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Overview
The Civil Rights Movement

Separate But Equal

With the end of the Civil War in 1865, along with the legal abolition of slavery, came the 14th and 15th Amendments. The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, ensured equal protection under the law for the newly freed slaves, while the 15th Amendment gave Black men (at the time no women were permitted to vote) the legal right to vote. It soon became clear, however, that there was a difference between changing the laws on the books and changing the day-to-day realities of segregation. In Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court ruled that the separation of the races was constitutionally legal as long as equal accommodations were made for Blacks-the so-called "separate-but-equal" doctrine. The Plessy decision gave legal validity to the system of segregation called "Jim Crow" (supposedly named for a Black minstrel caricature). Jim Crow schools, lunch counters, water fountains and customs mandated separate facilities and practices for Whites and Blacks throughout the South and in many other places in the United States. What the court failed to recognize in Plessy vs. Ferguson was that, in practice, Jim Crow meant two separate but drastically unequal ways of life. For instance, in the same city one might find White schools made of imposing brick and stone materials and African-American schools that were little more than unheated cabins or tarpaper shacks.


Brown vs. Board of Education

The Supreme Court unanimously overturned the Plessy ruling in 1954, with the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. The Court said that in the field of public education the "separate but equal" doctrine violated the 14th Amendment and was thus unconstitutional. African-Americans saw the Court's action as a sign of hope, but they felt little cause for immediate rejoicing. They knew that no matter what the law said, a stubborn fact stood in the way: it would take years of organizing and protesting before the promise of true equality would be realized.

Following the 1954 Brown decision, African-American students throughout the South fought for their constitutional right to attend previously all-White schools. Even when local school boards allowed African-Americans to enroll in White schools, they were often met with resistance from segregationist governors such as George Wallace of Alabama and Orval Faubus of Arkansas. In Arkansas, at Little Rock Central High School, President Eisenhower was forced to intervene when Governor Faubus refused to allow nine African-American students to enter the building on the first day of school.

The confrontation in Little Rock proved that even in cases where the Supreme Court had ruled against segregation, the implementation of the law was no easy task. Repeatedly faced with discrimination by Whites, African-Americans organized boycotts and demonstrations and brought lawsuits to gain access to public and private facilities. The first major mobilization of Blacks as part of the Civil Rights Movement occurred in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955.


The Montgomery Bus Boycott

In Montgomery, and elsewhere in the South, African-American passengers were required to sit in the back of the bus and, if all of the White seats were taken, to give up their seats to any Whites left standing. On December 1, 1955, a White bus driver demanded that Rosa Parks, a 43-year-old Black woman, give up her seat to a White passenger. When she refused, she was arrested. Local activists, who had been organizing since 1946, mobilized quickly. Before the night was out, Parks' arrest had served as a catalyst: setting in motion a citywide boycott of the Montgomery bus company and a law suit brought by local Black attorneys challenging the city's bus segregation law. A little-known, 26-year-old local minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., reluctantly agreed to head the boycott. Rather than ride the local buses, African-Americans organized those volunteers who owned cars to transport people, while others simply walked. The bus company tried desperately to break the boycott, but did not succeed. Approximately one year after the boycott began, the Supreme Court ordered the Montgomery city buses desegregated.

The success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott inaugurated a strategy of nonviolent confrontation developed by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and its leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. The idea, inspired by Indian nationalist Mahatma Gandhi, was that peaceful demonstrations would provoke both mass arrests and a violent reaction from segregationists. Civil Rights activists hoped this would draw national news coverage to the their cause. This strategy, while not always successful, did lead to major Civil Rights victories in cities such as Nashville, Tennessee (1960), where sit-ins at downtown department stores led to the end of "Whites-only" lunch counters. In Birmingham, Alabama (1963), the beatings and arrests of thousands of African-American students, some as young as seven years old, shocked the nation and pressured local White businessmen to change discriminatory practices. In Selma, Alabama (1965), a march to the state capitol led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and attended by thousands of Civil Rights supporters from across the country, put pressure on President Johnson to submit the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to Congress.


New Issues, New Tactics

Following the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the movement's focus shifted from changing laws that discriminated against African-Americans to confronting economic issues such as employment and housing discrimination. These issues proved to be intractable, so some believed tactics had to change. In the face of continuing White resistance, many African-Americans felt nonviolence was no longer the only tool for change. The Black nationalist leader Malcolm X, for instance, had questioned the effectiveness of nonviolence for years. What many Whites saw as his confrontational approach often made it easier for White moderates and politicians to embrace Martin Luther King's movement as a "safer" alternative. Malcolm X was assassinated purportedly by Black Muslims in New York on February 21, 1965. That same year, for many African-Americans, frustration escalated that more had not been accomplished. Civil unrest in the Watts district of Los Angeles and the Harlem area of New York in the summer of 1965 were signs that the pent-up anger in America's cities could-and would-explode in violence throughout the remainder of the decade.