 In today's lecture, we're going to be focusing on the origins and the roots of the modern civil rights movement in the 1950s and the 1960s. In previous lectures, we talked about how the 1950s was a decade of social stability of relative calm and order. And in many respects, the civil rights movement is the biggest challenge to that sense of sort of political conformity and social complacency. That's quite common within the 1950s society. And so the civil rights movement is very important, of course, for the fact that it helps guarantee a large segment of the American population basic civil rights. And also because it challenges and it sets the stage for other important changes in the status of rights for people of other groups as well in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s in fact to the very present period. The civil rights movement, which we'll focus on, we're going to be focusing on a number of different aspects. We're going to look at the origins. We're going to examine sort of the two different tracks that make up the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. And we'll talk a little bit about the impact of the civil rights movement on mainstream American politics and mainstream American society. We've already touched briefly in some of the previous lectures on a few of the origins of the civil rights movement. And one of the things that we talked about is that during World War II, in particular, there were lots of new opportunities for African Americans, one of these being job opportunities. So there are new jobs available for African Americans during the war in defense plants and other facilities. During the war, the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, establishes the double V campaign, which is this campaign of victory over tyranny abroad and victory over discrimination at home. We also see mass migrations of African Americans from the South to the West and the North during the war, which contributes to an expansion of African Americans into other regions of the United States. Another aspect of the war that has a big impact is that it really discredits ideas about race and human biology. Many ideas that had been popular before the war and that the Nazis in Germany had embraced are largely discredited because of what the Nazis had done before and during the war. The Nazis' kind of use of race as a biological category to identify and discriminate and ultimately exterminate people. And so it became much harder for people in the United States who before the war had casually engaged in very racist behavior and had argued that people of minority of different races did what they did because of some sort of biological imperative. That became much less popular and it became really quite questionable to make arguments based on biological categories of race. And lastly, as the Cold War begins in the 1950s and early 1960s, the United States is put in a tough position because the United States, of course, was at war with the Soviet Union and it was a proxy war. In other words, it was a war that was based on trying to win friends in various countries. And as the Third World, in other words, countries that had formerly been colonized that became independent in the 50s and 60s, starts to develop, the Third World's looking at the United States and looking at how minorities are being treated in Africa. African nations are very aware of civil rights problems and abuses in the United States and they're looking to see what the U.S. is doing. So there are all these factors that are broader contributing causes of a very important engagement with civil rights that begins in the 50s, continues through the 60s and ultimately continues up in many cases until the present day. What we're going to do is we're going to talk a little bit about the two main approaches, though, that come to define the civil rights movement in the United States in the 50s and the 60s. One of these movements and the first that we'll talk about is a formal legal approach, a legal strategy to combating discrimination in the United States. And this ultimately is carried out by the NAACP. The second approach is what I would call more of an organic approach, a grass root approach that didn't necessarily have any formal order initially, but gradually becomes very important as more and more people become involved in the movement, more and more order is applied to the movement and begins to have huge changes at the grassroots level. So we have two strategies, a top-down strategy and a bottom-up strategy. So we'll first talk a little bit about the top-down strategy and the role that the NAACP plays in this top-down strategy. On the NAACP had a legal wing and had a wing that was specifically there to help fight civil rights issues and fight against discrimination in court. And the head of this, and I shouldn't say the head, but one of the major forces behind the legal wing was Thurgood Marshall, a lawyer who eventually becomes a U.S. Supreme Court justice and who was very concerned about using legal strategies to fight and stamp out discrimination nationwide. And ultimately Marshall and his legal team pursue a number of strategies to do this, and the main one they had is they were challenging the doctrine of separate but equal that had been established in 1896 in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, talked about that in previous lectures, and had largely shaped public education in the United States, especially in southern states ever since then. The idea that you could have southern schools that were white schools and schools that were black schools, and as long as they were quote-unquote equal, then that was fine. And of course, the problem when you had a two-tiered system like that with a white school and a black school is that it was almost inherently impossible for the black school to be truly equal in quality to the white school. And then, so this is a strategy that the NAACP uses to try to stamp out the segregated educational system. They begin at the college level. They begin with college and professional schools, law schools, for instance, in the south because in the south, because of the legal doctrine, if there was a white law school in a university, then there had to be an equivalent black law school. Most states tried to ignore this provision because they didn't want to have to set up separate professional schools to train white lawyers and train black lawyers. And so the NAACP and Marshall uses this strategy to combat discrimination within these educational system. In the 1950s, they went a major decision when the University of Texas is forced by the Supreme Court to amend a black student into the white law program because the university didn't want to set up its own separate black law program. And so this is the first time that a professional school like a law school is being desegregated in the south. Based on this, they want to win a number of other major decisions at the university level that help admit African American students into institutions of higher education. But Marshall wanted to do more than that. They wanted to really go after education in the public school system, the place where the vast majority of Americans, young people were being educated across the country, both in the south and in the north. And ultimately, the strategy that Marshall and the NAACP pursue is to support the cases of local parents and local students who felt that their children were being discriminated against within the educational system due to unequal conditions. And ultimately, Marshall and the NAACP use five cases. Five cases, a case from Delaware, a case from Kansas, a case from Virginia, South Carolina, and the District of Columbia. And they argue these five cases until the US Supreme Court decides to hear these cases. And here we have the members of the Supreme Court in 1953. The only member we're missing in this picture was a new member who had been recently appointed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was president of the time. And this was the Justice Earl Warren, who is appointed as the Supreme Court Chief Justice, had been the California governor for a number of years, and had been appointed by Dwight Eisenhower because he was seen as a fairly moderate member of the court and moderate. And Eisenhower didn't want any radicals on the Supreme Court at the time. Well, the Supreme Court agrees to hear this decision, hear these five cases. They ultimately become known by the first case, the first name of the case, which was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. And so this oftentimes is simply referred to shorthand as the Brown decision or the Brown case. Well, Marshall and his legal team argue the case in court, and they argue a number of points that relate to the case. First of all, they argue that separate but equal is not equal. And they say, no matter how you try to do it, there's impossible for there to be a separate but equal system when you have two schools when they're based on race and argue that many respects in most Southern states, minority schools were inferior to white schools in curriculum, in physical plants. In other words, the buildings were not as nice. Access to educational materials like textbooks. They also make the argument beyond that they say, not only are they not equal in terms of just the general conditions in the school, they said, even if you have a school system that has essentially equal facilities and equal opportunities for African American and for white students, they're still stigma, they're still discrimination because you can't have a two tiered system of white schools and black schools without telling African American students that they're somehow inferior to whites. And so they argue that even if you have a system of true financial equality, in other words, both schools get the exact amount of money for the facilities and everything, they're still stigma. And argues, in fact, they use a number of sociological studies in their argument to show that these systems of discrimination in the public schools were conditioning minority students to think of themselves as being inferior to whites. And they show a number of sociological studies with young children that had grown up in these segregated school systems that they associated white with beautiful or they would show them two dolls, a black doll and a white doll and say which one is the nicer doll or which one is a better doll and these black children would pick the white doll. So they show that there's a conditioning effect of segregated education. Ultimately, they argue that segregated education violated the 14th amendment to the Constitution. They argued that it violated the Equal Protection Clause, which is one of the many phrases that made up the 14th amendment and argued that all US citizens enjoy equal protection under the law. And they said that discrimination is not equal protection. And therefore you have to fight the system, you have to end this legal system that plus CV Ferguson had created in the late 19th century. Well, Warren and the court, they consider these arguments. And for the most part, the court makes it clear and then certainly Warren pushes hard for a decision that in fact rules against the school systems that says that yes, separate but equal is in violation of the Constitution, some violation of the 14th amendment. But Warren wanted very hard to afford to be a unanimous opinion. He didn't want it just to be five justices voting in favor and for abstaining or voting against or making some other sort of statement. One of those to be a clear statement of the US government in terms of the judicial system, that segregation was wrong and it was going to end. And so there's a lot of work behind the scenes, Warren lobbying the other justices for a majority opinion, for unanimous opinion. And ultimately, the opinion is issued and argues just as Thurgood Marshall had that the 14th amendment, the equal protection clause is being violated by segregation in public schools and rules that public schools must desegregate. The phrase that is that's not initially used in the decision pictured here, but that later is issued the next year. The initial decision is in 54. And then in 55, there's a second ruling to help kind of interpret the initial ruling. Warren argues that schools must be desegregated with all deliberate speed. This is a phrase that's used in the ruling. In other words, schools can't take 10 years or 15 years to integrate, they must do it right away, or they must at least show that they are attempting to do it right away. What happens as a result of this, though, is that there is a massive ground swell of resistance, especially in the deep South, against public school desegregation. The phrase that is commonly used for this is called massive, literally massive resistance. This becomes a policy that southern states pursue in order to try to fight or delay desegregation within the school systems. So many states, Virginia included and in other states as well, passed laws to block desegregation to try to literally legally prevent school systems even if they wanted to desegregate, which many didn't, but to prevent school systems from desegregating, they would lose all their state funding if they did so. Some places they simply shut down the schools in Prince Edward County in Virginia, the local school board essentially votes itself out of business and says that all public schools are shut down in order to prevent desegregation from happening. And of course, one of the ways they get around that then is they offer private funds, essentially vouchers to students to go to private schools for the next five years. So white students are still able to go to school, but African Americans are entirely excluded from any educational opportunities within the public school system because it was shut down. So massive resistance really plays a role in slowing the implementation of the Brown decision. But nevertheless, the Brown decision is law, and the US government is essentially because of the ruling tasked with ensuring that desegregation does take place. Whereas the federal government tries very hard to stay out of desegregating at the local level because it's a messy, messy subpart and Dwight De Eisenhower, who's still president until the end of the fifties, really doesn't want to get the US government involved in doing so. One of the few cases where the US government is directly involved in desegregating is in nineteen fifty seven in Little Rock, Arkansas. And in nineteen fifty seven Little Rock attempts to desegregate their public high school. And one of the things that happens is that the local level they decide to do so. But the governor of Arkansas decides to make this into a public issue and argues that he will not allow the school to be desegregated. In fact, argues that he'll stand in the doorway and block any African American students who try to enter the high school and then calls out the Arkansas National Guard to essentially barricade the building to prevent any African Americans from getting inside. And Dwight De Eisenhower says this can't stand. You can't have governors at the state level using military force in the state and National Guard to block desegregation. And so ultimately he calls out the hundred and first airborne division, one of the US Army elite units, and orders them to Little Rock to essentially escort the children into the high school in order to counter the efforts by the governor and the National Guard to intimidate and prevent students from entering. And so this becomes, you know, one of the few cases where these nine students, and of course we have this image here of now of the hundred and first airborne escorting these nine students into the high school. Of course for them it's a very difficult experience and it's a very rough year, the first year of desegregation. But ultimately it begins the trend towards desegregation at the state level, which is a trend that continues well into the 1970s and 1980s and leads the systems like busing in order to equalize the sort of levels of different national, different ethnicities within schools. And it creates a, there's a much longer story behind that that we won't get into. But needless to say this legal strategy, this top-down strategy of changing the Constitution or forcing the Supreme Court to make a ruling on the Constitution, then trickles down to local level in terms of desegregation within the public school systems. Now the other approach I mentioned at the very beginning of the lecture, which we'll talk about now, was the bottom-up approach. As I said, the bottom-up grassroots approach to civil rights. In many cases this is the story that I think many of us are familiar with, but we're going to talk a little bit about it and perhaps tell you a few things you didn't know about the Civil Rights Movement. The bottom-up movement is largely an effort to challenge Jim Crow, this idea of essentially racially segregated public and private institutions in the South. And it really comes about, again in some ways, through informal efforts by the NAACP, working within local chapters in many Southern communities. But it also comes about in some ways even beyond the NAACP's ability to control it. So the NAACP is very important in this side of the story, but not necessarily as a driving force as it was in the school desegregation cases. The initial sort of beginning of the challenge to Jim Crow begins in 1955 when Rosa Parks, here pictured, famously refuses to take a seat at the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, which is in violation of the local law. And she's arrested. What's interesting and what most people don't realize is that this had actually been the same activity, refusing to give up one seat in violation of the local law, had actually been done nine months earlier by another woman named Claudette Colvin. In reality, she anticipated Rosa Parks' strategy. But unfortunately for Claudette Colvin, she was single, she got pregnant, and the local NAACP chapter decided not to represent her because they were concerned that perhaps she might not make a good sort of poster child for desegregation efforts. They're in the south being particularly socially conservative at this time, that a pregnant single woman wouldn't look good in court. And so they ultimately decide not to proceed with her case. But when Rosa Parks nine months later does the same thing, she, it looks better and doesn't have sort of the problems that Claudette Colvin had at the time. And as a result, she becomes the person who the local chapter and local lawyers use to fight the case. Well, when Parks violates the law is arrested, this precipitates the Montgomery bus boycott that begins in December and lasts for an entire year. And African-Americans in the community refuse to ride the public transit system. And this of course attracted support from across the nation, attracted publicity from across the nation. And ultimately, the case Rosa Parks case makes its way through the federal courts and to the local courts, to the federal courts, to the Supreme Court, who eventually does rule that laws that segregated public transportation, such as at the local level, are unconstitutional. And so this has a huge impact on the legal side of things. It also has a huge impact because this is the first time that a young minister, Martin Luther King, Jr., becomes involved in the civil rights movement. King had been, was from Atlanta. He had been educated both in the South and in the North. And he had recently arrived at a local Baptist church branch in Montgomery. And he helps coordinate the boycott of the buses and argues very much in favor of non-violence as a source of protest. He's inspired by Thoreau, he's inspired by Gandhi, argues that non-violence can be effective for challenging legal systems and challenging social institutions. And so he really is inspirational for the grassroots evolution of this movement by his insistence on peaceful civil disobedience. Now, African Americans will not engage in violent activities to challenge this Jim Crow legal and social institution. And so King becomes well known through his efforts in the Montgomery bus boycott and begins to play a broader role in the civil rights movement beginning in the late 1950s. This time period of the late 50s and early 60s is very, very vibrant period within, as I said, this grassroots aspect of the civil rights movement because you have a lot of different people and a lot of different groups acting at different levels challenging Jim Crow legal and social institutions. When King is successful and Montgomery is successfully, the Montgomery bus system is successfully integrated, he and a number of other Christian ministers go on to form an organization known as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. And the SCLC, as it's known SCLC, helps to play an important role in organizing civil rights movements throughout the South beginning in 1957. King and other members of the SCLC use it as a way to help regionalize the individual civil rights protests that had broken out in places like Birmingham. So the SCLC plays an important role within the growing grassroots civil rights movement of the American South in the late 50s and the early 1960s. And the SCLC embraces King's ideas of civil protests, of refusal to engage in violence, if people hit you or abuse you you accept it you don't simply fight back. And this becomes really a hallmark of King and the SCLC's actions. Now there are also other sides of the civil rights movement, there's a student side and you begin to see young African-American students growing to increasingly dissatisfied with the set situation in the South and beginning to stage their own protests. In many cases young people were more willing to take greater we're willing to take greater chances than adults. Perhaps they felt they had less to lose than adults and so young people really are sort of the foot soldiers of much of this protest. The early example that's a successful example of integration by young people takes place in Greensboro, North Carolina. Here we have an image from this protest and this is a protest that becomes known as a sit-in. And the first of these sit-ins for the civil rights movement for by young people beginning in Greensboro, Alabama in 1960 four students from the local North Carolina Ag and Tech State University decide to sit at the all-white lunch counter at the Woolworths, the local store, local kind of department store that also had a lunch counter for food. This was well known that Woolworths policy was they didn't serve African-Americans at the lunch counter. If you wanted food you had to go to the back of the store basically in order from the kitchen. Well the staff refused to sit them, refused to serve them but the young African-Americans refused to leave the store until it closes and they sit there nonetheless and they return the next day and more more African-American students return with them until the number is grown into the hundreds demanding you know sitting but at the same time demanding service and not leaving when the staff asked them to. Eventually they have to call the police in to maintain order. Well the sit-ins start to spread across the south led by student organizations and eventually within five months Woolworths at the national level just the publicity is bad they're not they don't want it anymore. They agree to serve African-Americans at their lunch counters and integrate this very segregated this very segregated facility in the south and this is a huge success for young people for young college students. This helps bring about the formation of an organization called SNCC the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and this is another organization somewhat of a parallel to the SCLC to help young people organize and challenge segregation to fight for racial justice and power African-Americans to take control in their over their lives to help fight for equality within their communities and in many respects as the sixties goes on SNCC emerges as a more radical alternative to the SCLC to sort of summarize a little bit as we go ahead these movements gradually continue to expand the SCLC and Martin Luther King SNCC and various student leaders push for more more rights in 1963 the SCLC engages in a campaign campaign in Birmingham, Alabama and the Birmingham campaign is important because Birmingham had essentially very segregated public stores and other facilities that employ African-Americans and the local community was extremely upset about this and the SCLC organizes protests to try to combat this extreme segregation within the community. They are violently repressed peaceful marches are attacked by police with dogs they use water cannons on the protesters and it's an extremely violent reaction against actions of peaceful protesters houses are bombed here is a picture of a house where a bomb was thrown into it during the during the protest period Birmingham becomes among protesters known as bombing him because of all these bombs that are set in churches and in homes and to try to kill or scare African-Americans into giving up the protest Martin Luther King gets arrested during this period for his actions but ultimately this campaign draws nationwide attention forces the people of Birmingham and of Alabama in general under a very negative light as the national news broadcaster showing what's happening in Birmingham every night or in every day and ultimately forces local leaders to negotiate and into the campaign by promising greater access for African-Americans to businesses promising to hire African-Americans to work in businesses and so it's ultimately a success for the SCLC for African-Americans for King because of these nonviolent activities King and the SCLC continue they begin to grow more bold in their objectives and the next major project that the SCLC and a number of other organizations engage in is a march on Washington DC this is something that actually had originally been proposed by another African-American A. Philip Randolph who was a union leader during World War II and because of arguing against segregation in wartime industries and actually at the last minute President Franklin Roosevelt had made some decisions to help avert this huge march that was threatened on Washington well King and his supporters go ahead with this march and it becomes ultimately the largest public demonstration in U.S. history 250,000 black and white attendees march to DC to the National Mall and campaign for civil rights legislation as well as for legislation that would help promote jobs help in segregation in the workplace by far probably the most famous outcome of this is of course Martin Luther King gives his I Have a Dream speech which is inspiring to those who are in attendance and widely reported to those who can't attend and ultimately it reflects a peak of the nonviolent integrationist movement in the United States this movement spurred by the NAACP by SCLC to peacefully bring about the end of segregation and to promote integration of African-Americans and other minorities into white society in the United States both in the South and throughout the United States and ultimately part of the outcome of this is that the United States government accepts the demands of protesters to play a greater role in ensuring equality for under the law for those of different races and to ensure equality for those of different genders as a result of these march on Washington and the other protests in 1964 the new president President Lyndon Johnson who takes office after Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated in 1963 Johnson puts pressure on Congress who passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and here are Johnson's signing the Civil Rights Act which is a hallmark piece of legislation and outlawed racial and gender-based discrimination in employment public institutions and commercial facilities gave the U.S. government the U.S. Attorney in general power to sue in federal court in any circumstances where there was discrimination and this was a huge amount of power the next year the Voting Rights Act is passed which allows the federal government to oversee elections especially elections in the South where there was a lot of discrimination and intimidation of voters later the same year the 24th Amendment is passed which bans poll taxes which was a technique that many Southern states use by forcing you to have to pay a fee every year in order to vote and most African Americans couldn't afford or just weren't willing to pay this fee and therefore were excluded the final outcome of this great series of events that take place in 1963 and 1964 is that in 1964 something called freedom summer is launched and this is a summer where young people mostly college age students go to the South and try to bring about voter registration drives for African Americans they start freedom schools to help educate African Americans about civics and things like that and it really helps bring about a very strong awareness among the general population about what's going on in the South this also massively resisted there's a lot of violence directed at these people who were in the South for freedom summer and for those who were engaging in another activity called freedom rides that took place even before freedom summer or as an attempt to try to bring about the desegregation of interstate transportation systems and here are images of young people who were attacked during these freedom rides on buses by those in the community who resisted this desegregation so between all these activities by 64 dramatic progress have been made in civil rights in the United States from 1954 to 64 this is a decade of huge changes within American society bringing about at the national level the end of separate but equal bringing about at the local level the integration of public and private institutions and ultimately mentally bringing about federal legislation guaranteeing civil rights guaranteeing both gender as well as racial equality and putting the federal government in a position to deal with any sort of inequality as the federal government being the final arbiter of solving those problems now of course as we'll talk about in the next lecture this doesn't end the situation while great strides are made between 54 and 64 there's still a great deal of white resistance against civil rights and there's also a lot of frustration by many African Americans who felt who feel that the well you know the results of the decade are positive that it hasn't had an immediate impact on their lives and so as we'll talk about in the next lecture how these two forces interact with each other in the second half of the 1960s