From the late 1940s to the 1970s, mass protests and coordinated demonstrations made it clear that minorities would no longer tolerate discrimination. But full equality would take time, and the struggle to get there would often be brutal.

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These people marched from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, demanding passage of the Voting Rights Act. What words would you use to describe the actions and attitudes of these people?

Guiding Questions

• How did discrimination affect the lives of minorities in the United States?

• How did the courts, protests, and boycotts help minority groups achieve greater rights?

• What was the role of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Civil Rights Movement?

Vocabulary

• segregation

• integration

• Civil Rights Movement

• boycott

• civil disobedience

• sit-in

• affirmative action

Academic Vocabulary

• compose

• prominent

The Legal Struggle for Equality

During the 1950s, African Americans stepped up the struggle for legal and social equality. They took their cases to court and protested in the streets. Their efforts became known as the Civil Rights Movement.

Analyze Charts This chart lists selected Supreme Court rulings that advanced civil rights in the United States.

Summarize the purpose of bringing civil rights cases to the Supreme Court.

Equal Educational Opportunities

The U.S. Supreme Court had decided in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson that the U.S. Constitution did not prohibit “separate but equal” facilities for blacks and whites. During the 1940s, the NAACP did not attack this idea head on. Instead, its lawyers argued that separate facilities for African American students were in fact not equal to white facilities.

This strategy required patience. Each type of facility and each type of inequality had to be attacked case by case. By the early 1950s, laws in 21 states and the District of Columbia still enforced separate black and white public schools. Virtually all of the black schools were inferior to the white ones.

Oliver Brown of Topeka, Kansas, decided to challenge the Kansas school segregation law. He asked the local school board to let his daughter, Linda, attend a nearby white school rather than the distant black school to which she had been assigned. When board members refused, Brown filed a suit against the school board with the help of the NAACP. Eventually, the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

In court, the Browns were represented by Thurgood Marshall, who had served as legal director of the NAACP for more than ten years. Marshall and his team decided they had made enough progress to finally challenge the whole idea of “separate but equal.” Segregated schools, he argued, could never provide equal education. By their very nature, said Marshall, segregated schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment, which promised “equal protection of the laws” to all citizens.

The Supreme Court ruled in Brown’s favor in 1954. Chief Justice Earl Warren noted that segregation affected the “hearts and minds” of African American students “in a way unlikely ever to be undone”:

Primary Source

“We conclude that in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are always unequal.”

—Chief Justice Earl Warren, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka

Analyze Images Thurgood Marshall (center) and his legal team were a powerful weapon in the fight against discrimination. Marshall would later become the first African American Supreme Court justice.

Infer Why would a legal approach to fighting discrimination be effective?

Desegregating Schools

A year later, the Court ordered the schools to be desegregated “with all deliberate speed.” In a few places, schools were desegregated without much trouble. In many others, officials resisted. White politicians in these places decided that the phrase “with all deliberate speed” could mean they could take years to integrate their schools. Or, perhaps they would never obey the decision.

The case that caught everyone’s attention took place in 1957. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called out the National Guard in order to keep African American students from attending the all-white Central High School in Little Rock. President Eisenhower decided he had to act because the Arkansas governor was defying a federal court order. Eisenhower sent in federal troops to protect black students as they entered Central High.

Eisenhower was the first President since Reconstruction to use armed troops in support of African American rights. The action showed that the federal government could play a key role in protecting civil rights.

Analyze Images President Eisenhower sent federal troops to protect students integrating Little Rock’s Central High School.

Draw Conclusions What does this photo reveal about Americans’ attitudes toward desegregation in the 1950s?

READING CHECK 

Identify Main Ideas Why would a state governor refuse to follow a court order such as Orval Faubus did after the ruling of Brown v. Board of Education?

A Continuing Crusade for Equality

In 1963, Anne Moody was a senior in college when she and two friends sat down at a “whites-only” lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi. The server told them to move to the black section, but Anne and her friends, all African Americans, stayed put. “We would like to be served,” Anne said politely.

A crowd of whites pulled Anne and her friends from their seats. They beat one of Anne’s friends, who was promptly arrested. When Anne and her other friend returned to their seats, they were joined by a white woman from her school. “Now there were three of us,” Anne recalled, “and we were integrated.” The crowd smeared them with ketchup and mustard and dragged them from the lunch counter.

Anne and her friends were using a form of protest called a sit-in, in which people sit and refuse to leave. The first sit-in took place at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960. During the 1960s, thousands of blacks and whites were conducting sit-ins at public places across the South.

Segregation laws in the South limited the rights of African Americans not only at lunch counters but also in bus stations, restrooms, and other public facilities. In the 1960s, sit-ins and other forms of protest fortified the crusade for equality. The protests signaled a new determination to end segregation and discrimination.

Analyze Images These African American students refused to leave when white waitstaff at this lunch counter refused to serve them

Infer Why was this form of protest effective?

Nonviolent Direct Action

Civil rights groups planned the protests, but it was often young people like Anne Moody who carried them out. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), for example, organized “Freedom Rides.” Busloads of young Freedom Riders—black and white—rode from town to town to integrate bus terminals in the South.

These early civil rights groups held firmly to the tactics of what Martin Luther King, Jr., called “nonviolent direct action.” Sit-ins, boycotts, marches, and other peaceful methods were used to achieve their goals.

Police sometimes responded by using attack dogs or water hoses against protesters. Houses and churches of black leaders were bombed. Civil rights workers—black and white—were sometimes injured or killed. By remaining nonviolent, protesters gained a moral advantage and the sympathy of many Americans.

In 1963, more than 200,000 Americans marched on Washington, D.C. They wanted Congress to pass laws to end discrimination and to help the poor. Among the speakers that day was Martin Luther King, Jr.

Primary Source

“When we let freedom ring . . . we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”

—Martin Luther King, Jr., Speech, August 28, 1963

Analyze Images This was a recruiting and publicity poster for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an interracial civil rights group that supported sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and the 1963 March on Washington.

Synthesize Visual Information How does this poster relate to the goals and nonviolent methods of SNCC?

After a lifetime of struggles with discrimination, Fannie Lou Hamer became a leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964. She went on to national prominence in the Civil Rights Movement.

The Federal Government Protects Civil Rights

The demonstrations spurred Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to press for federal civil rights laws. Kennedy failed, but Johnson succeeded in pushing through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protected the right of all citizens to vote. It also outlawed discrimination in hiring and ended segregation in public places.

At the Democratic National Convention in 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer, an African American, told of her experiences while trying to register to vote in Mississippi. Her efforts, along with the help of others, were successful in gaining voting rights for all citizens.

In 1965, the Voting Rights Act allowed federal officials to register voters in states practicing discrimination. It also ended literacy tests that were used to block African Americans from voting. As a result, tens of thousands of African Americans voted for the first time.

The new civil rights laws did not end all discrimination. In the North, no formal system of segregation existed. Informally, though, housing in certain neighborhoods and employment in many companies remained closed to African Americans.

Some Call for Separation

Because progress was slow, some African Americans believed that nonviolent protest had failed. The Black Panthers and other radical groups told African Americans to arm themselves. Blacks, they said, had to be ready to protect themselves and to fight for their rights.

Black Muslims, such as Malcolm X, argued that African Americans could succeed only if they separated themselves from white society. Before he was assassinated in 1965, Malcolm X began to change his views. He called for “a society in which there could exist honest white-black brotherhood.”

Both moderates and radicals found common ground in talk of “black power.” They urged African Americans to achieve economic independence by starting their own businesses and shopping in African American-owned stores. Leaders also called for “black pride,” encouraging African Americans to learn more about their heritage and culture.

Race Riots

In crowded city neighborhoods, many African Americans were angry about discrimination, lack of jobs, and poverty. Beginning in 1965, their anger boiled over into violence.

A confrontation between a white police officer and an African American man in Watts, an African American neighborhood in Los Angeles, triggered a riot there in August. During the next six days, rioters set fire to buildings and looted stores. Some 4,000 people were arrested, 34 were killed, and 1,000 were injured. Over the next two years, Chicago, Detroit, and dozens of other cities exploded with violence, destruction, and death.

King Is Assassinated

Martin Luther King, Jr., continued to preach nonviolence. His high visibility made him a target of hate from those who opposed integration. In April 1968, he went to Memphis, Tennessee, to support a strike of black sanitation workers. When he stepped outside his motel room, a white gunman killed him.

King’s life has continued to inspire Americans to work for peaceful change. To honor his memory, his birthday was declared a national holiday in 1986.

Analyze Graphs This graph shows the unemployment rates for blacks and whites.

Use Evidence Through the 1950s and 1960s, did the difference between the unemployment rates for blacks and whites increase, decrease, or stay about the same?

Getting Results

The Civil Rights Movement began to show some results in the 1970s when African Americans won public offices in small towns and large cities. Atlanta, Cleveland, Detroit, New Orleans, and Los Angeles had all elected black mayors by 1979.

African Americans also made gains in the federal government. In 1967, Edward Brooke of Massachusetts became the first black senator since Reconstruction. A year later, President Johnson appointed Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court.

Many businesses and universities adopted affirmative action programs. These programs sought to hire and promote minorities, women, and others who had faced discrimination. By the 1970s, more African Americans were entering such professions as medicine and law. Yet, for all their efforts, African Americans still had to contend with bias in hiring, promotions, and pay.

Analyze Images Before his election as senator, Edward Brooke was a decorated veteran of World War II and attorney general of Massachusetts.

Infer How did the Civil Rights Movement change the federal and state governments?

READING CHECK 

Summarize How did the Civil Rights Movement change over time?