ORIGINS OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
African Americans became in- creasingly restive in the postwar years . During the war they had chal- lenged discrimination in the mili-
tary services and in the work force, and they had made limited gains . Millions of African Americans had left Southern farms for Northern cit- ies, where they hoped to find better jobs . They found instead crowded conditions in urban slums . Now, African-American servicemen re- turned home, many intent on reject- ing second-class citizenship .
Jackie Robinson dramatized the racial question in 1947 when he broke baseball’s color line and be- gan playing in the major leagues . A member of the Brooklyn Dodgers, he often faced trouble with oppo- nents and teammates as well . But an outstanding first season led to his acceptance and eased the way for other African-American players, who now left the Negro leagues to which they had been confined .
Government officials, and many other Americans, discovered the connection between racial problems and Cold War politics . As the leader of the free world, the United States sought support in Africa and Asia . Discrimination at home impeded the effort to win friends in other parts of the world .
Harry Truman supported the early civil rights movement . He per- sonally believed in political equality, though not in social equality, and recognized the growing importance of the African-American urban vote . When apprised in 1946 of a spate of lynchings and anti-black violence in the South, he appointed a com- mittee on civil rights to investigate discrimination . Its report, To Secure
272
These Rights, issued the next year, documented African Americans’ second-class status in American life and recommended numerous fed- eral measures to secure the rights guaranteed to all citizens .
Truman responded by sending a 10-point civil rights program to Congress . Southern Democrats in Congress were able to block its en- actment . A number of the angriest, led by Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, formed a States Rights Party to oppose the president in 1948 . Truman thereupon issued an executive order barring discrim- ination in federal employment, or- dered equal treatment in the armed forces, and appointed a committee to work toward an end to military segregation, which was largely ended during the Korean War .
African Americans in the South in the 1950s still enjoyed few, if any, civil and political rights . In gener- al, they could not vote . Those who tried to register faced the likelihood of beatings, loss of job, loss of credit, or eviction from their land . Occa- sional lynchings still occurred . Jim Crow laws enforced segregation of the races in streetcars, trains, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, recreational facilities, and employment .
DESEGREGATION
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took the lead in efforts to overturn the judicial doctrine, es- tablished in the Supreme Court case
Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, that seg- regation of African-American and white students was constitutional if facilities were “separate but equal .” That decree had been used for de- cades to sanction rigid segregation in all aspects of Southern life, where facilities were seldom, if ever, equal .
African Americans achieved their goal of overturning Plessy in 1954 when the Supreme Court — pre- sided over by an Eisenhower ap- pointee, Chief Justice Earl Warren — handed down its Brown v. Board of Education ruling . The Court de- clared unanimously that “separate facilities are inherently unequal,” and decreed that the “separate but equal” doctrine could no longer be used in public schools . A year later, the Supreme Court demanded that local school boards move “with all deliberate speed” to implement the decision .
Eisenhower, although sympathet- ic to the needs of the South as it faced a major transition, nonetheless act- ed to see that the law was upheld in the face of massive resistance from much of the South . He faced a ma- jor crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, when Governor Orval Faubus attempted to block a desegregation plan calling for the admission of nine black students to the city’s previ- ously all-white Central High School . After futile efforts at negotiation, the president sent federal troops to Little Rock to enforce the plan .
Governor Faubus responded by ordering the Little Rock high schools closed down for the 1958-59 school
CHAPTER 12: POSTWAR AMERICA
OUTLINE OF U.S. HISTORY
273
year . However, a federal court ordered them reopened the follow- ing year . They did so in a tense at- mosphere with a tiny number of African-American students . Thus, school desegregation proceeded at a slow and uncertain pace throughout much of the South .
Another milestone in the civil rights movement occurred in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama . Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old African-American seamstress who was also secretary of the state chapter of the NAACP, sat down in the front of a bus in a section reserved by law and custom for whites . Ordered to move to the back, she refused . Police came and arrested her for violating the seg- regation statutes . African-American leaders, who had been waiting for just such a case, organized a boycott of the bus system .
Martin Luther King Jr ., a young minister of the Baptist church where the African Americans met, became a spokesman for the pro- test . “There comes a time,” he said, “when people get tired . . . of being kicked about by the brutal feet of op- pression .” King was arrested, as he would be again and again; a bomb damaged the front of his house . But African Americans in Montgomery sustained the boycott . About a year later, the Supreme Court affirmed that bus segregation, like school segregation, was unconstitutional . The boycott ended . The civil rights movement had won an important victory — and discovered its most
powerful, thoughtful, and eloquent leader in Martin Luther King Jr .
African Americans also sought to secure their voting rights . Although the 15th Amendment to the U .S . Constitution guaranteed the right to vote, many states had found ways to circumvent the law . The states would impose a poll (“head”) tax or a lit- eracy test — typically much more stringently interpreted for African Americans — to prevent poor Afri- can Americans with little education from voting . Eisenhower, working with Senate majority leader Lyn- don B . Johnson, lent his support to a congressional effort to guarantee the vote . The Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first such measure in 82 years, marked a step forward, as it authorized federal intervention in cases where African Americans were denied the chance to vote . Yet loopholes remained, and so activ- ists pushed successfully for the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which provided stiffer penalties for interfering with voting, but still stopped short of au- thorizing federal officials to register African Americans .
Relying on the efforts of African Americans themselves, the civil rights movement gained momen- tum in the postwar years . Working through the Supreme Court and through Congress, civil rights sup- porters had created the groundwork for a dramatic yet peaceful “revolu- tion” in American race relations in the 1960s . 9
274
C H A P T E R
13 DECADES
OF CHANGE: 1960-1980
Module Pilot Edwin Aldrin Jr. on the moon, July 20, 1969.
276
By 1960, the United States was on the verge of a major social change . American society had always been more open and fluid than that of the nations in most of the rest of the world . Still, it had been dominated primarily by old-stock, white males . During the 1960s, groups that previ- ously had been submerged or sub- ordinate began more forcefully and successfully to assert themselves: Af- rican Americans, Native Americans, women, the white ethnic offspring of the “new immigration,” and Latinos . Much of the support they received came from a young population larg- er than ever, making its way through a college and university system that was expanding at an unprecedented pace . Frequently embracing “coun- tercultural” lifestyles and radical
politics, many of the offspring of the World War II generation emerged as advocates of a new America char- acterized by a cultural and ethnic pluralism that their parents often viewed with unease .