Historical context

U.S. Civil Rights

*Please note that some of the content below quotes historically racist language. We use this language only in context of what we are reading and studying.

Any discussion of American civil rights movement must begin with the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

The majority of today's roughly 40 million black Americans are descendants of African slaves (Anderson, 2015). From 1525 to 1865, some 12.5 million black Africans were kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to North America, South America and the Caribbean (Gates, 2013b). In the Americas, these men, women and children were bought and sold as chattels (property or personal possession).

Slaves were brutally forced to work in the southern American colonies, particularly growing cotton. Slave labour generated much of the wealth that allowed the colonies to flourish and develop into the modern United States. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 legally freed the United States' slaves from bondage, and victory by the anti-slavery Union forces during the Civil War (1861—1865) ended the institution of chattel slavery in the United States.

A Spanish engraving of slaves being transported to the Americas. Conditions on slave ships were so horrific that almost two million people died on the notorious Middle Passage, the sea route across the Atlantic Ocean. In the Southern states, roughly 25% of the population were slave owners and in many places, slaves vastly outnumbered their white masters (Berry, 2017).

Lynchings

In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the American Constitution outlawed slavery ("except as a punishment for crime"); however, free black Americans remained targets of lynchings and other horrific acts of violence.

A lynching is an intentional killing of a person for alleged offences or crimes, which is extra-legal (it takes place without a legal trial), usually conducted by a group of people; hanging was probably the most common form of lynching.

Lynchings were common and were tolerated, even encouraged, by many whites, including politicians, policemen and lawyers, particularly in the South. Though it is difficult to pin down just how many people died in lynchings, historians estimate that some 2,812 people were lynched in the years from 1885 to 1915, mostly black men, but also Mexicans, Jews, black women, Native Americans, labour organisers and even whites with progressive political ideas (Belonsky, 2018).

Documents show that black men were lynched for such non-existent offenses as "walking behind the wife of his white employer" or for merely carrying a photograph of a white woman (Robertson, 2018). Though technically illegal, lynchings were often highly publicised and postcards of lynchings were a popular and profitable business. This history of murder (and often torture) still casts a long shadow over American history.

A crowd gathers in Waco, Texas in May 1916 for the lynching of Jesse Washington, who was burned alive in front of cheering crowds and a photographer from a local newspaper. Those photographs were also used by civil rights activists to show the brutality faced by many black Americans.

The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) gave black Americans citizenship and "equal protection of the laws"; the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) gave black men the right to vote.

The Reconstruction period (1865—1870) following the Civil War saw black Americans make some real strides towards equality and even saw black men elected to the national Congress, but many of these gains were shortlived and were quickly suppressed. By 1954, when we begin our story, segregation was widely practiced and was enforced by state and national "Jim Crow" laws, which legally enforced segregation. The idea that underlay these laws was that black and white people were "separate but equal".

Segregation is the act of keeping people separate from one another; in practice, this meant that black Americans, especially poor blacks, did not have nearly the same rights and freedoms as their white neighbours.

However, the simple truth was that white Americans enjoyed far better access to education, health care and other vital services. To give one example, William Mahoney (1961), a Harvard University student who participated in a civil rights protest against segregation on buses in 1961, describes a typical scene at a bus stop in Virginia: "I [was] confronted with what the Southern white has called 'separate but equal'. A modern rest station with gleaming counters and picture windows was labelled 'White,' and a small wooden shack beside it was labelled 'Colored'" (p. 124-125).

Federal government employees in the "White Men's Waiting Room" at the Public Health Service Dispensary, in Washington, D.C., circa 1920. Such discriminatory spaces were common in the United States even in the 1960s, especially in the former slave states in the South. The only black people allowed in this white waiting room were servants.

On 17 May 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools violated the Constitution, a crucial early civil rights victory.

In the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case, the nation's high court struck down a law requiring separate schools for white and black students, a law that was actually supported by many residents of Topeka (a city in the state of Kansas), both black and white, even though it was discriminatory (Cheney, 2018). The case was argued by lawyers from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organisation that was founded in 1909 and which has played a crucial role in many key civil rights legal cases in America.

The Brown case was one of several cases challenging segregation in schools, and the decision in effect ruled that segregation in public schools was illegal under the Constitution nationwide. This decision was rooted in the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed equal protection for black Americans. The court ruled (in part), "(d) Segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race deprives children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities ... (e) The 'separate but equal' doctrine ... has no place in the field of public education" (Supreme Court, 1954).

US Army soldiers protect teenage black students attending Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, a politically moderate city that was under the sway of Jim Crow laws, September 1957. The drive to integrate schools was violently opposed by many whites, and armed troops were often needed to enforce the new laws and to ensure the safety of black students.

The August 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African-American boy, helped light the fire of the budding civil rights movement.

Till was visiting the South from his home in the northern city of Chicago, and was kidnapped and brutally murdered after being accused of speaking disrespectfully to a white woman in Mississippi. Till's death showed many people that the struggle for equality was not just a matter of fighting unjust laws and a racist history, but was also a matter of life and death. In her 1968 autobiography, writer Anne Moody, who was the same age as Till in 1955, recalled,

"Before Emmett Till's murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was a new fear known to me—the fear of being killed just because I was black. This was the worst of my fears" (p. 43).

Two white men were tried for the murder but were quickly acquitted (judged not guilty) and freed by an all-white jury. In January 1956, Look magazine published a story in which Till's killers openly confessed to the crime, even bragging about it. One of the men said, "As long as I live and can do anything about it, n-----s are gonna stay in their place. N-----s ain't gonna vote where I live ... They ain't gonna go to school with my kids" (Huie, 1956). The 1956 Look story noted that the "majority of the white people in Mississippi" approved of or least tolerated the actions of Till's killers. In 2017, Carolyn Bryant, the woman behind the original allegations against Till, admitted that her accusations were entirely false, saying "Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him" (Weller, 2017).

Emmett Till's mother Mamie at Emmett's funeral, 6 September 1955. Mamie's decision to hold an open-casket funeral and have photographs of Emmett's mutilated corpse published helped to show Americans the horrors the black community faced on an everyday basis.

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