American Civil Rights Movement (1896-1954)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The 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, both in its tactics, the increased social and legal acceptance of civil rights it brought about and its exposure of the prevalence and cost of racism.
It has been made up of many movements, though it most often refers to the struggles between 1945 and 1970 to end discrimination against African-Americans and to end racial segregation, especially in the U.S. South. This article focuses on an earlier phase of that particular struggle, using two United States Supreme Court decisions—Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&court=US&vol=163&page=537) (1896), which enshrined "separate but equal" racial segregation as constitutional doctrine, and Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&court=US&vol=347&page=483) (1954) which overturned Plessy—as milestones. This is an era of stops and starts, in which some movements, such as Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, achieved great success but left little lasting legacy, while others, such as the NAACP's legal assault on state-sponsored segregation, achieved only modest results in its early years but gradually built to a key victory in Brown v. Board of Education.
| Contents |
Background
The struggle for civil rights after the Civil War
Following the Civil War, the federal government moved to extend legal equality to African-Americans with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (1865), which outlawed slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), which made citizens of all persons born and naturalized in the USA and afforded equal protection of the laws to all citizens, and the 15th Amendment (1870), which provided the right to vote to all citizens, regardless of race. During Reconstruction (1865-1877), Northern troops occupied the South and enforced these new constitutional amendments. Many blacks took prominent positions in society, including elected office.
Reconstruction ended following the Compromise of 1877 between Northern white elites and Southern white elites. The compromise called for the withdrawal of Northern troops from the South, giving Southern whites a free hand to reinstitute discriminatory practices, 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 Radical Republicans who spearheaded Reconstruction had attempted to eliminate both governmental and private discrimination by legislation. That effort was largely ended by the Supreme Court's decision in the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&court=US&vol=109&page=3) (1883), in which it held that the Fourteenth Amendment did not give Congress power to outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals or businesses.
Segregation and disenfranchisement
The Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson went even further by endorsing state-mandated discrimination in public transportation under the "separate but equal" doctrine. While the Supreme Court had previously overturned state statutes that excluded African Americans from juries or systematically disenfranchised them, and continued to do so in the years after Plessy, it endorsed segregation 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? . . . .
Harlan's predictions were, in fact, accurate, as the Court soon extended Plessy to legalize segregated schools, while in Berea College v. Kentucky, 211 U.S. 45 (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&court=US&vol=211&page=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, saw Plessy and Berea as blanket approval for restrictive laws, generally known as Jim Crow laws, that reinforced the second-class status of 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." Although the Supreme Court had declared overt forms of disenfranchisement, such as Oklahoma's "grandfather law", to be unconstitutional, Southern officials disenfranchised nearly all eligible African American voters through "white primaries", poll taxes, literacy tests, gerrymandering, economic reprisals and selective use of violence to discourage blacks from registering to vote.
Criminal law and lynching
Despite the United States Supreme Court's decision in Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303 (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&court=US&vol=100&page=303) (1880) barring exclusion of African Americans from juries, blacks were routinely barred from jury service throughout the South, leaving them at the mercy of a white justice system. In some states, particularly Alabama, the state used the criminal justice system to reestablish a form of peonage, sentencing black males to years of imprisonment, which they spent working without pay for private employers such as Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, a subsidiary of United States Steel Corporation, which paid the state for their labor. Extrajudicial punishment was even more brutal. During the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, thousands of black males were lynched by white vigilantes, sometimes with the overt assistance of state officials, throughout the South and outside it. In some cases, such as Elaine County, Arkansas in 1919 and Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, lynching escalated into mass murder, as rampaging whites killed large numbers of blacks. 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 took photographs of their victims, but made postcards out of them. The Ku Klux Klan, which had largely disappeared after a brief violent career in the early years of Reconstruction, reappeared in 1915, 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 more 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.
Economic subjugation and segregated economic life
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. Black farmers in the South often found themselves held in economic bondage as sharecroppers or tenant farmers, while employers and labor unions generally restricted African Americans to the worst paid and least desirable jobs. Relatively undistinguished jobs, such as working as a Pullman Porter, became prestigious positions in black communities where steady well-paid employment was hard to find. 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 allowed to blacks: black newspapers sprung up throughout the North, while black-owned insurance and funeral establishments acquired disproportionate influence as both economic and political leaders.
The black church
The black church likewise filled the void created by the lack of any meaningful political role for blacks in either the segregated South or much of the North in the first half of the twentieth century. The leadership role of black churches in the movement was a natural extension of their structure and function. They offered members an opportunity to exercise roles denied them in society. Throughout history, the black church served not only as a place of worship but also as a community "bulletin board," a credit union, and a "people's court" to solve disputes. Many black churches were, however, also apolitical, serving more as a means of organizing relief for their parishioners than in challenging the economic, political or social structures that kept African Americans in subjugation. New religious movements, such as the Holiness tradition that expanded rapidly in the first decades of the twentieth century as the originally integrated Pentecostal movement segregated itself, reinforced the apolitical and quietist approach of many black churchgoers.
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 United States. Washington, who led the Tuskegee Institute, preached a message of self-reliance, in which he urged blacks to concentrate on improving their economic position rather than demanding social equality until they had proved that they "deserved" it. His accommodationist rhetoric not only accepted the continuation of Jim Crow and segregation in the short term, but implicitly blamed blacks for their own subjugation.
W.E.B. Du Bois and others in the black community rejected Washington's apology for segregation; one of his close associates, Monroe Trotter, was arrested after challenging Washington when he came to deliver a speech in Boston in 1905. Later that year Du Bois and Trotter convened a meeting of black activists on the Canadian side of the river at Niagara Falls that issued a manifesto calling for universal manhood suffrage, elimination of all forms of racial segregation and extension of education—not limited to the vocational education that Washington emphasized—on a nondiscriminatory basis.
The Niagara Movement gave birth to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909; Du Bois was editor of its magazine The Crisis. In its early years, the NAACP concentrated on using the courts to attack Jim Crow laws, successfully challenging the Louisville, Kentucky ordinance that required residential segregation in Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60 (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&court=US&vol=245&page=60) (1917) and Oklahoma's "grandfather law" that exempted most white voters from a law that disenfranchised African-American citizens in Guinn v. United States. The NAACP also lobbied against President Wilson's introduction of racial segregation into federal government employment in 1913 and for commissioning of African-Americans as officers in World War I. The NAACP organized a nationwide protest against D.W. Griffith's silent film Birth of a Nation, a film that glamorized the Ku Klux Klan, in 1915.
"The New Negro"
The experience of fighting as part of the war to protect democracy in World War I, along with exposure to the different racial mores of Europe, made a tremendous impact on the black men who returned from the army, creating a widespread demand for equality they had fought for abroad. Those veterans found conditions at home as bad as ever; some were assaulted for having the impertinence of wearing their uniforms. This generation responded with a far more militant spirit than the generation before, urging blacks to fight back when whites attacked them. A. Philip Randolph introduced the term the "New Negro" in 1917; it became the catchphrase to describe the new spirit of militancy and impatience of the post-war era.
A group known as the African Blood Brotherhood, a socialist group with a large number of Jamaican 閙igr閟 in its leadership, organized around 1920 to demand the same sort of self-determination for black Americans that the Wilson administration was promising to Eastern European peoples at the Versailles conference in the aftermath of World War I. The leaders of the Brotherhood, many of whom joined the Communist Party in the years to come, were also inspired by the anti-imperialist program of the new Soviet Union.
In addition, large numbers of African-Americans had moved north during World War I, as manpower shortages in war industries promised steady jobs, and thereafter, as depressed conditions in the farm economy of the South in the 1920s made the north look more appealing. Those expanding northern communities confronted familiar problems—racism, poverty, police abuse and official hostility—in a new setting, where the possibilities for political action were far broader than in the South.
Marcus Garvey and the UNIA
Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association made great strides in organizing in these new communities and among the internationalist-minded "New Negro" movement in the early 1920s. Garvey's program pointed in the opposite direction from mainstream civil rights organizations such as the NAACP; instead of striving for integration into white-dominated society, Garvey offered a program of black nationalism that encouraged black economic independence within the system of racial segregation in the United States, an African Orthodox Church with a black Jesus and black Virgin Mother that offered an alternative to the white Jesus of the black church, and a campaign that urged African Americans to "return to Africa". Garvey attracted thousands of supporters, both in the United States and in the African diaspora in the Caribbean, and claimed eleven million members for the UNIA, which was broadly popular in Northern black communities.
Garvey's movement was a contradictory mix of defeatism, accommodation and separatism: he married themes of self-reliance that Booker T. Washington could have endorsed and the "gospel of success" so popular in white America in the 1920s with a rejection of white colonialism abroad and any hope of reform of white society at home. The movement at first attracted many of the foreign-born radicals also associated with the Socialist and Communist parties, but drove many of them away when Garvey began to suspect them of challenging his control.
The movement collapsed nearly as quickly as it blossomed, as the federal government convicted Garvey for mail fraud in 1922 in connection with the movement's financially troubled "Black Star Line". The government commuted Garvey's sentence and deported Garvey to his native Jamaica in 1927. While the movement foundered without him, it inspired other self-help and separatist movements that followed, including Father Divine and the Nation of Islam.
The Labor movement and civil rights
The labor movement, with some exceptions, had historically excluded African-Americans. While the radical labor organizers who led organizing drives among packinghouse workers in Chicago and Kansas City during World War I and the steel industry in 1919 made determined efforts to appeal to black workers, they were not able to overcome the widespread distrust of the labor movement among black workers in the North. With the ultimate defeat of both of those organizing drives, the black community and the labor movement largely returned to their traditional mutual mistrust.
Left political activists in the labor movement some progress in the 1920s and 1930s, however, in bridging that gap. A. Phillip Randolph, a long-time member of the Socialist Party of America, took the leadership of the fledgling Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters at its founding in 1925. Randolph and the union found themselves facing opposition not only from the Pullman Company, but from the press and churches within the black community, many of whom were the beneficiaries of financial support from the company. The union eventually won over many of its critics in the black community by wedding its organizing program with the larger goal of black empowerment. The union won recognition from the Pullman Company in 1935 after a ten year campaign and a union contract in 1937.
The BSCP became the only black-led union within the American Federation of Labor in 1935. Randolph chose to remain within the AFL when the Congress of Industrial Organizations split from it, even though the CIO was much more committed to organizing African-American workers and made strenuous efforts to persuade the BSCP to join it, because Randolph believed more could be done to advance black workers' rights, particularly in the railway industry, by remaining in the AFL, to which the other railway brotherhoods belonged. Randolph remained the voice for black workers within the labor movement, raising demands for elimination of Jim Crow unions within the AFL at every opportunity. BSCP members such as Edgar Nixon played a significant role in the civil rights struggles of the following decades.
Many of the CIO unions, in particular the Packinghouse Workers, the United Auto Workers and the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers made advocacy of civil rights part of their organizing strategy and bargaining priorities. The Transport Workers Union of America, which had strong ties with the Communist Party at the time, entered into coalitions with Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the NAACP and the National Negro Congress to attack employment discrimination in public transit in New York City in the early 1940s.
The CIO was particularly vocal in calling for elimination of racial discrimination by defense industries during World War II; they were also forced to combat racism within their own membership, putting down strikes by white workers who refused to work with black co-workers. While many of these "hate strikes" were short-lived, a wildcat strike launched in Philadelphia in 1944 when the federal government ordered the private transit company to desegregate its workforce lasted two weeks and was ended only when the Roosevelt administration sent troops to guard the system and arrested the strike's ringleaders.
Randolph and the BSCP took the battle against employment discrimination even further, threatening a March on Washington in 1942 if the government did not take steps to outlaw racial discrimination by defense contractors. Randolph limited the March on Washington Movement to black organizations in order to maintain black leadership of it and endured harsh criticism from others on the left for his insistence on black workers' rights in the middle of a war. Randolph only dropped the plan to march after winning substantial concessions from the Roosevelt administration.
The Left and civil rights
See The Communist Party and African-Americans.
The Scottsboro Boys
The NAACP and the Communist Party USA also organized support for the "Scottsboro Boys", nine black men first arrested in 1931 after a fight with some white men also riding the rails, then convicted and sentenced to death for raping two white women dressed in men's clothes later found on the same train. The NAACP and the CP fought over the control of those cases and the strategy to be pursued; the CP and its arm the International Labor Defense largely prevailed. The ILD's legal campaign produced two significant Supreme Court decisions extending the rights of defendants; its political campaign saved all of the defendants from the death sentence and ultimately led to freedom for most of them.
The Scottsboro defense was only one of the ILD's many cases in the South at that time; for a period of time in the early and mid-1930s the ILD was the most active defender of blacks' civil rights in the South and the most popular party organization among African-Americans. Its campaigns for black defendants' rights did much to focus national attention on the extreme conditions that black defendants faced in the criminal justice system throughout the South.
The NAACP
The NAACP devoted much of its energy between the first and second world wars to fighting the lynching of blacks throughout the United States. The organization sent Walter F. White, who later became its general secretary, to Phillips County, Arkansas in October, 1919 to investigate the Elaine Race Riot in which more than two hundred black tenant farmers were killed by roving white vigilantes and federal troops after a deputy sheriff's attack on a union meeting of sharecroppers left one white man dead. The NAACP organized the appeals for the twelve men sentenced to death a month later, based on testimony obtained by beating and electric shocks, and obtained a groundbreaking Supreme Court decision in Moore v. Dempsey, 261 U.S. 86 (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&court=US&vol=261&page=86) (1923) that significantly expanded the federal courts' oversight of the states' criminal justice systems in the years to come. The NAACP also spent more than a decade seeking federal legislation barring lynching and regularly displayed a black flag stating "A Man Was Lynched Yesterday" from the window of its offices in New York to mark each outrage.
The NAACP led the successful fight, in alliance with the American Federation of Labor to prevent the nomination of John Johnston Parker to the Supreme Court based on his opposition to black suffrage and his anti-labor rulings. This represented an important step for the NAACP, both in demonstrating the NAACP's ability to mobilize widespread opposition to racism and as a first step toward building political alliances with the labor movement.
The NAACP's legal department, headed by Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, undertook a campaign spanning several decades to bring about the reversal of the "separate but equal" doctrine announced by the Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. The NAACP's first cases did not challenge the principle directly, but sought instead to show that the state's segregated facilities were not, in fact, equal.
Even those more modest goals helped lay the foundation for the ultimate reversal of the doctrine in Brown by showing the irrational nature of the distinctions that the states drew in order to preserve segregation and the humiliating impact it had on the black subjects of "separate but equal" treatment. The Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education holding that state-sponsored segregation of elementary schools was unconstitutional was only a first step in actually dismantling desegregation in the South, but a historic milestone in reframing the national debate over segregation by putting state-sponsored discrimination beyond constitutional defense.
And see
External links
- What Was Jim Crow? (http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/what.htm) (The racial caste system that precipitated the Civil Rights Movement)
Further Reading
- Bates, Beth Tompkins, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1929-1945, 2001 ISBN 0807826146.
- Kluger, Richard, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality, 1976 ISBN 0394722558.de:B黵gerrechtsbewegung
