Chapter 18 – The Civil Rights Movement

Section Notes Video

Fighting Segregation The Civil Rights Movement
Freedom Now!
Voting Rights
Changes and Challenges
The Movement Continues
Maps
School Segregation, 1952
Freedom Rides, 1961

Quick Facts
Early Civil Rights Victories
Images
Sit-in
Major Civil Rights Reforms
Witness to Violence
Visual Summary: The
The March Against Fear
Civil Rights Movement
Political Cartoon: Civil Rights
 Fighting Segregation

The Main Idea

In the mid-1900s, the civil rights movement began to make
major progress in correcting the national problem of racial
segregation.

Reading Focus
• What was the status of the civil rights movement prior to 1954?
• What were the key issues in the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown
v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, and what was its
impact?
• How did events in Montgomery, Alabama, help launch the
modern civil rights movement?
 The Civil Rights Movement prior to 1954

Pre-1900 To 1930 To 1940

• Opposition to • Booker T. • A. Philip Randolph
slavery in Washington and forced a federal
colonial days W.E.B. Du Bois ban against
discrimination in
• Abolition • Founding of the defense work.
movement and NAACP in 1909
Civil War • 1940s founding of
• African Americans CORE
• Legalized racism suffered worse
after than others • President Truman
Reconstruction during the Great desegregated the
Depression. armed forces.
• 1896 Plessy v.
Ferguson allowed • Roosevelt • Brooklyn Dodgers
the segregation unwilling to push put an African
of African too hard for American—Jackie
Americans and greater African Robinson—on its
whites. American rights. roster.
 Seeking Change in the Courts

The NAACP attacked racism through the courts.

In the 1930s Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood

Marshall began a campaign to attack the concept of “separate
but equal.”

The NAACP began to chip away at the 1896 Supreme Court

ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson—the legal basis for segregation.

Examples:
• 1938 – Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, Registrar of the
University of Missouri
• 1950 – Sweatt v. Painter
 Key Issues in the Supreme Court’s ruling on
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas

• Thurgood Marshall began to focus on desegregating the

nation’s elementary and high schools in the 1950s.
• He found a case in Linda Brown of Topeka, Kansas.
• The Supreme Court combined several school segregation
cases from around the country into a single case: Brown
v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.
• The Supreme Court was aware of this case’s great
significance.
 Brown v. Board of Education

The Supreme Court heard arguments over a two-year

period. The Court also considered research about
segregation’s effects on African American children.

In 1954 Chief Justice Earl Warren issued the Supreme

Court’s decision.

All nine justices agreed that separate schools for African

Americans and whites violated the Constitution’s
guarantee of equal protection of the law.
 The Little Rock Crisis

Integration The Little Rock Nine

• The Supreme Court’s ruling • On September 4, 1957,
did not offer guidance angry whites harassed nine
about how or when black students as they
desegregation should arrived at Little Rock’s
occur. Central High School.
• Some states integrated • The Arkansas National Guard
quickly. Other states faced turned the Little Rock Nine
strong opposition. away and prevented them
from entering the school for
• Virginia passed laws that three weeks.
closed schools who
planned to integrate. • Finally, Eisenhower sent U.S.
soldiers to escort the Little
• In Little Rock, Arkansas, Rock Nine into the school.
the governor violated a
federal court order to • The events in Little Rock
integrate Little Rock’s revealed how strong racism
Central High School. was in some parts of the
country.
 Montgomery, Alabama

The Montgomery Bus Boycott

• In 1955 a local NAACP member named Rosa Parks refused to
give her seat to white riders.
• The resulting Montgomery bus boycott led to a Supreme
Court ruling that segregation on buses was unconstitutional.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference

• African Americans formed the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, or SCLC, to protest activities taking place all across
the South.
• Martin Luther King Jr. was the elected leader of this group—
which was committed to mass, nonviolent action.
 The Montgomery Bus Boycott

• When Rosa Parks was arrested, the NAACP called for a

one-day boycott of the city bus system.
• Community leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement
Association and selected Martin Luther King Jr. as its
leader.
• African Americans continued to boycott the bus system for
a year—which hurt the bus system and other white
businesses.
• After the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on buses
was unconstitutional, integration of the buses moved
forward.
 Freedom Now!

The Main Idea

The quest for civil rights became a nationwide movement in the 1960s as
African Americans won political and legal rights, and segregation was
largely abolished.

Reading Focus
• What are sit-ins and Freedom Rides, and why were they important in the
1960s?
• How was the integration of higher education achieved in the South?
• What role did Albany, Georgia, and Birmingham, Alabama, play in the
history of civil rights?
• What concerns and events led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of
1964?
 Non-Violent Protests during
the Civil Rights Movement

• Civil rights workers used several direct, nonviolent methods to

confront discrimination and racism in the late 1950s and early
1960s.
– Boycotts
– Sit-ins
– Freedom Rides
• Many of these non-violent tactics were based on those of
Mohandas Gandhi—a leader in India’s struggle for
independence from Great Britain.
• American civil rights leaders such as James Farmer of CORE,
Martin Luther King Jr. of SCLC, and others shared Gandhi’s
views.
• James Lawson, an African American minister, conducted
workshops on nonviolent methods in Nashville and on college
campuses.
 The Strategy of Nonviolence
The Sit-in Movement The Freedom Rides
• Four college students in • In 1960 the Supreme Court
Greensboro, North Carolina, ordered that bus station
stayed in their seats at a facilities for interstate
Woolworth’s lunch counter travelers must be open to all
after being refused service passengers. But this ruling
because of their race. was not enforced.
• Over the next few days, • CORE sent a group of
protesters filled 63 of the 66 Freedom Riders on a bus trip
seats at the lunch counter. through the South to draw
attention to this situation.
• The students were dedicated
and well-behaved and ended • Mobs angry at the Freedom
each sit-in with a prayer. Riders attempts to use white-
only facilities firebombed a
• Over time, protesters in bus in Anniston, Alabama and
about 50 southern cities attacked riders with baseball
began to use the sit-in tactic. bats and metal pipes in
Birmingham.
 Results of Sit-ins and Freedom Rides
• Succeeded at getting businesses to change their
policies
• Marked a shift in the civil rights movement—
Sit-ins showed young African Americans’ growing
impatience with the slow pace of change
• Leaders formed the SNCC.

Freedom • After the savage beatings in Birmingham, bus

Rides companies refused to sell the Freedom Riders
tickets and CORE disbanded the Freedom Ride.
• SNCC continued the Freedom Rides.
• Attorney General Robert Kennedy sent federal
Federal
marshals to Montgomery to protect the riders.
Intervention
• The Interstate Commerce Commission finally
forced the integration of bus and train stations.
 Integration of Higher Education in the South

• By 1960 the NAACP began to attack segregation in colleges and universities.

• In 1961 a court order required the University of Georgia to admit two
African American students.
– Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes suffered but both graduated in
1963.
• In 1962 James Meredith tried to enroll at the University of Mississippi.
– He arrived on campus with 500 federal marshals and was met by 2,500
violent protesters.
– President Kennedy went on national television to announce that he was
sending in troops.
– The troops ended the protest but hundreds had been injured and two
killed.
– A small force of marshals remained to protect Meredith until he
graduated in 1963.
• In 1963 the governor of Alabama physically blocked Vivian Malone and
James Hood from enrolling at the University of Alabama.
 What role did Albany, Georgia, and
Birmingham, Alabama, play in the history of
civil rights?

• Local officials in Albany, Georgia, ignored the

Interstate Commerce Commission’s new
integration rules.

• Birmingham, Alabama, was known for its strict

enforcement of segregation.
 The Albany Movement

The Movement The Results

• SNCC began a sit-in in • The police chief had
Albany’s bus station. studied King’s tactics and
made arrangements to
• Over 500 demonstrators counter-act the nonviolent
were arrested. protest.
• The federal government • When the press arrived,
was informed but took no King was released.
action.
• City officials would only
• Local leaders asked Martin deal with local leaders
Luther King Jr. to lead until King left.
more demonstrations and
to gain more coverage for • Once King left, officials
the protests. would not negotiate at all.
• He agreed and was also • The nine-month
arrested. movement failed.
 The Birmingham Campaign
The Campaign The Results
• Martin Luther King raised • A SCLC leader convinced King
money to fight Birmingham’s to use children for his
segregation laws. protests.
• Volunteers began with sit-ins • More than 900 children
and marches and were between ages six and
quickly arrested. eighteen were arrested.
• King hoped this would • Police Chief Eugene “Bull”
motivate more people to join Connor used police and fire
the protests. fighters to break up a group
of about 2,500 student
• White clergy attacked King’s protesters.
actions in a newspaper ad.
• The violence of Connor’s
• King wrote his “Letter from a methods was all over the
Birmingham Jail.” television news.
• Fewer African Americans • Federal negotiators got the
were willing to join and risk city officials to agree to many
their jobs. of King’s demands.
 Civil Rights Act of 1964

• The events in Alabama convinced President Kennedy to

President act on civil rights issues.
Kennedy • Kennedy announced that he would ask for legislation to
finally end segregation in public accommodations.

• Medgar Evers, the head of the NAACP in Mississippi, was

Medgar shot dead in his front yard.
Evers • Ku Klux Klan member Byron De La Beckwith was tried for
the crime but all-white juries failed to convict.

• On August 28, 1963, the largest civil rights

March demonstration ever held in the United States took place
on in Washington.
Washington • More than 200,000 people marched and listened to Martin
Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
 Passing the Civil Rights Act

• President Johnson supported passage of a strong

civil rights bill.
• Some southerners in Congress fought hard to kill
his bill.
• Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into
law on July 2, 1964.
• The law banned discrimination in employment
and in public accommodations.
 Voting Rights

The Main Idea

In the 1960s, African Americans gained voting rights and
political power in the South, but only after a bitter and
hard-fought struggle.

Reading Focus
• What methods did civil rights workers use to gain voting rights
for African Americans in the South?
• How did African American political organizing become a national
issue?
• What events led to passage of the Voting Rights Act?
Gaining Voting Rights for African Americans
in the South

• Voting rights for African Americans were achieved at great

human cost and sacrifice.
• President Kennedy was worried about the violent reactions
to the nonviolent methods of the civil rights movement.
– Attorney General Robert Kennedy urged SNCC leaders to
focus on voter registration rather than on protests.
– He promised that the federal government would protect civil
rights workers if they focused on voter registration.
• The Twenty-fourth Amendment outlawed the practice of
taxing citizens to vote.
• Hundreds of people volunteered to spend their summers
registering African Americans to vote.
 Gaining Voting Rights
Registering Voters Twenty-fourth
Amendment
• SNCC, CORE, and other
groups founded the Voter • Congress passed the
Education Project (VEP) Twenty-fourth Amendment
to register southern in August 1962.
African Americans to vote.
• The amendment banned
• Opposition to African states from taxing citizens
American suffrage was to vote—for example, poll
great. taxes.
• Mississippi was particularly • It applied only to elections
hard—VEP workers lived in for president or Congress.
daily fear for their safety.
• VEP was a success—by
1964 they had registered
more than a half million
more African American
voters.
 Gaining Voting Rights
Freedom Summer Crisis in Mississippi
• Hundreds of college • Andrew Goodman, a
students volunteered to Freedom Summer
spend the summer volunteer, went missing
registering African on June 21, 1964.
Americans to vote.
• Goodman and two CORE
• The project was called workers had gone to
Freedom Summer. inspect a church that had
• Most of the trainers were
recently been bombed.
from poor, southern African • President Johnson ordered
American families. a massive hunt for the
• Most of the volunteers were three men. Their bodies
white, northern, and upper were discovered near
middle class. Philadelphia, Mississippi.
• Volunteers registered voters • 21 suspects were tried in
or taught at summer federal court for violating
schools. civil rights laws.
 The Results of Project Freedom Summer

Organizers considered Mississippi’s Freedom Summer

project a success.

The Freedom Schools taught 3,000 students.

More than 17,000 African Americans in Mississippi

applied to vote.

State elections officials accepted only about 1,600 of the

17,000 applications.

This helped show that a federal law was needed to secure

voting rights for African Americans.
How did African American political organizing
become a national issue?

Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders wanted to
help President Johnson defeat Republican Barry Goldwater in
the 1962 election.

These leaders agreed to suspend their protests until after

election day.

SNCC leaders refused, saying they wanted to protest

segregation within the Democratic Party.

SNCC helped form the Mississippi Freedom Democratic

Party. They elected sixty-eight delegates to the Democratic
National Convention and asked to be seated instead of the all-
white delegation sent by the state’s Democratic Party.
 Political Organizing

Fannie Lou Hamer told the convention’s credentials committee

why the MFDP group should represent Mississippi.

President Johnson offered a compromise—two members of the

MFDP delegation would be seated and the rest would be non-
seated “guests” of the convention.

The NAACP and SCLC supported the compromise. SNCC and

the MFDP rejected the compromise.

The MFDP’s challenge failed in the end. It also helped widen a

split that was developing in the civil rights movement.
 The Voting Rights Act

Selma Campaign Selma March Voting Rights Act

• King organized • President
marches in • 600 African Johnson asked
Selma, Alabama, Americans began for and received
to gain voting the 54-mile a tough voting
rights for African march. rights law.
Americans.
• City and state • The Voting
• King and many police blocked Rights Act of
other marchers their way out of 1965 passed in
were jailed. Selma. Congress with
large majorities.
• Police attacked a • TV cameras
march in Marion. captured the • Proved to be one
police using of the most
• King announced clubs, chains, important pieces
a four-day march and electric of civil rights
from Selma to cattle prods on legislation ever
Montgomery. the marchers. passed.
 Changes and Challenges

The Main Idea

Continued social and economic inequalities caused many
young African Americans to lose faith in the civil rights
movement and integration and seek alternative solutions.

Reading Focus
• Why did the civil rights movement expand to the North?
• What fractures developed in the civil rights movement, and what
was the result?
• What events led to the death of Martin Luther King Jr., and how
did the nation react?
 The Civil Rights Movement
Expands to the North

• The civil rights movement had done much to bring an end

to de jure segregation—or segregation by law.
• However, changes in law had not altered attitudes and
many were questioning nonviolent protest as an effective
method of change.
• In most of America there was still de facto segregation
—segregation that exists through custom and practice
rather than by law.
• African Americans outside the South also faced
discrimination—in housing, by banks, in employment.
 Expanding the Movement
Conditions outside the Urban Unrest
South
• Frustration over the urban
• Most African Americans conditions exploded into
outside the South lived in violence.
cities. – Watts (Los Angeles) in
• African Americans were 1965
kept in all-black parts of – Detroit in 1967
town because they were
unwelcome in white • President Johnson
neighborhoods. appointed the Kerner
Commission to study the
• Discrimination in banking causes of urban rioting.
made home ownership and
home and neighborhood – Placed the blame on
improvements difficult. poverty and
discrimination
• Job discrimination led to
high unemployment and
poverty.
 The Movement Moves North

The riots convinced King that the civil rights movement

needed to move north. He focused on Chicago in 1966.

The eight month Chicago campaign was one of King’s

biggest failures.

Chicago’s African Americans did not share his civil rights

focus—their concerns were economic.

King discovered that some northern whites who had

supported him and criticized racism in the South had no
interest in seeing it exposed in the North.
 Fractures in the civil rights movement

• Conflict among the diverse groups of the civil rights

movement developed in the 1960s.
• Many SNCC and CORE members were beginning to question
nonviolence.
– In 1966 SNCC abandoned the philosophy of nonviolence.
• Huey Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther
Party and called for violent revolution as a means of African
American liberation.
• Malcolm X and the Black Muslims were critical of King and
nonviolence.
 Fractures in the Movement
Black Power Black Panthers Black Muslims
• Stokely • The Black Panther • Nation of Islam
Carmichael Party was formed was a large and
became the head of in Oakland, influential group
SNCC. California, in 1966. who believed in
• Called for violent Black Power.
• SNCC abandoned
the philosophy of revolution as a
• Message of black
nonviolence. means of African
nationalism, self-
American
• Black Power discipline, and
liberation.
became the new self-reliance.
• Members carried
rallying cry. • Malcolm X
guns and
• Wanted African offered message
monitored African
Americans to of hope, defiance,
American
depend on and black pride.
neighborhoods to
themselves to solve guard against
problems. police brutality.
 The Death of Martin Luther King Jr.

King became aware that economic issues must be part of

the civil rights movement.

King went to Memphis, Tennessee to help striking

sanitation workers. He led a march to city hall.

James Earl Ray shot and killed King as he stood on the

balcony of his motel.

Within hours, rioting erupted in more than 120 cities.

Within three weeks, 46 people were dead, some 2,600
were injured, and more than 21,000 were arrested.
 The Movement Continues

The Main Idea

The civil rights movement was in decline by the 1970s, but
its accomplishments continued to benefit American
society.

Reading Focus
• How did the SCLC’s goals change and with what results?
• For what reasons did the Black Power movement decline?
• What civil rights changes took place in the 1970s, and what were
their results?
 The Civil Rights Movement after Martin
Luther King Jr.

King realized that most African Americans were prevented

from achieving equality because they were poor.

Ralph Abernathy, the new leader of the SCLC, led

thousands of protesters to the nation’s capital as part of
the Poor People’s Campaign.

The campaign turned out to be a disaster. Bad weather

and terrible media relations marred the campaign.

The campaign also failed to express clearly the protesters’

needs and demands.
 The Black Power Movement

• The civil rights movement took place at the height of the

Cold War.
• FBI director J. Edgar Hoover created a secret program to
keep an eye on groups that caused unrest in American
society.
• Hoover considered King and the Black Power movement a
threat to American society.
• The FBI infiltrated civil rights movement groups and
worked to disrupt them.
– Spread false rumors that the Black Panthers intended to kill
SNCC members
– Forged harmful posters, leaflets, and correspondence from
targeted groups
 The Decline of Black Power
The Black Panthers SNCC
• Hoover was particularly • SNCC collapsed with the
concerned about the Black help of the FBI.
Panthers.
• H. Rap Brown, the leader
• Police raided Black Panther who replaced Stokely
headquarters in many Carmichael as the head of
cities. SNCC, was encouraged to
take radical and shocking
• Armed conflict resulted, positions.
even when Black Panther
members were unarmed. • Brown was encouraged to
take these positions by his
• By the early 1970s, armed staff—many of whom
violence had led to the worked for the FBI.
killing or arrest of many
Black Panther members. • Membership declined
rapidly.
 Civil Rights Changes in the 1970s

• Civil Rights Act of 1968—banned discrimination in the sale or

rental of housing (also called the Fair Housing Act)
• Busing and political change—to speed the integration of city
schools, courts began ordering that some students be bused
from their neighborhood schools to schools in other areas
– Busing met fierce opposition in the North.
– Busing was a major cause of the migration of whites from
cities to suburbs.
– This development increased the political power of African
Americans in the cities.
• Affirmative action—programs that gave preference to
minorities and women in hiring and admissions to make up for
past discrimination against these groups
 The New Black Power

• Black Power took on a new form and meaning in the 1970s.

• African Americans became the majority in many counties in the
South.
• African Americans were elected to public office.
• African Americans who played roles in the civil rights movement
provided other services to the nation
– Thurgood Marshal became Supreme Court’s first African
American justice.
– John Lewis represented the people of Alabama in Congress.
– Andrew Young became Georgia’s first African American
member of Congress since Reconstruction, U.S. ambassador
to the United Nations, and mayor of Atlanta.
– Jesse Jackson founded a civil rights organization called
Operation PUSH and campaigned for the Democratic
presidential nomination in the 1980s.
“…Wait a minute … Somebody has gotta keep this thing on the track!”
Click on the window to start video