the government they had fought for could beguile them in such a mode. Some white parents promptly withdrew their children from public schools and enrolled them in all-white individual academies, many newly created for the sole purpose of keeping white children from attending integrated schools. Often, these "academies" held classes in neighbors' basements or living rooms.

Other white southerners turned to state legislatures or courts to solve the trouble of school integration. Orders to integrate school districts were routinely challenged in court. When the lawsuits proved unsuccessful, many southern school districts responded by closing all public schools, as Orval Faubus had done subsequently Central Loftier Schoolhouse was integrated. One county in Virginia closed its public schools for five years rather than see them integrated. Besides suing school districts, many southern segregationists filed lawsuits against the NAACP, trying to bankrupt the organization. Many national politicians supported the segregationist efforts. In 1956, xc-six members of Congress signed "The Southern Manifesto," in which they accused the U.S. Supreme Court of misusing its power and violating the principle of states' rights, which maintained that states had rights equal to those of the federal government.

Unfortunately, many white southern racists, frightened by challenges to the social order, responded with violence. When Picayune Rock's Central High Schoolhouse desegregated, an irate Ku Klux Klansman from a neighboring community sent a letter to the members of the urban center'south school lath in which he denounced them as Communists and threatened to kill them. White rage sometimes erupted into murder. In Baronial 1955, both white and black Americans were shocked by the brutality of the murder of Emmett Till. Till, a fourteen-year-quondam boy from Chicago, had been vacationing with relatives in Mississippi. While visiting a white-owned store, he had made a remark to the white woman backside the counter. A few days later, the husband and blood brother-in-constabulary of the adult female came to the home of Till's relatives in the centre of the night and abducted the boy. Till's beaten and mutilated trunk was found in a nearby river 3 days later. Till's mother insisted on an open-casket funeral; she wished to use her son's body to reveal the brutality of southern racism. The murder of a kid who had been guilty of no more than a casual remark captured the nation'south attention, every bit did the acquittal of the ii men who admitted killing him.

THE MONTGOMERY Motorcoach Boycott

One of those inspired by Till's expiry was Rosa Parks, an NAACP member from Montgomery, Alabama, who became the confront of the 1955–1956 Montgomery Motorbus Boycott. Metropolis ordinances in Montgomery segregated the city's buses, forcing African American passengers to ride in the back section. They had to enter through the rear of the double-decker, could non share seats with white passengers, and, if the front of the motorbus was full and a white passenger requested an African American's seat, had to relinquish their identify to the white passenger. The bus company too refused to hire African American drivers even though most of the people who rode the buses were blackness.

On December one, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to requite her seat to a white man, and the Montgomery constabulary arrested her. After being bailed out of jail, she decided to fight the laws requiring segregation in court. To back up her, the Women's Political Council, a group of African American female activists, organized a boycott of Montgomery's buses. News of the boycott spread through newspaper notices and by word of oral cavity; ministers rallied their congregations to back up the Women's Political Council. Their efforts were successful, and twoscore chiliad African American riders did non have the bus on Dec five, the first day of the cold-shoulder.

Other African American leaders within the city embraced the boycott and maintained information technology across December 5, Rosa Parks' court engagement. Among them was a young minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. For the next twelvemonth, black Montgomery residents avoided the metropolis's buses. Some organized carpools. Others paid for rides in African American-owned taxis, whose drivers reduced their fees. Most walked to and from school, work, and church for 381 days, the duration of the cold-shoulder. In June 1956, an Alabama federal court found the segregation ordinance unconstitutional. The city appealed, but the U.Due south. Supreme Court upheld the decision. The urban center'southward buses were desegregated.

Section Summary

Later on World War 2, African American efforts to secure greater civil rights increased across the Us. African American lawyers such every bit Thurgood Marshall championed cases intended to destroy the Jim Crow system of segregation that had dominated the American Due south since Reconstruction. The landmark Supreme Court case Chocolate-brown five. Board of Pedagogy prohibited segregation in public schools, but non all school districts integrated willingly, and President Eisenhower had to utilize the military to desegregate Lilliputian Stone's Central High School. The courts and the federal government did not assist African Americans in asserting their rights in other cases. In Montgomery, Alabama, information technology was the grassroots efforts of African American citizens who boycotted the city'due south jitney system that brought about change. Throughout the region, many white southerners fabricated their opposition to these efforts known. Too often, this opposition manifested itself in violence and tragedy, as in the murder of Emmett Till.

Review Question

1. What was the significance of Shelley 5. Kraemer?

Answer to Review Question

1. Shelley v. Kraemer held that state courts could not enforce agreements that prevented homeowners from selling to members of particular races. The ruling made it easier for African Americans to buy houses in neighborhoods of their choosing.

Critical Thinking Questions

1. How did some Americans turn their wartime experiences into lasting personal gains (i.e. meliorate employment, a new habitation, or an education) subsequently the war was over? Why did others miss out on these opportunities?
2. What was the reason for the breakdown in friendly relations between the Us and the Soviet Union after World State of war 2? What were the results of this conflict?
3. How did fear of the Soviet Matrimony and Communism impact American culture and society?
4. What social changes took place in the U.s. after World State of war Two? What role did the war play in those changes?
5. How did the wartime experiences of African Americans contribute to the drive for greater civil rights afterwards the war?

Glossary

desegregationthe removal of laws and policies requiring the separation of different racial or ethnic groups

Piddling Rock 9the nickname for the 9 African American high school students who first integrated Little Stone'due south Central High School

states' rightsthe political belief that states possess authority beyond federal law, which is ordinarily seen as the supreme police of the land, and thus can act in opposition to federal law

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