The Civil Rights Movement in the United States.doc

The Civil Rights Movement in the United StatesThe Civil Rights Movement in the United States has been a long, primarily nonviolent struggle to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to all Americans. The movement has had a lasting impact on United States society, in its tactics, the increased social and legal acceptance of civil rights, and in its exposure of the prevalence and cost of racism. The American Civil Rights movement has been made up of many movements. The term usually refers to the political struggles and reform movements between 1945 and 1970 to end discrimination against African Americans and to end legal racial segregation, especially in the U.S. South. This article focuses on an earlier phase of the struggle. Two United States Supreme Court decisionsPlessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), which upheld separate but equal racial segregation as constitutional doctrine, and Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) which overturned Plessy serve as milestones. This was an era of stops and starts, in which some movements, such as Marcus Garveys Universal Negro Improvement Association, achieved great success but left little lasting legacy, while others, such as the NAACPs painstaking legal assault on state-sponsored segregation, achieved modest results in its early years but made steady progress on voter rights and gradually built to a key victory in Brown v. Board of Education. After the Civil War, the U. S. expanded the legal rights of African Americans. Congress passed, and enough states ratified, an amendment ending slavery in 1865the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution. This amendment only outlawed slavery; it did not provide equal rights, nor citizenship. In 1868, the 14th Amendment was ratified by the states, granting African Americans citizenship. Black persons born in the U. S. were extended equal protection under the laws of the Constitution. The 15th Amendment was ratified in (1870), which stated that race could not be used as a condition to deprive men of the ability to vote. During Reconstruction (1865-1877), Northern troops occupied the South. Together with the Freedmens Bureau, they tried to administer and enforce the new constitutional amendments. Many black leaders were elected to local and state offices, and others organized community groups. Reconstruction ended following the Compromise of 1877 between Northern and Southern white elites. In exchange for deciding the contentious Presidential election in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes, supported by Northern states, over his opponent, Samuel J. Tilden, the compromise called for the withdrawal of Northern troops from the South. This followed violence and fraud in southern elections in 1876, which had reduced black voter turnout and enabled Southern white Democrats to regain power in state legislatures across the South. The compromise and withdrawal of Federal troops meant that white Democrats had more freedom to impose and enforce discriminatory practices. Many African Americans responded to the withdrawal of federal troops by leaving the South in what is known as the Kansas Exodus of 1879. The Radical Republicans, who spearheaded Reconstruction, had attempted to eliminate both governmental and private discrimination by legislation. That effort was largely ended by the Supreme Courts decision in the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883), in which the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment did not give Congress power to outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals or businesses. Segregation The Supreme Courts decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) upheld state-mandated discrimination in public transportation under the separate but equal doctrine. While in the 20th century, the Supreme Court began to overturn state statutes that disfranchised African Americans, as in Guinn v. United States (1915), with Plessy, it upheld segregation that Southern states enforced in nearly every other sphere of public and private life. As Justice Harlan, the only member of the Court to dissent from the decision, predicted: If a state can prescribe, as a rule of civil conduct, that whites and blacks shall not travel as passengers in the same railroad coach, why may it not so regulate the use of the streets of its cities and towns as to compel white citizens to keep on one side of a street, and black citizens to keep on the other? Why may it not, upon like grounds, punish whites and blacks who ride together in street cars or in open vehicles on a public road or street? . . . . The Court soon extended Plessy to uphold segregated schools. In Berea College v. Kentucky, 211 U.S. 45 (1908), the Court upheld a Kentucky statute that barred Berea College, a private institution, from teaching both black and white students in an integrated setting. Many states, particularly in the South, took Plessy and Berea as blanket approval for restrictive laws, generally known as Jim Crow laws, that created second-class status for African-Americans. In many cities and towns, African-Americans were not allowed to share a taxi with whites or enter a building through the same entrance. They had to drink from separate water fountains, use separate restrooms, attend separate schools, be buried in separate cemeteries and even swear on separate Bibles. They were excluded from restaurants and public libraries. Many parks barred them with signs that read Negroes and dogs not allowed. One municipal zoo went so far as to list separate visiting hours. The etiquette of racial segregation was even harsher, particularly in the South. African Americans were expected to step aside to let a white person pass, and black men dared not look any white woman in the eye. Black men and women were addressed as Tom or Jane, but rarely as Mr. or Miss or Mrs. Whites referred to black men of any age as boy and a black woman as girl; both often were called by labels such as nigger or colored. Less formal social segregation in the North began to yield to change. Jackie Robinsons Major League Baseball debut, 1947 Jackie Robinson was a sports pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement. Jackie Robinson is most well known for becoming the first African American to play professional sports in the major leagues. He is not often recognized as one of earliest public figures in the Civil Rights Movement. He debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers of Major League Baseball on April 15, 1947. Jackie Robinsons first major league game came one year before the U.S. Army was integrated, seven years before Brown v. Board of Education, eight years before Rosa Parks, and before Martin Luther King Jr. was leading the Civil Rights Movement. Jackie Robinson stepped into the spotlight before many of the most notable people in the Civil Rights Movement history. Every day he played, he was an example and role model for countless children and youths. Disfranchisement Main article: Disfranchisement after the Civil War By the turn of the century, white-dominated Southern legislatures disfranchised nearly all age-eligible African American voters through a combination of statute and constitutional provisions. While requirements applied to all citizens, in practice, they were targeted at blacks and poor whites, and subjectively administered. In addition, opponents of black civil rights used economic reprisals and sometimes violence in the 1880s to discourage blacks from registering to vote. Mississippi was the first state to have such constitutional provisions, such as poll taxes, literacy tests (which depended on subjective by white registrars), and complicated record keeping to establish residency, litigated before the Supreme Court. In 1898 the Court upheld the state, in Williams v. Mississippi. Other Southern states quickly adopted the Mississippi plan, and from 1890-1908, ten states adopted new constitutions with provisions to disfranchise most blacks and many poor whites. States continued to disfranchise these groups for decades. Blacks were most adversely affected, as in many states black voter turnout dropped to zero. Poor whites were also disfranchised. In Alabama, for instance, by 1941, 600,000 poor whites had been disfranchised, and 520,000 blacks.1 It was not until the 20th century that litigation by African Americans on such provisions began to meet some success before the Supreme Court. In 1915 in Guinn v. United States, the Court declared Oklahomas grandfather law, to be unconstitutional. Although the decision affected all states that used the grandfather clause, state legislatures quickly devised new devices to continue disfranchisement. Each provision or statute had to be litigated separately. One device the Democratic Party began to use more widely in Southern states was the white primary, which served for decades to disfranchise the few blacks who managed to get past barriers of voter registration. Barring blacks from voting in the Democratic Party primaries meant they had no chance to vote in the only competitive contests. White primaries were not struck down by the Supreme Court until Smith v. Allwright in 1944. Criminal law and lynching In 1880, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303 (1880) that African Americans could not be excluded from juries. The late 19th century disfranchisement of blacks in the South, however, meant that blacks were routinely barred from jury service, as it was reserved for voters only. This left them at the mercy of a white justice system arrayed against them. In some states, particularly Alabama, the state used the criminal justice system to reestablish a form of peonage in the form of the convict-lease system. The state sentenced black males to years of imprisonment, which they spent working without pay. The state leased prisoners to private employers, such as Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, a subsidiary of United States Steel Corporation, which paid the state for their labor. Because the state made money, the system created incentives for the jailing of more men, who were disproportionately black. It also created a system in which treatment of prisoners received little oversight. Extra-judicial punishment was even more brutal. During the last decade of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, white vigilantes lynched thousands of black males, sometimes with the overt assistance of state officials, mostly within the South. No whites were charged with crimes in any of those massacres. Whites were, in fact, so confident of their immunity from prosecution for lynching that they not only photographed the victims, but made postcards out of the pictures. The Ku Klux Klan, which had largely disappeared after a brief violent career in the early years of Reconstruction, reappeared in 1915. It grew mostly in industrializing cities of the South and Midwest that underwent the most rapid growth from 1910-1930. Social instability contributed to racial tensions from severe competition for jobs and housing. People joined KKK groups who were anxious about their place in American society, as cities were rapidly changed by a combination of industrialization, migration of blacks and whites from the rural South, and waves of increased immigration from mostly rural southern and eastern Europe.2 Initially the KKK presented itself as another fraternal organization devoted to betterment of its members. The KKKs revival was inspired in part by the movie Birth of a Nation, which glorified the earlier Klan and dramatized the racist stereotypes concerning blacks of that era. The Klan focused on political mobilization, which allowed it to gain power in states such as Indiana, on a platform that combined racism with anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic and anti-union rhetoric, but also supported lynching. It reached its peak of membership and influence about 1925, declining rapidly afterward as opponents mobilized.3 Segregated economic life and education In addition to excluding blacks from equal participation in many areas of public life, white society also kept blacks in a position of economic subservience or marginality. After widespread losses from disease and financial failures in the late 19th c., black farmers in the South worked in virtual economic bondage as sharecroppers or tenant farmers. Employers and labor unions generally restricted African Americans to the worst paid and least desirable jobs. Because of the lack of steady, well-paid jobs, relatively undistinguished positions, such as those with the Pullman Porter or as hotel doorman, became prestigious positions in black communities. The Jim Crow system that excluded African-Americans from many areas of economic life led to creation of a vigorous, but stunted economic life within the segregated sphere. Black newspapers sprang up throughout the North, while black owners of insurance and funeral establishments acquired disproportionate influence as both economic and political leaders. Continuing to see education as the primary route of advancement and critical for the race, many talented blacks went into teaching, which had high respect as a profession. Segregated schools for blacks were underfunded in the South and ran on shortened schedules in rural areas. Despite segregation in Washington, DC, by contrast, as Federal employees, black and white teachers were paid on the same scale. Outstanding black teachers in the North received advanced degrees and taught in highly regarded schools, which trained the next generation of leaders in cities such as Chicago, Washington, and New York. Education, in fact, was one of the major achievements of the black community in the 19th century. Blacks in Reconstruction governments had supported the establishment of public education in every Southern state. Despite the difficulties, with the enormous eagerness of freedmen for education, by 1900 the African-American community had trained and put to work 30,000 African-American teachers in the South. In addition, a majority of the black population had achieved literacy.4 Not all the teachers had a full 4-year college degree in those years, but the shorter terms of normal schools were part of the system of teacher training in both the North and the South to serve the many new communities across the frontier. African American teachers got many children and adults started on education. Northern alliances had helped fund normal schools and colleges to teach African American teachers, as well as create other professional classes. African Americans reached out for education at these historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). After the turn of the century, black men and women began to found their own fraternities and sororities to create networks for lifelong service and collaboration. These were part of the new organizations that strengthened community life. The Black church As the center of community life, Black churches held a leadership role in the Civil Rights Movement. Their history as a focal point for the Black community and as a link between the Black and White worlds made them natural for this purpose. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was but one of many notable Black ministers involved in the movement. Ralph David Abernathy, Bernard Lee, Fred Shuttlesworth, and C.T. Vivian are among the many notable minister-activists.5 They were especially important during the later years of the movement in the 1950s and 1960s. The Niagara Movement and the founding of the NAACP At the turn of the century, Booker T. Washington was regarded, particularly by the white community, as the foremost spokesman for African-Americans in the U. S. Washington, who led the Tuskegee Institute, preached a message of self-reliance. He urged blacks to concentrate on improving their economic position rather than demanding social equality until they had proved that they deserved it. Publicly, he accepted the continuation of Jim Crow and segregation in the short term, but privately helped to fund court cases challenging the laws. W.E.B. Du Bois and others in the black community