2. In Brief
1) Emancipation but
no freedom: 1863 1947
2) The Battles:
1948-1965
3) Winning the War:
1964 & 1965
4) New Battles: Watts
and Rodney King
3. Emancipation but no freedom
• Lincoln’s Emancipation
proclamation 1863 during
the Civil War.
• Amendments to slavery,
citizenship and
discrimination.
• All men are still not equal
- especially in the South.
4. Jim Crow Laws
1876 - 1965 “separate but equal” = the
segregation laws:
– Public schools
– Public spaces (ex. washrooms, fountains,
lunch counters)
– Public transportation (ex. buses)
Brown Vs Board of Education of Topeka (Kansas) 1954
Civil Rights Act 1964
5. Desegregation
• US Military desegregated 1948 under
Truman (Marines, 1954).
• 1954 Supreme Court ruling for deseg.
of schools (Brown Vs. Board of Educ
Topeka, Kansas)
• Soon other public spaces included:
parks, beaches, air/rail terminals, etc
• De Jure and De Facto not the same –
much resistance in the SOUTH.
6.
7. • First KKK started 1865 at
end of War in Tennessee soon every Southern
state.
• Social club jokes/hazing
turned to Reign of Terror
vs Republicans, black and
white and their post-war
Reconstruction.
• Second KKK started 1915
with remarkable growth
(20-40% of adult males in
some states).
• Lynching, harassment,
intimidation
Ku Klux Klan
8. Leo Frank murdered by
vigilante lynch mob, 1915
A Jewish factory owner,
convicted of the murder of a
Catholic woman, Mary
Phagan. When his sentence
was commuted to life, a mob
stormed the jail and lynched
him. This was the start of
KKK2.
Of the ≈ 5000 US lynchings in the
last century, 75% of the victims
were black.
9. During the 1950s and 60s, the
KKK was a key force opposing
desegregation
• The Klan had the tacit (sometimes
direct) approval of police, municipal and
state authorities.
• Klan criminals often were not charged,
convicted or given firm sentences
because their politics were mirrored by
those in power.
12. JFK
• A Catholic president
• Talked the talk, but let down the African
American minority in terms of action.
13. The Great Society
Kennedy’s Civil
Rights Bill
passed by
Congress –
allows Feds to
cut-off funding
to those who
discriminated.
Editor's Notes
Brown vs Board: Class action suit that was supported by the US Supreme Court by application of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment
KKK membership: 1920=4 million, 1924=6million, 1930= 30,000 (after rape and murder by leader), 1970=2,000, and 2000=3000. At peak, 15% of total US pop.
A lynching doesn’t have to be a hanging - the first ones were under the British: tar and feathers. Most recently, in the 1990s in Texas, a black man was dragged from a car for 3 miles until dead.
1931, Scottsboro, Alabama: 2 white women traveling in a train car accused the 9 of raping them - boys aged 13-19. Later, one of the women admitted they had made up the story. The Communist Party helped with the legal defense of the accused and gained international exposure. It seemed clear the boys were railroaded (pun).
1931, Scottsboro, Alabama: 2 white women traveling in a train car accused the 9 of raping them - boys aged 13-19. Later, one of the women admitted they had made up the story. The Communist Party helped with the legal defense of the accused and gained international exposure. It seemed clear the boys were railroaded (pun).
