2. When Did the Civil Rights
Movement Begin?
The Founding of the NAACP in 1909?
The “Double V” Campaign of WWII?
Brown v. Board of Education in 1954?
The murder of Emmett Till in 1955?
The Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955?
The Greensboro Sit-Ins in 1960?
The NAACP had a long-term strategy that was a long
time in the making. The civil rights movement was not
an accident. It was something people had worked
toward for decades.
3. Rhetoric Meets Reality
In the context of the Cold War, the United States’
continued racism against its black citizens looked very,
very bad. The U.S. supposedly stood for freedom and
democracy, but black people couldn’t even vote.
Many young African Americans grew up hearing the
rhetoric of freedom and democracy and took it very
seriously. Young people were often at the forefront of
the civil rights movement, passionate about bringing
the reality they knew closer to the rhetoric they had
grown up with.
4.
5. Really Bad
Did I mention that this looked bad in a Cold War Context?
Yes, it looked bad.
In fact, in 1963 police in Birmingham, Alabama, attacked a
march of over 1000 African American children. They put
their dogs on them and sprayed them with high powered
water hoses and arrested 600 children, herding them into a
concentration camp makeshift prison. These images
circulated the globe.
Short documentary:
http://www.biography.com/news/black-history-
birmingham-childrens-crusade-1963-video
6.
7.
8.
9.
10. No More Sweeping It
under the Rug
For decades the federal government had let the South
do its own thing. They couldn’t do that anymore.
Kennedy, and after him Johnson, had to do something.
11. School Desegregation
In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessy
v. Ferguson, the 1896 decision that had set the
“separate but equal” standard.
It took time for Brown to be applied, and schools across
the South were desegregated only gradually over the
course of the 1950s and 1960s.
Documentary about Brown v. Board of Education:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5wthZhF3Jk
12. Ruby Bridges
Southern schools disobeyed the Supreme Court’s order
to desegregate, so the NAACP had to press the issue.
Typically, they would select specific black children for
the first year, which was always the hardest.
The “Little Rock Nine,” who desegregated Little Rock’s
Central High School in 1957, are a chief example.
Another is Ruby Bridges, selected in 1960 to
desegregate an elementary school in New Orleans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09faLq3wT8c
13. Tension
In an era when federal and state troops stared each
other down over things like school desegregation,
tensions were high. There were even fears of civil war.
The federal government had freed the slaves after the
Civil War, but only now, nearly one hundred years later,
were they actually stepping in and backing those
freedoms up.
14. Nonviolence
“Nonviolence” was major tactic of the civil rights movement.
Black youth would sit at whites-only lunch counter, waiting
to be served, for hours on end. Black communities would
hold marches or boycotts. Teams of black and white college
students challenged state laws by traveling by bus across the
South, facing severe beatings and jail time.
Black ministers tended to be at the front and center of the
civil rights movement, and their religion gave many African
Americans confidence that they would overcome. White
ministers from mainline Protestant denominations and
Jewish rabbis sometimes threw in their support as well.
16. Freedom Summer
In the summer of 1964, civil rights groups targeted
Mississippi, the very worst of the South. They sent
college-aged volunteers from across the country to
participate in voter registration and education.
Several white volunteers were murdered. This shocked
the country.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gYKcZCWv-w
17. Federal Action
The Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Voting Rights Act of 1965
These laws were passed with stiff opposition.
19. Northern Racism: Chicago
Martin Luther King Jr. faced some of his greatest
opposition in Chicago in 1965.
http://www.wttw.com/main.taf?p=76,4,5,7
20. Northern Racism: Boston
School districts are determined by where students live, and
blacks had been forced to live in black-only housing areas for
decades now. Housing separation meant school segregation.
In an attempt to fix this problem, judges called for busing,
bringing white and black students together. Ultimately, the
Supreme Court found busing across city lines unconstitutional,
which meant that those whites who had left the city for the
suburbs were free from the specter of busing. More whites left.
The result was that cities were increasingly black while the
suburbs around them were increasingly white. This has not
changed. Schools today are more segregated than they were in
the 1960s.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/resources/
vid/21_video_boston_qt.html
21. Economic Limitations
Blacks were increasingly in poverty and increasingly
confined to ghetto areas. Remember, this was a result of
highly discriminatory housing policy, not a result of any
deficiency on African Americans’ part. Unfortunately,
the civil rights movement, while it may have officially
ended desegregation, did not have the resources or
political clout to address the underlying economic
problems many blacks faced.
23. Black Power
Some black Americans began finding power and pride
in their own race. Malcolm X is a key example.
Advocates of black power often questioned the value of
nonviolence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1prIok_uedw
24. Riots
Okay, so this isn’t a solution. But, some African
Americans grew so fed up with the lack of change that
they rioted, burning and looting. Unfortunately, this
tended to result in white Americans turning against
African Americans and typing them as dangerous. There
was a lack of understanding of the underlying
socioeconomic problems.
