Equal Rights For All
Martin Luther King Jr.
Sit-Ins
Birmingham
Rosa Parks
Selma
 
 
 
Report on the Civil Rights Movement
 

    "Most of us came here in chains and most of you came here to escape your chains. Your freedom was our slavery, and therein lies the bitter difference in the way we look at life." This quote by John Oliver Killens, a black writer, reveals a side of United States history that many people would prefer to ignore, a side of history where all me were not created equal, and where there was not freedom and justice for all. All of the individuals involved in the civil rights movement strongly believed that these basic human rights should be for everyone, not just the white elite. A constitutional revolution took place between the 1950s and 1970s to ensure that these rights would be available to everyone.
 Many people reacted with fear and anger to the idea of equal rights for all. Dr. Robert M. Hutchins describes some of the reasons behind the apprehension:
       The United States was born out of a revolution. Our convention has been to glorify this fact; and more often than not we have also glorified in, or at least morally supported, revolution in other places . . . but we do not want it for ourselves because we feel we do not need it. Do we still believe in it for others when others want it?
     The civil rights movement was democracy in action: people were exercising their constitutional rights to free speech, freedom of the press, the right to petition the government, and the right to peaceably assemble. The noted successes of the civil rights movement says that when people but their prejudices aside and work together on something, anything can become possible.
 On of the first major cases during the civil rights movement was the case Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka. Segregation prevented Linda Brown, a young African American girl from going to a nearby white elementary school.  Instead, she had to walk a quite a distance to get to a far away black school (Holt 478). The NAACP provided Brown with a lawyer, Thurgood Marshal, who would later serve on the United States Supreme Court. He introduced evidence that revealed that segregation psychologically damaged African American students by lowering their self-esteem (Holt 478). Mel King, who was a student teacher at a Southern black school, describes how the inadequacies made him feel:
     When I was student teaching, we used to pass the school that was for white students, and it was very modern, had nice facilities.  When I got to the school that the black students had to attend, it had an outdoor toilet, a pot-bellied stove in the classroom as a way to heat the school, no gym, and I made up my mind then that I was going to try to get myself in a position where I could do something about that; change that injustice.
     The Supreme Court verdict came back as a unanimous decision in Brown's favor on May 17, 1954. Chief Justice Earl Warren read the majority decision.  He said that segregation perpetuated:

     There were many reactions to the verdict. Some states rapidly ended school segregation.  Just after the verdict, the Knoxville Journal printed: The governor of Virginia stated that he would use every legal means possible to keep segregated schools in Virginia. The white school authorities in Farmville closed the entire public school system for five years, rather than compromise the practice of racial segregation (Branch 25). Because of this resistance in the South, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in 1955 that urged federal district courts to quickly end segregation (Holt 479).
 Another important protest during the civil rights movement was the Montgomery bus boycott. This phase of civil protest began when Rosa Parks, a black seamstress who was involved in the civil rights movement and held office in the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white passenger on December 1, 1955. She was arrested and convicted of violating Montgomery's segregation laws (Holt 479).
     There used to be a much more overt pattern of racism, particularly in the South, where you saw sign that said for 'Blacks', for 'Whites', and so forth. In the North, you didn't find signs, but you found practices. People knew that this was a restaurant you could go to, this was a restaurant for this group of people, and so forth. People lived in certain areas, and they simply couldn't buy a home in another area, regardless of how much money they may have earned (Shropshire).
In protest of Parks' conviction, Montgomery's fifty thousand African Americans boycotted the public transportation system. The Mongomery Improvement Association (MIA) became involved, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a 26-year-old Baptist minister, was chosen as the MIA's spokesperson (Holt 479). Almost immediately after the boycott was initiated about ninety African Americans were indicted under a 1921 anti-union law forbidding conspiracy to obstruct the operation of a business (Franklin/Moss 467).
 Many tactics were used to try to get the African Americans to stop the boycott. Everything from intimidation to actual physical violence was tried, but all of it failed.  The peaceful protest against the segregation of the public transportation system continued. The houses of King and other MIA leaders were bombed and many boycotters lost their jobs, yet still the protest continued (Holt 479). For 382 days, from December 5, 1955, to December 20, 1956, thousands of blacks refused to ride Montgomery's buses (worldbook.com/features/blackhistory/bh121.html).
 Finally, in November of 1956, the Supreme Court both the Alabama and Montgomery segregation laws unconstitutional. By the end of 1956, Montgomery had a desegregated bus system (Holt 479).
     .Involved in this was a gradual shift in both tactics and goals; from legal to direct action, from middle and upper class to mass action, from attempts to guarantee the [blacks'] constitutional rights to efforts to secure economic policies giving [them] equality of opportunity in a changing society, from appeals to the sense of fair play of white Americans to demands based upon power in the black ghetto (NACCD 227).
 Desegregation moved slowly in the South. Even during the 1956-1957 school year, the vast majority of southern schools were not integrated. In Arkansas, however, school desegregation was proceeding smoothly without much opposition (Holt 480). In fact, the School board of Little rock, Arkansas was the first to state that it would comply with the Brown decision of the Supreme Court.
 The Little Rock desegregation plan was set to begin with the admission of nine black students to all-white Central high School in September 1957 (Holt 480). The night before school began, however, Governor Orval Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to surround Central High, claiming it was to protect the school from attacks by armed protesters. The black students were sent a message instructing them to stay home (Holt 480). One of the black students, Elizabeth Eckford, did not receive it. The Little Rock Nine were prevented form entering the school for three weeks by the National Guard. Under court order, Faubus finally removed the National Guard (Holt 480).
 On September 23, when the nine black students tried to enter the school, the white mob outside rioted.
     The weeks And months of intimidation and harassment of the children on the part of the white students and their parents suggested how bitter and harsh the resistance could be (Franklin/Moss 493).
President Eisenhower ordered about one thousand federal troops to Little Rock to enforce the school integration and to keep the peace (Holt 480). He expressed his own opinion in this statement to Attorney General Brownwell: The Little Rock Nine finally entered the school on September 25, 1957 (Holt 481).
 During this period of social turmoil, President Eisenhower passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, making it a federal crime to prevent qualified people from voting. It also created the federal Civil Rights Commission to investigate violations of the law (Holt 481).
     The real significance of the law lay not so much in its provisions as in its recognition of federal responsibility and its reflection of a remarkable and historic reversal of the federal policy of hands off in matters involving civil rights (Franklin/Moss 494).
The Greensboro sit-ins began in February of 1960. Four African American college students sat down at a "Whites only" lunch counter in a Greensboro, North Carolina, variety store. They were refused service, but said that they would sit there until they were served (Holt 500).  News of this protest spread, and soon students were demonstrating throughout the South.
     One of the things that happened because of the emergence of television was how quickly the word could be spread about what was happening in other parts of the country, and we could watch and realize that there were some actions we could take to support [the national movements] (King).
White racists retaliated violently against the demonstrators, dumping food and drinks on them and extinguishing cigarettes on their heads. In some instances the students were physically attacked, but they (the demonstrators) never resorted to violence. By the end of the year, many restaurants and lunch counters were integrated (Holt 501).
     What they accomplished in that brief time span still strikes me as a shining example of democracy at work: ordinary young people, hardly favored by circumstances at their birth, changing first the conscience of the nation and then its laws (Halberstam 6).

 Inspired by the success of the sit-ins, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) initiated a protest against segregated interstate transportation. In may of 1961, an integrated group of Freedom Riders Left Washington, D.C., for a trip through the Deep South (Holt 501).
     After tapering off in 1958 and 1959, the Ku Klux Klan sprang back into action with the [black] lunch-counter sit-ins, Freedom Riders, and mass demonstrations of the early 1960s. All of these offered an impetus and occasion for the type of direct violence in which the Klan excelled (Chalmers 366).
Outside of Anniston, Alabama, a white mob firebombed one of the two buses and attacked the Freedom Riders as they tried to escape. The riders on the other bus were attacked in Birmingham (Holt 501).  Because of the imminent threat of physical brutality and property damage, the bus company refused to carry the Freedom Riders any further. CORE called of the ride, but Nashville Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leaders decided to take over and complete the rest of the trip (Holt 501).
 Under pressure from civil rights leaders, Attorney General Robert Kennedy sent federal marshals to protect the riders for the rest of their journey. In Jackson, Mississippi, the Freedom Riders were arrested. Hundreds of people protested, and during the summer more than 300 Freedom Riders traveled through the South to protest segregation. Finally, Robert Kennedy pressured the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) into strengthening its desegregation regulations (Holt 501).
 
 In June of 1963, President Kennedy urged the passage of a broad new civil rights act that would end segregation entirely. African American leaders called for a huge march of Washington, D.C., to show support for the proposed act (Holt 503). On August 28, 1963, more than twenty thousand people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, where they heard Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., deliver his "I Have a Dream " speech, an excerpt of which follows:

 There was definite white supremacist retaliation to the march. In mid-September, a bomb exploded in a Birmingham church, killing four young African American girls (Holt 503). It was the work of the Ku Klux Klan (Chalmers 368).

 In November 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated. The new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, encouraged Congress to pass Kennedy's civil rights bill. It was passed. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 barred discrimination in employment and public accommodations, and gave the Justice Department the authorization to bring lawsuits to enforce school desegregation (Holt 503).
 Movement leaders next turned their attention towards voter registration. In June 1964 Freedom Summer was launched, a campaign to register African American voters. It involved about one thousand volunteers, many of them white Northerners (Holt 503). "We were beginning to build up a cadre of people willing to go out and speak to people, willing to join in the struggle to end segregation" (King). The project focused on Mississippi, which had a black population of 45 percent, only five percent of whom were registered to vote.
 On June 21, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, two white New Yorkers, and James Chaney, a black Mississippian, were kidnapped and killed. Many African Americans did not register after this because they were afraid of being killed. By the end of the summer only 1,600 African Americans had been registered (Holt 504).
 In early 1965, civil rights leaders began a registration drive in Selma, Alabama. They invited Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to join them (Holt 504). For days when African Americans tried to register they were beaten or arrested. Civil rights leaders called for a protest march from Selma to Montgomery. On Sunday, March 7, about six hundred people began the fifty-mile walk. Just outside Selma, police attacked the marchers (Holt 504).  One little girl participating in the march described what she saw:
     I saw those horsemen coming toward me and they had those awful masks on; they rode right through the cloud of tear gas. Some of them had clubs, others had ropes, or whips, which they swung about them like they were driving cattle.
Stunned by the ferocity of the attack, thousands of people went to Selma in a show of support for the marchers. President Johnson called it Selma's "Bloody Sunday." A week later the marchers completed their journey under the protection of federal marshals and the National Guard (Holt 504).
 On March 15, before Congress, Lyndon B. Johnson asked for the passage of a voting rights bill.  He said that all Americans should take up the struggle for civil rights, because "it's . . . all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice, And we shall overcome."  Five months later Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Holt 504).
     By the mid-1960s, the civil rights movement -- a movement that had its great leaders but was carried by the marching feet of ordinary men and women -- was an irresistible force.  With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the battle against the formal system of segregation was won (Dees 91).

Yet, many African American questioned the effectiveness of nonviolence.  Many of these leaders argued that African Americans should mobilize to gain economic and political power.
 Malcolm X (ne  Malcolm Little) was a leading minister for the Nation of Islam. As a powerful speaker he called for black separatism and for freedom to be earned "by any means necessary", even if that meant resorting to violence (Holt 505).  He said:

 In 1966, college students Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther party in Oakland, California, to promote self-determination in the black community (Holt 505). Black Panthers armed themselves and established citizen patrols to monitor the streets and watch police in order to alleviate the growing trend of police brutality. The Black Panthers kept communities informed as to their beliefs and actions. "We start with the basic definition: that black people in America are a colonized people in every sense of the term, and that white America is an organized Imperial force holding black people in colonial bondage." The Black Panthers initiated many community-based programs. The programs included Free Breakfast for School Children, Free Preventive Medical Health Care clinics, SAFE (Seniors Against a Fearful Environment), Cooperative Housing, and Free Food & Clothing mass voter registration drives (bobbyseale.com). They said they could not trust white police officers to protect them. "War can only be abolished through war." Black Panther party member Eldridge Cleaver said: "So now we are engaged in a war for the national liberation of Afro-America from colonial bondage to the white mother country." Whites saw the Black Panthers as a major security threat. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover said: "Without question, the Panthers represent the greatest threat to the internal security of this country among black extremist groups."
     Standing on our constitutional and democratic human rights, we made Malcolm X's philosophical polemics, 'the ballot or the bullet' and 'by any means necessary', come alive (Seale, introduction).
 
 In August 1965, a routine arrest by Los Angeles police officers in the black neighborhood of Watts ignited a riot that lasted for six days. After the National Guard restored order, 34 people were dead, hundreds injured, and over four thousand arrested. During the next two years there were more than 100 riots in cities across the country.  In a Detroit riot 43 people were killed (Holt 506).
 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated April 4, 1968, in Memphis Tennessee.  Riots began all over the country as people vented their anger and outrage over his death. After a week 46 people were dead and thousands injured (Holt 506).

In 1975, a Civil Rights Commission report found that many African Americans ere still being kept from voting, either by intimidation or by acts of physical violence (Holt 574). By the end of the 1970s, however, more than 4,500 African Americans held elective office, or more than three times the number in 1969. In 1978 the elected officials included 16 members of the United States House of Representatives, and 170 mayors, including those of Los Angeles, Atlanta, Detroit, and Washington, D.C. President Carter appointed the first African American woman to a cabinet post: Patricia Harris as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (Holt 574).
 In an effort to uphold federal laws against discrimination, the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice sued corporations and labor unions to end unfair employment practices (Holt 575).

Many schools and businesses began to use affirmative action programs, whereby ethnic minorities and women were given preference in hiring and admission to make up for previous discrimination.
 Some people complained that affirmative action programs were depriving them of their rights. One target for their anger was court-ordered busing that was initiated in order to achieve school desegregation by ending de facto segregation (Holt 575). "The term de facto segregation we use to describe the result of housing patterns and other forms of discrimination" (King).
 Some of the strongest opposition to the busing was in Boston. "Almost all the public housing in Boston was segregated. Neighborhoods were very segregated, and the level of interaction between people was almost nonexistent between the communities" (King). By the fall of 1974 many violent protests against busing had erupted all over Boston. "The problem was not the busing. It was the racist attitudes of the people  opposed to desegregation, to opening the schools up for everybody." Many black parents believed busing was necessary. As one woman, Rachel Twymon, told her two children (who were being bused) : By the late 1970s, the busing controversy had calmed down some (Holt 576).
     What has happened in recent years is that the racism has become much more covert, and it's difficult to always find it out; things like racism and sexism don't show their ugly heads that easily. You can find things like racism and sexism in every part of the country (Shropshire).

The struggle for civil rights continues today- it will continue forever unless people realize that all men and women were created equal and that by denying someone else their basic rights we are being untrue to ourselves.
     I think it's important to understand that it's no one action that makes things happen but a series of things, and if you can build on one and then another you can . . . change the nature of the debate or discussion (King).
That's what the civil rights movement was; a series of actions, each building on the one before and creating an unstoppable force.
We must all do our parts to stop injustice, racism and sexism when we see it. Only by doing so can we ourselves become free.

 
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Works Cited

Archer, Jules. Revolution In Our Time. Julian Messner, New York, New York. 1971.

Branch, Taylor. Parting The Waters - America In The King Years, 1954-63. Simon & Schuster Inc., New   York, New York. 1988.

Chalmers, David M. Hooded Americanism: The First Century of the Ku Klux Klan: 1865 to the Present.   Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York. 1965.

Dees, Morris. Gathering Storm: America's Militia Threat. HarperCollins, New York, New York. 1996.

Franklin, John Hope, and Moss, Jr., Alfred A. From Slavery to Freedom - A History of African      Americans. McGraw-Hill, Inc., New York, New York. 1998.

Halberstam, David. "We Were Led By The Children", Parade. Pittsbugh Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh, USA.   March 22, 1998. pp 6.

Holt, Rinehart and Winston. The American Nation in The Twentieth Century. Holt, Rinehart and     Winston, Orlando, USA. 1998.

King, Mel. Chain of Change - Struggles For Black Community Development. South End Press, Boston,   USA. 1981.

King, Mel. Interview on February 11, 1998. Interviewer: Anna LaRue

Report of the National Commission on Civil Disorders. "What Happened? Why Did It Happen? What   Can Be Done?" The New York Times, New York, New York. 1968.

Seale, Bobby. Seize The Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton. Black Classic   Press, Baltimore, USA. 1968.

Shropshire, John. Interview on March 19, 1998. Interviewer: Amanda Rudisin

www.bobbyseale.com

www.worldbook.com/features/blackhistory/bh121.html
 
 
 
 

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