The Civil Rights Movement in the United States was a long, primarily nonviolent struggle to bring full
civil rightsCivil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...
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 AmericanAfrican Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
s and other disadvantaged groups and to end legal
racial segregationRacial segregation in the United States, as a general term, included the racial segregation or hypersegregation of facilities, services, and opportunities such as housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation along racial lines...
, especially in the U.S. South.
This article focuses on an earlier phase of the struggle. Two United States Supreme Court decisions—
Plessy v. FergusonPlessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 , is a landmark United States Supreme Court decision in the jurisprudence of the United States, upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in private businesses , under the doctrine of "separate but equal".The decision was handed...
, , which upheld "separate but equal" racial segregation as constitutional doctrine, and
Brown v. Board of EducationBrown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 , was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 which...
, which overturned Plessy — serve as milestones. This was an era of stops and starts, in which some movements, such as
Marcus GarveyMarcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr., ONH was a Jamaican publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who was a staunch proponent of the Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, to which end he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League...
's Universal Negro Improvement Association, were very successful but left little lasting legacy, while others, such as the NAACP's 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 (1954).
After the
Civil WarThe American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
, the U. S. expanded the legal rights of African Americans.
CongressThe United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Congress meets in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C....
passed, and enough states ratified, an amendment ending slavery in 1865—the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution. This amendment only outlawed slavery; it provided neither citizenship nor equal rights. In 1868, the 14th Amendment was ratified by the states, granting African Americans citizenship. All persons born in the U. S. were extended equal protection under the laws of the Constitution. The 15th Amendment (ratified in 1870) 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 Freedmen's Bureau, they tried to administer and enforce the new constitutional amendments. Many black leaders were elected to local and state offices, and many others organized community groups, especially to support education.
Reconstruction ended following the
Compromise of 1877The Compromise of 1877, also known as the Corrupt Bargain, refers to a purported informal, unwritten deal that settled the disputed 1876 U.S. Presidential election and ended Congressional Reconstruction. Through it, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was awarded the White House over Democrat Samuel J...
between Northern and Southern white elites. In exchange for deciding the contentious Presidential election in favor of
Rutherford B. HayesRutherford Birchard Hayes was the 19th President of the United States . As president, he oversaw the end of Reconstruction and the United States' entry into the Second Industrial Revolution...
, supported by Northern states, over his opponent,
Samuel J. TildenSamuel Jones Tilden was the Democratic candidate for the U.S. presidency in the disputed election of 1876, one of the most controversial American elections of the 19th century. He was the 25th Governor of New York...
, the compromise called for the withdrawal of Northern troops from the South. This followed violence and fraud in southern elections from 1868-1876, 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 1879Exodusters was a name given to African Americans who fled the Southern United States for Kansas in 1879 and 1880. After the end of Reconstruction, racial oppression and rumors of the reinstitution of slavery led many freedmen to seek a new place to live....
.
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 CourtThe Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...
's decision in the
Civil Rights CasesThe Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 , were a group of five similar cases consolidated into one issue for the United States Supreme Court to review...
, , 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 Court's decision in
Plessy v. FergusonPlessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 , is a landmark United States Supreme Court decision in the jurisprudence of the United States, upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in private businesses , under the doctrine of "separate but equal".The decision was handed...
(1896) upheld state-mandated discrimination in public transportation under the "
separate but equalSeparate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law that justified systems of segregation. Under this doctrine, services, facilities and public accommodations were allowed to be separated by race, on the condition that the quality of each group's public facilities was to...
" doctrine. As Justice
HarlanJohn Marshall Harlan was a Kentucky lawyer and politician who served as an associate justice on the Supreme Court. He is most notable as the lone dissenter in the Civil Rights Cases , and Plessy v...
, 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 Plessy decision did not address an earlier Supreme Court case,
Yick Wo v. HopkinsYick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 , was the first case where the United States Supreme Court ruled that a law that is race-neutral on its face, but is administered in a prejudicial manner, is an infringement of the Equal Protection Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S...
,
118 U.S. 356Case citation is the system used in many countries to identify the decisions in past court cases, either in special series of books called reporters or law reports, or in a 'neutral' form which will identify a decision wherever it was reported...
(1886), involving discrimination against Chinese immigrants, that held that a law that is race-neutral on its face, but is administered in a prejudicial manner, is an infringement of the
Equal Protection ClauseThe Equal Protection Clause, part of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, provides that "no state shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws"...
in the
Fourteenth AmendmentThe Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments.Its Citizenship Clause provides a broad definition of citizenship that overruled the Dred Scott v...
to the U.S. Constitution.
While in the 20th century, the Supreme Court began to overturn state statutes that disfranchised African Americans, as in
Guinn v. United StatesGuinn v. United States, 238 U.S. 347 , was an important United States Supreme Court decision that dealt with provisions of state constitutions that set qualifications for voters. It found grandfather clause exemptions to literacy tests to be unconstitutional...
(1915), with Plessy, it upheld segregation that Southern states enforced in nearly every other sphere of public and private life.
The Court soon extended Plessy to uphold segregated schools. In
Berea College v. KentuckyBerea College v. Kentucky , was a significant case argued before the United States Supreme Court that upheld the rights of states to prohibit private educational institutions chartered as corporations from admitting both black and white students. Like the related Plessy v. Ferguson case, it was...
, , 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 lawsThe Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans...
, that created second-class status for African Americans.
In many cities and towns, African Americans were not allowed to share a
taxiA taxicab, also taxi or cab, is a type of vehicle for hire with a driver, used by a single passenger or small group of passengers, often for a non-shared ride. A taxicab conveys passengers between locations of their choice...
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 swear on separate
BibleThe Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
s. They were excluded from restaurants and public libraries. Many parks barred them with signs that read "Negroes and dogs not allowed." One municipal zoo listed separate visiting hours.
The etiquette of racial segregation was 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," titles then widely in use for adults. 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. In 1941, however, the
United States Naval AcademyThe United States Naval Academy is a four-year coeducational federal service academy located in Annapolis, Maryland, United States...
, based in segregated Maryland,
refused to playThe Harvard-Navy lacrosse game of 1941 was an intercollegiate lacrosse game between the Harvard University Crimson and the United States Naval Academy Midshipmen on April 4, 1941. The game was played at Navy's campus in Annapolis, Maryland. Before the game, the Naval Academy's superintendent told...
a
lacrosseLacrosse is a team sport of Native American origin played using a small rubber ball and a long-handled stick called a crosse or lacrosse stick, mainly played in the United States and Canada. It is a contact sport which requires padding. The head of the lacrosse stick is strung with loose mesh...
game against
Harvard UniversityHarvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
because Harvard's team included a black player.
Paul Robeson addresses segregation in Major League Baseball, 1943
In December 1943, the singer and activist
Paul RobesonPaul Leroy Robeson was an American concert singer , recording artist, actor, athlete, scholar who was an advocate for the Civil Rights Movement in the first half of the twentieth century...
became the first black man to address baseball team owners on the subject of integration. At the owners' annual winter meeting, Robeson argued that baseball, as a national game, had an obligation to ensure segregation did not become a national pattern. The owners gave Robeson a round of applause. Although
Baseball CommissionerThe Commissioner of Baseball is the chief executive of Major League Baseball and its associated minor leagues. Under the direction of the Commissioner, the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball hires and maintains the sport's umpiring crews, and negotiates marketing, labor, and television contracts...
Kenesaw Mountain LandisKenesaw Mountain Landis was an American jurist who served as a federal judge from 1905 to 1922 and as the first Commissioner of Baseball from 1920 until his death...
remarked after the meeting that there was no rule on the books denying blacks entry into the league, he had stood in way of integration for more than 20 years. His death in 1944 removed a significant obstacle to integrating Major League Baseball. Still, Robeson is credited with helping to pave the way for Jackie Robinson's entry into major league baseball four years later.
Jackie Robinson’s Major League Baseball debut, 1947
Jackie RobinsonJack Roosevelt "Jackie" Robinson was the first black Major League Baseball player of the modern era. Robinson broke the baseball color line when he debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947...
was a sports pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement, best known for becoming the first African American to play professional sports in the major leagues.
Robinson debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers of
Major League BaseballMajor League Baseball is the highest level of professional baseball in the United States and Canada, consisting of teams that play in the National League and the American League...
on April 15, 1947. His 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 ParksRosa Louise McCauley Parks was an African-American civil rights activist, whom the U.S. Congress called "the first lady of civil rights", and "the mother of the freedom movement"....
, and before Martin Luther King Jr. was leading the Civil Rights Movement.
Lily-White Movement
Following the Civil War black leaders made substantial progress in establishing representation in the
Republican PartyThe Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...
. Among the most stunning was the rise of
Norris Wright CuneyNorris Wright Cuney, or simply Wright Cuney, was an American politician, union leader, and African American activist in Texas in the United States. He became active in Galveston politics serving as an alderman and a national Republican delegate...
to the chairmanship of the Texas Republican Party. These gains led to substantial discomfort among many white voters, some of whom left the party to join the
DemocratsThe Democratic Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. The party's socially liberal and progressive platform is largely considered center-left in the U.S. political spectrum. The party has the lengthiest record of continuous...
.
During the 1888 Texas Republican Convention, Cuney coined the term Lily-White Movement to describe efforts by white conservatives to oust blacks from positions of party leadership and incite riots to divide the party. Increasingly organized efforts by this movement gradually eliminated black leaders from the party. The writer Michael Fauntroy contends that the effort was coordinated with Democrats as part of a larger movement toward disfranchisement of blacks in the South, but by the late nineteenth century, the Democratic Party had retaken most state legislatures in the South and accomplished disfranchisement of blacks without Republican assistance.
Nationally, the Republican Party responded to black demands. For instance, opposition to
lynchingLynching, the practice of killing people by extrajudicial mob action, occurred in the United States chiefly from the late 18th century through the 1960s. Lynchings took place most frequently in the South from 1890 to the 1920s, with a peak in the annual toll in 1892.It is associated with...
was part of the Republican platform at the 1920 Republican National Convention. Lynchings, primarily of black men in the South, had increased in the decades around the turn of the century.
Leonidas C. DyerLeonidas Carstarphen Dyer was an American politician, reformer, civil rights activist, and military officer who served 11 terms in the U.S. Congress as a Republican Representative from Missouri from 1911 to 1933. In 1898 enrolling in the U.S...
, a white Republican Representative from
St. Louis, MissouriSt. Louis is an independent city on the eastern border of Missouri, United States. With a population of 319,294, it was the 58th-largest U.S. city at the 2010 U.S. Census. The Greater St...
, worked with the NAACP to introduce an anti-lynching bill into the House, where he gained strong national passage in 1922. His effort was defeated by the Southern Democratic block in the Senate, which filibustered the bill that year, and in 1923 and 1924.
Disfranchisement
Opponents of black civil rights used economic reprisals and sometimes violence in the 1870s and 1880s to discourage blacks from registering to vote. By the turn of the 20th century, white Democratic-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 Mexican Americans in Texas), and subjectively administered. The feature "Turnout in Presidential and Midterm Elections" at this University of Texas website devoted to politics, shows the drastic drop in voting as these provisions took effect in Southern states compared to the rest of the US, and the longevity of the measures.
MississippiMississippi is a U.S. state located in the Southern United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city. The name of the state derives from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, whose name comes from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi...
was the first state to have such constitutional provisions, such as poll taxes, literacy tests (which depended on the arbitrary decisions of white registrars), and complicated record keeping to establish residency, litigated before the Supreme Court. In 1898, in
Williams v. MississippiWilliams v. Mississippi, 170 U.S. 213 is a United States Supreme Court case that reviewed provisions of the state constitution that set requirements for voter registration...
, the Court upheld the state. 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, until mid-1960s federal legislation provided for oversight and enforcement of voting rights. Blacks were most adversely affected, and 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, as well as 520,000 blacks.
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 StatesGuinn v. United States, 238 U.S. 347 , was an important United States Supreme Court decision that dealt with provisions of state constitutions that set qualifications for voters. It found grandfather clause exemptions to literacy tests to be unconstitutional...
, the Court declared Oklahoma’s ‘
grandfather clauseGrandfather clause is a legal term used to describe a situation in which an old rule continues to apply to some existing situations, while a new rule will apply to all future situations. It is often used as a verb: to grandfather means to grant such an exemption...
’ to be unconstitutional. Although the decision affected all states that used the grandfather clause, state legislatures quickly employed new devices to continue disfranchisement. Each provision or statute had to be litigated separately. The NAACP litigated against many such provisions.
One device which the Democratic Party began to use more widely in Southern states in the early 20th century 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. AllwrightSmith v. Allwright , 321 U.S. 649 , was a very important decision of the United States Supreme Court with regard to voting rights and, by extension, racial desegregation. It overturned the Democratic Party's use of all-white primaries in Texas, and other states where the party used the...
in 1944.
Criminal law and lynching
In 1880, the United States Supreme Court ruled in
Strauder v. West VirginiaStrauder v. West Virginia, , was a United States Supreme Court case about racial discrimination.-Background:At the time, West Virginia excluded African-Americans from juries. Strauder was a Black man who, at trial, had been convicted of murder by an all-white jury...
, that African Americans could not be excluded from juries. But, beginnin in 1890 with new state constitutions and electoral laws, the South effectively disfranchised blacks in the South, which routinely disqualified them for jury duty which was limited to voters. This left them at the mercy of a white justice system arrayed against them. In some states, particularly
AlabamaAlabama is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and Mississippi to the west. Alabama ranks 30th in total land area and ranks second in the size of its inland...
, the state used the criminal justice system to reestablish a form of peonage, through 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 CompanyThe Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company , also known as TCI and the Tennessee Company, was a major American steel manufacturer with interests in coal and iron ore mining and railroad operations. Originally based entirely within Tennessee, it relocated most of its business to Alabama in the...
, 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.
Extrajudicial punishment was more brutal. During the last decade of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, white vigilante mobs 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 murders. Whites were 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 KlanKu Klux Klan, often abbreviated KKK and informally known as the Klan, is the name of three distinct past and present far-right organizations in the United States, which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically...
, 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 to 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.
Initially the KKK presented itself as another fraternal organization devoted to betterment of its members. The KKK's 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
IndianaIndiana is a US state, admitted to the United States as the 19th on December 11, 1816. It is located in the Midwestern United States and Great Lakes Region. With 6,483,802 residents, the state is ranked 15th in population and 16th in population density. Indiana is ranked 38th in land area and is...
, 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.
Republicans repeatedly introduced bills in the House to make
lynchingLynching, the practice of killing people by extrajudicial mob action, occurred in the United States chiefly from the late 18th century through the 1960s. Lynchings took place most frequently in the South from 1890 to the 1920s, with a peak in the annual toll in 1892.It is associated with...
a federal crime, but they were defeated by the Southern block. In 1920 the Republicans made an anti-lynching bill part of their platform and achieved passage in the House by a wide margin. Southern Democrats in the Senate repeatedly filibustered the bill to prevent a vote, and defeated it in the 1922, 1923 and 1924 sessions as they held the rest of the legislative program hostage.
Segregated economic life and education
Besides 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 crops from disease and land from financial failures in the late 19th c., black farmers in the South by the early 20th century worked in virtual economic bondage as sharecroppers or tenant farmers. In Mississippi particularly, many blacks had become landowners before the financial failures of the late 19th century. 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 PorterThe Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was, in 1925, the first labor organization led by blacks to receive a charter in the American Federation of Labor . It merged in 1978 with the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks , now known as the Transportation Communications International Union.The...
or as hotel doorman, became prestigious positions in black communities in the North. The expansion of railroads meant that they recruited in the South for laborers, and tens of thousands of blacks moved North to work with the
Pennsylvania RailroadThe Pennsylvania Railroad was an American Class I railroad, founded in 1846. Commonly referred to as the "Pennsy", the PRR was headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania....
, for example, during the period of the
Great MigrationThe Great Migration was the movement of 6 million blacks out of the Southern United States to the Northeast, Midwest, and West from 1910 to 1970. Some historians differentiate between a Great Migration , numbering about 1.6 million migrants, and a Second Great Migration , in which 5 million or more...
.
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, and other services for blacks, acquired disproportionate influence as both economic and political leaders.
This period saw the maturing of independent black churches, whose leaders were usually also strong community leaders. Blacks had left white churches and the
Southern Baptist ConventionThe Southern Baptist Convention is a United States-based Christian denomination. It is the world's largest Baptist denomination and the largest Protestant body in the United States, with over 16 million members...
to set up their own churches free of white supervision immediately during and after the
American Civil WarThe American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
. With the help of northern associations, they quickly began to set up state conventions and, by 1895, joined several associations into the black
National Baptist ConventionNational Baptist Convention may refer to:One of several historically African-American Christian denominations:*National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc., the oldest and largest denomination using this name, formed in the late 19th century...
, the first of that denomination among blacks. In addition, independent black denominations, such as the
African Methodist Episcopal ChurchThe African Methodist Episcopal Church, usually called the A.M.E. Church, is a predominantly African American Methodist denomination based in the United States. It was founded by the Rev. Richard Allen in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1816 from several black Methodist congregations in the...
and AME Zion Church, had made hundreds of thousands of converts in the South, founding AME churches across the region. The churches were centers of community activity, especially organizing for education.
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, whose black populations had increased in the twentieth century due to the Great Migration.
Education 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. 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. The
American Missionary AssociationThe American Missionary Association was a Protestant-based abolitionist group founded on September 3, 1846 in Albany, New York. The main purpose of this organization was to abolish slavery, to educate African Americans, to promote racial equality, and to promote Christian values...
, supported largely by the Congregational and Presbyterian churches, had helped fund and staff numerous private schools and colleges in the South, who collaborated with black communities to train generations of teachers and other leaders. Major 20th-century industrialists, such as
George EastmanGeorge Eastman was an American innovator and entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and invented roll film, helping to bring photography to the mainstream...
of
Rochester, New YorkRochester is a city in Monroe County, New York, south of Lake Ontario in the United States. Known as The World's Image Centre, it was also once known as The Flour City, and more recently as The Flower City...
, acted as philanthropists and made substantial donations to black educational institutions such as Tuskegee Institute.
In 1862, the US Congress passed the Morrill Act, which established federal funding of a land grant college in each state, but 17 states refused to admit black students to their land grant colleges. In response, Congress enacted the second Morrill Act of 1890, which required states that excluded blacks from their existing land grant colleges to open separate institutions and to equitably divide the funds between the schools. The colleges founded in response to the second Morill Act became today's public
historically black colleges and universitiesHistorically black colleges and universities are institutions of higher education in the United States that were established before 1964 with the intention of serving the black community....
(HBCUs) and, together with the private HBCUs and the unsegregated colleges in the North and West, provided higher educational opportunities to African Americans. Federally funded extension agents from the land grant colleges spread knowledge about scientific agriculture and home economics to rural communities with agents from the HBCUs focusing on black farmers and families.
In the nineteenth century, blacks formed fraternal organizations across the South and the North, including an increasing number of women's clubs. They created and supported institutions that increased education, health and welfare for black communities. After the turn of the 20th century, black men and women also began to found their own college fraternities and sororities to create additional networks for lifelong service and collaboration. These were part of the new organizations that strengthened independent community life under segregation.
The Black church
As the center of community life, Black churches were integral leaders and organizers in the
Civil Rights MovementThe civil rights movement was a worldwide political movement for equality before the law occurring between approximately 1950 and 1980. In many situations it took the form of campaigns of civil resistance aimed at achieving change by nonviolent forms of resistance. In some situations it was...
. 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.Martin Luther King, Jr. was an American clergyman, activist, and prominent leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for being an iconic figure in the advancement of civil rights in the United States and around the world, using nonviolent methods following the...
was but one of many notable Black ministers involved in the movement. Ralph David Abernathy,
Bernard LeeJohn Bernard Lee was an English actor, best known for his role as M in the first eleven James Bond films.-Life and career:...
,
Fred ShuttlesworthReverend Fred Shuttlesworth, born Freddie Lee Robinson, was a U.S. civil rights activist who led the fight against segregation and other forms of racism as a minister in Birmingham, Alabama...
, and C.T. Vivian are among the many notable minister-activists. 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 20th century,
Booker T. WashingtonBooker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, author, orator, and political leader. He was the dominant figure in the African-American community in the United States from 1890 to 1915...
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 national court cases that challenged the laws.
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
BostonBoston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
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. They 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.
Du Bois joined with other black leaders and white activists, such as
Mary White OvingtonMary White Ovington was a suffragette, socialist, Unitarian, journalist, and co-founder of the NAACP.-Biography:...
,
Oswald Garrison VillardOswald Garrison Villard was an American journalist. He provided a rare direct link between the anti-imperialism of the late 19th century and the conservative Old Right of the 1930s and 1940s.-Biography:...
,
William English WallingWilliam English Walling was an American labor reformer and socialist born in Louisville, Kentucky. He was the grandson of William Hayden English, the Democratic candidate for vice president in 1880, and was born into wealth. He was educated at the University of Chicago and at Harvard Law School...
,
Henry MoskowitzHenry Moskowitz was a civil rights activist, and one of the co-founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.-Biography:He was born in 1879 in Romania....
, Julius Rosenthal,
Lillian WaldLillian D. Wald was a nurse; social worker; public health official; teacher; author; editor; publisher; activist for peace, women's, children's and civil rights; and the founder of American community nursing...
, Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch, and Stephen Wise to create the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored PeopleThe National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, usually abbreviated as NAACP, is an African-American civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909. Its mission is "to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to...
(NAACP) in 1909. W. E. B. Du Bois also became editor of its magazine
The CrisisThe Crisis is the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People , and was founded in 1910 by W. E. B. Du Bois , Oswald Garrison Villard, J. Max Barber, Charles Edward Russell, Kelly Miller, W.S. Braithwaite, M. D. Maclean.The original title of the journal was...
. In its early years, the NAACP concentrated on using the courts to attack Jim Crow laws and disfranchising constitutional provisions. It successfully challenged the
Louisville, KentuckyLouisville is the largest city in the U.S. state of Kentucky, and the county seat of Jefferson County. Since 2003, the city's borders have been coterminous with those of the county because of a city-county merger. The city's population at the 2010 census was 741,096...
ordinance that required
residential segregationResidential segregation is the physical separation of cultural groups based on residence and housing, or a form of segregation that "sorts population groups into various neighborhood contexts and shapes the living environment at the neighborhood level."...
in
Buchanan v. WarleyBuchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60 was a unanimous United States Supreme Court decision addressing civil government instituted racial segregation in residential areas. The Court held that a Louisville, Kentucky, city ordinance prohibiting the sale of real property to African Americans violated the...
, . It also gained a Supreme Court ruling striking down
OklahomaOklahoma is a state located in the South Central region of the United States of America. With an estimated 3,751,351 residents as of the 2010 census and a land area of 68,667 square miles , Oklahoma is the 28th most populous and 20th-largest state...
's ‘
grandfather clauseGrandfather clause is a legal term used to describe a situation in which an old rule continues to apply to some existing situations, while a new rule will apply to all future situations. It is often used as a verb: to grandfather means to grant such an exemption...
’ that exempted most illiterate white voters from a law that disfranchised African-American citizens in
Guinn v. United StatesGuinn v. United States, 238 U.S. 347 , was an important United States Supreme Court decision that dealt with provisions of state constitutions that set qualifications for voters. It found grandfather clause exemptions to literacy tests to be unconstitutional...
(1915).
The NAACP lobbied against President
Woodrow WilsonThomas Woodrow Wilson was the 28th President of the United States, from 1913 to 1921. A leader of the Progressive Movement, he served as President of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910, and then as the Governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913...
's introduction of racial segregation into Federal government employment and offices in 1913. They lobbied for commissioning of African Americans as officers in
World War IWorld War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
. In 1915 the NAACP organized public education and protests in cities across the nation against D.W. Griffith's silent film Birth of a Nation, a film that glamorized the Ku Klux Klan. Some cities refused to allow the film to open.
The American Jewish community and the civil rights movement
Many from the
American Jewish communityAmerican Jews, also known as Jewish Americans, are American citizens of the Jewish faith or Jewish ethnicity. The Jewish community in the United States is composed predominantly of Ashkenazi Jews who emigrated from Central and Eastern Europe, and their U.S.-born descendants...
tacitly or actively supported the civil rights movement. Several of the co-founders of the NAACP were Jewish. Many of its white members and leading activists came from within the Jewish community. The great majority of American Jews who were active in promoting civil rights were secular Jews,
Reform JewsReform Judaism refers to various beliefs, practices and organizations associated with the Reform Jewish movement in North America, the United Kingdom and elsewhere. In general, it maintains that Judaism and Jewish traditions should be modernized and should be compatible with participation in the...
and
Conservative JewsConservative Judaism is a modern stream of Judaism that arose out of intellectual currents in Germany in the mid-19th century and took institutional form in the United States in the early 1900s.Conservative Judaism has its roots in the school of thought known as Positive-Historical Judaism,...
, especially during the later years.
Jewish
philanthropistsPhilanthropy etymologically means "the love of humanity"—love in the sense of caring for, nourishing, developing, or enhancing; humanity in the sense of "what it is to be human," or "human potential." In modern practical terms, it is "private initiatives for public good, focusing on quality of...
actively supported the NAACP and various civil rights group, and schools for African Americans. The Jewish philanthropist
Julius RosenwaldJulius Rosenwald was a U.S. clothier, manufacturer, business executive, and philanthropist. He is best known as a part-owner and leader of Sears, Roebuck and Company, and for the Rosenwald Fund which donated millions to support the education of African American children in the rural South, as well...
funded the creation of dozens of primary schools, secondary schools and colleges for segregated black youth. In partnership with
Booker T. WashingtonBooker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, author, orator, and political leader. He was the dominant figure in the African-American community in the United States from 1890 to 1915...
and
Tuskegee UniversityTuskegee University is a private, historically black university located in Tuskegee, Alabama, United States. It is a member school of the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund...
, Rosenwald created a fund which provided seed money for building 5,000 schools for black Americans, mostly in the rural South. Tuskegee architects created model school plans. What is most remarkable is that black communities essentially taxed themselves twice to pay for such schools, which required community matching funds. Often most of the residents in rural areas were blacks. Public funds were committed for the schools, and blacks raised additional funds by community events, and sometimes by members' getting second mortgages on their homes. At one time some forty percent of rural southern blacks were learning at Rosenwald elementary schools.
Rosenwald also contributed to HBCUs such as
HowardHoward University is a federally chartered, non-profit, private, coeducational, nonsectarian, historically black university located in Washington, D.C., United States...
,
DillardDillard University is a private, historically black liberal arts college in New Orleans, Louisiana. Founded in 1930 incorporating earlier institutions that went back to 1869, it is affiliated with the United Church of Christ and the United Methodist Church....
and
FiskFisk University is an historically black university founded in 1866 in Nashville, Tennessee, U.S. The world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers started as a group of students who performed to earn enough money to save the school at a critical time of financial shortages. They toured to raise funds to...
universities.
The PBS television show From Swastika to Jim Crow discussed Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement. It recounted that Jewish scholars fleeing from or surviving the Holocaust of
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
came to teach at many Southern schools, where they reached out to black students:
- Thus, in the 1930s and '40s when Jewish refugee professors arrived at Southern Black Colleges
Historically black colleges and universities are institutions of higher education in the United States that were established before 1964 with the intention of serving the black community....
, there was a history of overt empathy between Blacks and Jews, and the possibility of truly effective collaboration. Professor Ernst BorinskiErnst Borinski was a German-Jewish sociologist and intellectual, who contributed to undermining Jim Crow laws in Mississippi during the 1950s and 1960s.-Background:...
organized dinners at which Blacks and Whites would have to sit next to each other — a simple yet revolutionary act. Black students empathized with the cruelty these scholars had endured in Europe and trusted them more than other Whites. In fact, often Black students — as well as members of the Southern White community — saw these refugees as "some kind of colored folk."
The
American Jewish CommitteeThe American Jewish Committee was "founded in 1906 with the aim of rallying all sections of American Jewry to defend the rights of Jews all over the world...
,
American Jewish CongressThe American Jewish Congress describes itself as an association of Jewish Americans organized to defend Jewish interests at home and abroad through public policy advocacy, using diplomacy, legislation, and the courts....
, and
Anti-Defamation LeagueThe Anti-Defamation League is an international non-governmental organization based in the United States. Describing itself as "the nation's premier civil rights/human relations agency", the ADL states that it "fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals and protects...
became active in promoting civil rights.
"The New Negro"
The experience of fighting as part of World War I, along with exposure to the different racial mores of Europe, influenced the black veterans; they created a widespread demand for the freedoms and 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 RandolphAsa Philip Randolph was a leader in the African American civil-rights movement and the American labor movement. He organized and led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first predominantly Negro labor union. In the early civil-rights movement, Randolph led the March on Washington...
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 BrotherhoodThe African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption was a radical U.S. black liberation organization established in 1919 in New York City by journalist Cyril Briggs. The group was established as a propaganda organization built on the model of the secret society...
, a socialist group with a large number of Caribbean émigrés 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 EuropeEastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
an 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 UnionThe Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
.
In addition, during the
Great MigrationThe Great Migration was the movement of 6 million blacks out of the Southern United States to the Northeast, Midwest, and West from 1910 to 1970. Some historians differentiate between a Great Migration , numbering about 1.6 million migrants, and a Second Great Migration , in which 5 million or more...
, hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved to northern industrial cities starting before World War I and through 1940. Another wave of migration during and after World War II led many to West Coast cities, as well as more in the North and Midwest. They were both fleeing violence and segregation and seeking jobs, as manpower shortages in war industries promised steady work. Continued 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— but these were in a new setting, where the men could vote (and women, too, after 1920), and possibilities for political action were far broader than in the South.
Marcus Garvey and the UNIA
Marcus GarveyMarcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr., ONH was a Jamaican publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who was a staunch proponent of the Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, to which end he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League...
's Universal Negro Improvement Association made great strides in organizing in these new communities in the North, and among the internationalist-minded "
New NegroNew Negro is a term popularized during the Harlem Renaissance implying a more outspoken advocacy of dignity and a refusal to submit quietly to the practices and laws of Jim Crow racial segregation...
" 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's program of Pan Africanism has become known as
GarveyismGarveyism is an aspect of Black Nationalism which takes its source from the works, words and deeds of UNIA-ACL founder Marcus Garvey. The fundamental focus of Garveyism is the complete, total and never ending redemption of the continent of Africa by people of African ancestry, at home and abroad...
. It encourages economic independence within the system of
racial segregationRacial segregation is the separation of humans into racial groups in daily life. It may apply to activities such as eating in a restaurant, drinking from a water fountain, using a public toilet, attending school, going to the movies, or in the rental or purchase of a home...
in the United States, an African Orthodox Church with a black Jesus and black Virgin Mother that offered an alternative to the white
JesusJesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...
of the black church, and a campaign that urged African Americans to "return to Africa", if not physically, at least in spirit. Garvey attracted thousands of supporters, both in the United States and in the African diaspora in the
CaribbeanThe Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...
, 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. WashingtonBooker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, author, orator, and political leader. He was the dominant figure in the African-American community in the United States from 1890 to 1915...
could have endorsed and the "gospel of success" so popular in white America in the 1920s with a rejection of white
colonialismColonialism is the establishment, maintenance, acquisition and expansion of colonies in one territory by people from another territory. It is a process whereby the metropole claims sovereignty over the colony and the social structure, government, and economics of the colony are changed by...
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 partiesThe African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption was a radical U.S. black liberation organization established in 1919 in New York City by journalist Cyril Briggs. The group was established as a propaganda organization built on the model of the secret society...
, 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 LineThe Black Star Line was a shipping line incorporated by Marcus Garvey, organizer of the Universal Negro Improvement Association . The shipping line was supposed to facilitate the transportation of goods and eventually African Americans throughout the African global economy...
". The government commuted Garvey's sentence and deported Garvey to his native
JamaicaJamaica is an island nation of the Greater Antilles, in length, up to in width and 10,990 square kilometres in area. It is situated in the Caribbean Sea, about south of Cuba, and west of Hispaniola, the island harbouring the nation-states Haiti and the Dominican Republic...
in 1927. While the movement floundered without him, it inspired other self-help and separatist movements that followed, including Father Divine and the
Nation of IslamThe Nation of Islam is a mainly African-American new religious movement founded in Detroit, Michigan by Wallace D. Fard Muhammad in July 1930 to improve the spiritual, mental, social, and economic condition of African-Americans in the United States of America. The movement teaches black pride and...
.
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 CityKansas City, Missouri is the largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri and is the anchor city of the Kansas City Metropolitan Area, the second largest metropolitan area in Missouri. It encompasses in parts of Jackson, Clay, Cass, and Platte counties...
during
World War IWorld War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
and the steel industry in
1919The Steel Strike of 1919 was an attempt by the weakened Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers to organize the United States steel industry in the wake of World War I. The strike began on September 22, 1919, and collapsed on January 8, 1920.The AA had formed in 1876. It was a...
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-wing political activists in the labor movement made some progress in the 1920s and 1930s, however, in bridging that gap. A. Phillip Randolph, a long-time member of the
Socialist Party of AmericaThe Socialist Party of America was a multi-tendency democratic-socialist political party in the United States, formed in 1901 by a merger between the three-year-old Social Democratic Party of America and disaffected elements of the Socialist Labor Party which had split from the main organization...
, took the leadership of the fledgling Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters at its founding in 1925. Randolph and the union faced 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 LaborThe American Federation of Labor was one of the first federations of labor unions in the United States. It was founded in 1886 by an alliance of craft unions disaffected from the Knights of Labor, a national labor association. Samuel Gompers was elected president of the Federation at its...
in 1935. Randolph chose to remain within the AFL when the
Congress of Industrial OrganizationsThe Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, proposed by John L. Lewis in 1932, was a federation of unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 required union leaders to swear that they were not...
split from it. The CIO was much more committed to organizing African-American workers and made strenuous efforts to persuade the BSCP to join it, but 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 NixonEdgar Daniel Nixon was an African American civil rights leader and union organizer who played a crucial role in organizing the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. Nixon also led the Montgomery branch of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union, known as the Pullman Porters...
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 WorkersThe International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, better known as the United Auto Workers , is a labor union which represents workers in the United States and Puerto Rico, and formerly in Canada. Founded as part of the Congress of Industrial...
and the
Mine, Mill and Smelter WorkersThe Western Federation of Miners was a radical labor union that gained a reputation for militancy in the mines of the western United States and British Columbia. Its efforts to organize both hard rock miners and smelter workers brought it into sharp conflicts – and often pitched battles...
made advocacy of civil rights part of their organizing strategy and bargaining priorities: they gained improvements for workers in meatpacking in Chicago and Omaha, and in the steel and related industries throughout the Midwest. The
Transport Workers Union of AmericaTransport Workers Union of America is a United States labor union that was founded in 1934 by subway workers in New York City, then expanded to represent transit employees in other cities, primarily in the eastern U.S. This article discusses the parent union and its largest local, Local 100,...
, which had strong ties with the Communist Party at the time, entered into coalitions with
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was an American politician and pastor who represented Harlem, New York City, in the United States House of Representatives . He was the first person of African-American descent elected to Congress from New York and became a powerful national politician...
, the NAACP and the
National Negro CongressThe National Negro Congress is an organization which was put into place by the Communist Party of the United States of America in 1935 at Howard University. It was a popular front organization created with the goal of fighting for Black liberation and was the successor to the League of Struggle for...
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 IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
; 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
RooseveltFranklin Delano Roosevelt , also known by his initials, FDR, was the 32nd President of the United States and a central figure in world events during the mid-20th century, leading the United States during a time of worldwide economic crisis and world war...
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 contractorA defense contractor is a business organization or individual that provides products or services to a military department of a government. Products typically include military aircraft, ships, vehicles, weaponry, and electronic systems...
s. Randolph limited the March on Washington Movement to black organizations to maintain black leadership; he 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 Scottsboro Boys
In 1931, the NAACP and the
Communist Party USAThe Communist Party USA is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement....
also organized support for the "
Scottsboro BoysThe Scottsboro Boys were nine black teenage boys accused of rape in Alabama in 1931. The landmark set of legal cases from this incident dealt with racism and the right to a fair trial...
", nine black men arrested after a fight with some white men also riding the rails, then convicted and sentenced to death for allegedly 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 DefenseThe International Labor Defense was a legal defense organization in the United States, headed by William L. Patterson. It was a US section of International Red Aid organisation, and associated with the Communist Party USA. It defended Sacco and Vanzetti, was active in the civil rights and...
largely prevailed. The ILD's legal campaign produced two significant Supreme Court decisions (
Powell v. AlabamaPowell v. Alabama was a United States Supreme Court decision which determined that in a capital trial, the defendant must be given access to counsel upon his or her own request as part of due process.-Background of the case:...
and Norris v. Alabama) extending the rights of defendants; its political campaign saved all 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; for a period in the early and mid-1930s, the ILD was the most active defender of blacks' civil rights, and the Communist Party attracted many members among activist African Americans. Its campaigns for black defendants' rights did much to focus national attention on the extreme conditions which 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 and investigating the serious race riots in numerous cities throughout the United States in what was called the "Red Summer" of 1919, resulting from postwar economic and social tensions. The organization sent Walter F. White, who later became its general secretary, to
Phillips County, Arkansas in October 1919 to investigate the
Elaine Race RiotThe Elaine Race Riot, also called the Elaine Massacre, occurred September 30, 1919 in the town of Elaine in Phillips County, Arkansas, in the Arkansas Delta, where sharecropping by African American farmers was prevalent on plantations of white landowners.Approximately 100 African American farmers,...
. In that year, it was unusual for being a rural riot: more than 200 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 twelve men sentenced to death a month later, based on their testimony having been obtained by beating and electric shocks. They obtained a groundbreaking Supreme Court decision in
Moore v. DempseyMoore et al. v. Dempsey, , was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled 6-2 that the defendants' mob-dominated trials deprived them of due process guaranteed by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and reversed the district court's decision declining the...
, 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. It regularly displayed a black flag stating "A Man Was Lynched Yesterday" from the window of its offices in New York to mark each outrage. Efforts to pass an ant-lynching law foundered on Southern Democratic power in Congress. For instance, while Republicans achieved passage in the House of an anti-lynching law in 1922, Southern Democratic senators filibustered the bill in the Senate and defeated it in the 1922, 1923 and 1924 legislative sessions. The Southern Democratic block controlled important chairmanships in both houses of Congress and defeated all lynching legislative proposals.
The NAACP led the successful fight, in alliance with the
American Federation of LaborThe American Federation of Labor was one of the first federations of labor unions in the United States. It was founded in 1886 by an alliance of craft unions disaffected from the Knights of Labor, a national labor association. Samuel Gompers was elected president of the Federation at its...
, to prevent the nomination of John Johnston Parker to the Supreme Court. They opposed him because of his opposition to black suffrage and his anti-labor rulings. This alliance and lobbying campaign were important 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.
After
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, returning African-American veterans were spurred by their sacrifices and experiences to renew demands for the protection and exercise of their constitutional rights as citizens in US society. One serviceman reportedly said,t "I spent four years in the Army to free a bunch of Dutchmen and Frenchmen, and I'm hanged if I'm going to let the Alabama version of the Germans kick me around when I get home. No sirree-bob! I went into the Army a nigger; I'm comin' out a man." From 1940 to 1946, the NAACP's membership grew from 50,000 to 450,000.
The NAACP's legal department, headed by
Charles Hamilton HoustonCharles Hamilton Houston was an African American lawyer, Dean of Howard University Law School and NAACP Litigation Director who played a significant role in dismantling the Jim Crow laws and trained future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.Houston was born in Washington, D.C. His father...
and
Thurgood MarshallThurgood Marshall was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, serving from October 1967 until October 1991...
, 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. Instead of appealing to the legislative or executive branches of government, they focused on the judiciary, reasoning that Congress was dominated by Southern segregationists, while the Presidency could not afford to lose the Southern vote. The NAACP's first cases did not challenge the principle directly, but sought instead to show that the state's segregated facilities were not equal.
Even those more modest goals helped lay the foundation for the ultimate reversal of the doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson by showing the irrational nature of the distinctions that the states drew 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 (1954), holding that state-sponsored segregation of elementary schools was unconstitutional, was a first step in dismantling segregation in the South. It was a historic milestone in reframing the national debate over segregation by putting state-sponsored discrimination beyond constitutional defense.
Marshall eventually decided to go beyond the initial aims of the NAACP, thinking that the time had come to do away with "separate but equal". The NAACP issued a directive stating that their goal was now "obtaining education on a nonsegregated basis and that no relief other than that will be acceptable." The first case Marshall argued on this basis was
Briggs v. ElliottBriggs et al. v. Elliott et al., , commonly Briggs v. Elliott, was the first of the five cases combined into Brown v. Board of Education , the famous case in which the U.S. Supreme Court officially overturned racial segregation in U.S. public schools...
, but cases were also filed in other states. In
Topeka, KansasTopeka |Kansa]]: Tó Pee Kuh) is the capital city of the U.S. state of Kansas and the county seat of Shawnee County. It is situated along the Kansas River in the central part of Shawnee County, located in northeast Kansas, in the Central United States. As of the 2010 census, the city population was...
, the local NAACP branch determined that
Oliver BrownOliver L. Brown was the plaintiff in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of 1954. The Court overturned the doctrine of separate but equal for public schools....
would be a good candidate for filing a lawsuit; as an assistant pastor and the father of three girls, he was an ideal candidate. The NAACP instructed him to apply to enroll his daughters at a local white school; after the expected rejection,
Brown v. Board of EducationBrown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 , was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 which...
was filed. Later, this and several other cases made their way to the Supreme Court, where they were all consolidated under the title of Brown. The decision to name the case was apparently made "so that the whole question would not smack of being a purely southern one."
Some in the NAACP thought Marshall was being too enthusiastic, fearing that the Southern judge, Chief Justice
Fred M. VinsonFrederick Moore Vinson served the United States in all three branches of government and was the most prominent member of the Vinson political family. In the legislative branch, he was an elected member of the United States House of Representatives from Louisa, Kentucky, for twelve years...
, who would almost certainly oppose overruling Plessy, could destroy their case. One historian stated: "There was a sense that if you do this and you lose, you're going to enshrine Plessy for a generation." A government lawyer involved in the case agreed that it was "a mistake to push for the overruling of segregation per se so long as Vinson was chief justice — it was too early." In December 1952, the Supreme Court heard the case, but could not come to a decision. Unusually, the case was pushed back by a year to allow the lawyers involved to research the intention of the framers who drafted the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. In September 1953, Vinson died due to a
heart attackMyocardial infarction or acute myocardial infarction , commonly known as a heart attack, results from the interruption of blood supply to a part of the heart, causing heart cells to die...
, leading Justice
Felix FrankfurterFelix Frankfurter was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.-Early life:Frankfurter was born into a Jewish family on November 15, 1882, in Vienna, Austria, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Europe. He was the third of six children of Leopold and Emma Frankfurter...
to proclaim: "This is the first indication I have ever had that there is a God." Vinson was replaced by
Earl WarrenEarl Warren was the 14th Chief Justice of the United States.He is known for the sweeping decisions of the Warren Court, which ended school segregation and transformed many areas of American law, especially regarding the rights of the accused, ending public-school-sponsored prayer, and requiring...
, who was known for his moderate views on civil rights.
After the case was reheard in December, Warren set about persuading his colleagues to reach a unanimous decision overruling Plessy. Five of the other eight judges were firmly on his side, while another two were persuaded by Warren's promise that the decision would not touch greatly on the question of Plessys legality, focusing instead on the principle of equality. The remaining holdout, Justice
Stanley ReedStanley Forman Reed was a noted American attorney who served as United States Solicitor General from 1935 to 1938 and as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1938 to 1957. He was the last Supreme Court Justice who did not graduate from law school Stanley Forman Reed (December 31,...
, was swayed after it was suggested that a Southerner's lone dissent could be more dangerous and incendiary than a unanimous decision. In May 1954, Warren announced the Court's decision, authored by him, which declared that "segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race" deprived "the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities".
The decision was strongly resisted by a number of Southerners; the
Governor of VirginiaThe governor of Virginia serves as the chief executive of the Commonwealth of Virginia for a four-year term. The position is currently held by Republican Bob McDonnell, who was inaugurated on January 16, 2010, as the 71st governor of Virginia....
, Thomas B. Stanley, insisted he would "use every legal means at my command to continue segregated schools in Virginia." One survey suggested that only 13% of Florida policemen were willing to enforce the decision in Brown; while 19 Senators and 77 members of the House of Representatives, including the entire congressional delegations of the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia, signed "The Southern Manifesto", all but two of the signatories were Southern Democrats: Republicans Joel Broyhill and Richard Poff of Virginia also promised to resist the decision by "lawful means". By the fall of 1955, Cheryl Brown started first grade at an integrated school — the first step on the long road to eventual equality for African Americans.
The Regional Council of Negro Leadership: Laying a Civil Rights Foundation
On December 28, 1951, T.R.M. Howard, an entrepreneur, surgeon, fraternal leader and planter in Mississippi, founded the
Regional Council of Negro LeadershipThe Regional Council of Negro Leadership was a society in Mississippi founded by T. R. M. Howard in 1951 to promote a program of civil rights, self-help, and business ownership...
(RCNL) along with other key blacks in the state. At first the RCNL, which was based in the all-black town of Mound Bayou, did not directly challenge "separate but equal" (much like the initial stance of the
Montgomery Improvement AssociationThe Montgomery Improvement Association was formed on December 5, 1955 by black ministers and community leaders in Montgomery, Alabama. Under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr...
), but worked to guarantee the "equal." It often identified inadequate schools as the primary factor responsible for the black exodus to the North. Instead of demanding immediate integration, however, it called for equal school terms for both races. From the beginning, the RCNL also pledged an "all-out fight for unrestricted voting rights."
The Board of RCNL represented some of the key black business, fraternal, agricultural, educational, and governmental leaders in the state. Sixteen relatively autonomous committees, each headed by a respected leader in business, education, the church, or the professions, formed the backbone of the RCNL. The committees, in turn, reported to an executive board and board of directors headed by Howard.
The RCNL's most famous member was
Medgar EversMedgar Wiley Evers was an African American civil rights activist from Mississippi involved in efforts to overturn segregation at the University of Mississippi...
. Fresh from graduation at
Alcorn State UniversityAlcorn State University is an historically black university comprehensive land-grant institution in Lorman, Mississippi. It was founded in 1871-History:...
in 1952, he had moved to Mound Bayou to sell insurance for Howard. Evers soon became the RCNL's program director and helped to organize a boycott of service stations that failed to provide restrooms for blacks. As part of this campaign, the RCNL distributed an estimated 20,000 bumper stickers with the slogan “Don’t Buy Gas Where You Can’t Use the Rest Room." Beginning in 1953, it directly challenged "separate but equal" and demanded integration of schools.
The RCNL’s annual meetings in Mound Bayou between 1952 and 1955 attracted crowds of ten thousand or more. They featured speeches by Rep. William L. Dawson of Chicago, Rep.
Charles DiggsCharles Coles Diggs, Jr. was an African-American politician from the U.S. state of Michigan. Diggs was an early member of the civil rights movement, having been present at the murder trial of Emmett Till and elected the first chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus.Diggs resigned from the...
of Michigan, Alderman Archibald J. Carey Jr. of Chicago, and NAACP attorney
Thurgood MarshallThurgood Marshall was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, serving from October 1967 until October 1991...
. Each of these events, in the words of Myrlie Evers, later Myrlie Evers-Williams, the wife of Medgar, constituted "a huge all-day camp meeting: a combination of pep rally, old-time revival, and Sunday church picnic." The conferences also included panels and workshops on voting rights, business ownership, and other issues. Attendance was a life-transforming experience for many future civil black leaders who became prominent in the 1960s, such as
Fannie Lou HamerFannie Lou Hamer was an American voting rights activist and civil rights leader....
,
Amzie MooreAmzie Moore was an African American, civil rights leader, and entrepreneur in the Mississippi Delta.-Early life:Moore was born on the Wilkin plantation near the Grenada and Carroll County lines...
,
Aaron HenryAaron Henry was an American civil rights leader, politician, and head of the Mississippi branch of the NAACP. He was one of the founders of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party which tried to seat their delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.-Early life:Henry was born in Dublin,...
,
George W. LeeGeorge W. Lee was an African American civil rights leader, minister, and entrepreneur. He was a vice president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership and head of the Belzoni, Mississippi branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People...
, and
Lamar SmithLamar Smith may refer to:* Lamar S. Smith , U.S. Representative from Texas* Lamar Smith , U.S. civil rights activist; murdered in Mississippi* Lamar Smith , NFL running back, 1994–2004...
.
The RCNL also played a key role in the search for witnesses and evidence in the
Emmett TillEmmett Louis "Bobo" Till was an African-American boy who was murdered in Mississippi at the age of 14 after reportedly flirting with a white woman. Till was from Chicago, Illinois visiting his relatives in the Mississippi Delta region when he spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the married...
murder case in late 1955, and Howard spoke at many rallies throughout the country in the aftermath of the trial.
On November 27, 1955,
Rosa ParksRosa Louise McCauley Parks was an African-American civil rights activist, whom the U.S. Congress called "the first lady of civil rights", and "the mother of the freedom movement"....
attended one of these speeches at Dexter Avenue Church in Montgomery. The host for this event was a then relatively unknown Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Parks later said that she was thinking of Till when she refused to give up her seat four days later.
See also
- African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955–1968)
- List of 19th-century African-American civil rights activists
- Nadir of American race relations
The "nadir of American race relations" is a term that refers to the period in United States history from the end of Reconstruction through the early 20th century, when racism in the country is deemed to have been worse than in any other period after the American Civil War. During this period,...
- African-American history
- Timeline of the African American Civil Rights Movement
- Timeline of racial tension in Omaha, Nebraska
The timeline of racial tension in Omaha, Nebraska lists events in African-American history in Omaha. These included racial violence, but also include many firsts as the African- American community built its institutions. Omaha has been a major industrial city on the edge of what was a rural,...
Further reading
- Bates, Beth Tompkins, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1929–1945, 2001 ISBN 0-8078-2614-6.
- Carson, Clayborne; Garrow, David J.; Kovach, Bill; Polsgrove, Carol, eds. Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1941–1963 and Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1963–1973. New York: Library of America
The Library of America is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature.- Overview and history :Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LoA has published over 200 volumes by a wide range of authors from Mark Twain to Philip...
, 2003. ISBN 1-931082-28-6 and ISBN 1-931082-29-4.
- Dagbovie, Pero Gaglo, “Exploring a Century of Historical Scholarship on Booker T. Washington,” Journal of African American History, 92 (Spring 2007), 239–64.
- Egerton, John, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994). ISBN 0-679-40808-8.
- Kluger, Richard, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality (1975; New York, Vintage Books, 1976). ISBN 0-394-72255-8.
- Nahal, Anita, and Lopez D. Matthews Jr., “African American Women and the Niagara Movement, 1905–1909,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, 32 (July 2008), 65–85.
- Parker, Christopher S., “When Politics Becomes Protest: Black Veterans and Political Activism in the Postwar South,” Journal of Politics, 71 (Jan. 2009), 113–31.
- Sitkoff, Harvard. "Harry Truman and the Election of 1948: The Coming of Age of Civil Rights in American Politics," Journal of Southern History Vol. 37, No. 4 (Nov., 1971), pp. 597-616 in JSTOR
External links