The Civil Rights Movement

POS 4070. Civil Rights Movement Outline

Intro- Civil Rights-The Movement? What was it? The Struggle for equality. White Supremacy and Racism in America. 1 page

Factors that Gave Rise to the Movement-1954 -1970’s

• Continued Racism-Jim Crow laws, segregation, racism and Plessy v Ferguson 1896– Historical Background. 1 ½ pages
• Brown v. Board 1954 and its effect on the modern-day civil rights movement. Impact of this case. 1 page
• Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. 1955, its effect, the rise of the modern-day movement, economic starvation and supreme court case on transportation. 1 page
• Rise of Dr. King and His Movement. Who was he, his background and influence and movement-non-violence? Techniques used. 2- pages
• Malcom X and his view on Civil Rights, any means necessary, same goal but different strategy. 1 ½ pages
• Techniques- sit inns, bus boycotts, marches protest etc. Raising Awareness, March on Washington, Creating Public Opinion, 1 1/2 pages
• Pressure on Government-Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act 1965 and the meaning of the laws and its impact on America. 2 pages

Conclusion: ½ page

  9-10 pages. Please don’t count the cover or reference page

Bibliography

ANSWER

Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Movement refers to the activism aimed at ensuring equal rights and treatment of African Americans in the United States. The movement aimed to ensure equal civil rights for the African American population as compared to the whites. This entailed the struggle for equal opportunities for black Americans as the ones enjoyed by the whites. White supremacy refers to ideologies that purport the natural superiority of the white race over other racial groups. Whites’ supremacists thus discriminated against individuals based on their skin color and race.

In America, white supremacy had manifested itself through slavery since most of the slaves were blacks. However, The American revolution in the late 18^th century led to the abolishment of the institution of slavery through the Emancipation Proclamation. The proclamation was codified into law as the 13^th amendment of the U.S. constitution and outlawed slavery in 1865[1]. White supremacy thus redefined racial discrimination and segregation against the blacks as they were denied fundamental civil rights. The racial segregation and discrimination against Black Americans thus led to the development of the civil rights movement.

Factors that Gave Rise to the Civil Rights Movement (1954-1970)

Jim Crow laws were state and local laws enacted in the late 19^th century. They were used to enforce white supremacy in the Southern states. The Jim Crow laws emerged from the end of the Reconstruction period to the 1960s. The 14^th amendment gave African American population equal protection under the law. Consequently, the 15^th amendment in 1870 granted black American men voting rights. The two amendments established a legal foundation for the political equality of the African American population. However, most Southerners who despised the abolishment of slavery were enraged with the political gains the blacks had garnered as it meant they were on an equal legal playing ground. The resentment and the desire to reassert white dominance led to the development of Jim Crow segregation laws.

The laws regarded African Americans as second-class citizens, thus denied access to various facilities enjoyed by the white populace. Under the Jim Crow laws, all public facilities in the Southern states were racially segregated starting in the 1870s. Under the Jim Crow system, whites-only signs increased across the southern states in public places such as swimming pools, movie theatres, and public schools[2]. Interracial marriages were made illegal, and blacks’ complex literacy tests meant that they could not vote. Besides, most residential areas were segregated, with specific areas meant for blacks. The laws dictated places black citizens would work and the wages allowed.  The laws also required black Americans to demonstrate subservience and inferiority to whites. African Americans who dared challenged the segregation laws faced arrest and hefty fines. The Jim Crow system ensured that blacks in southern states would continue living in poverty and inequality conditions. Though the Jim Crow laws were not exclusively adopted in the Northern states, African Americans were still racially discriminated against during job recruitments, purchasing houses, and educational services.

In 1896, the Jim Crow System was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of white supremacists stating that separate but equal accommodations for Black Americans were unconstitutional. The legal doctrine of separate but equal accommodations for black people expanded racial segregation to most public facilities and transportation, especially interstate trains and buses. African Americans were not allowed to ride in front of public buses or participate in white-only activities. The implementation of the Jim Crow laws ultimately led to the loss and abuse of African American civil liberties gained after the civil war.

The Impact of Brown v. Board Case in 1954

The principle of separate but equal plagued American society since its establishment by the Supreme Court in 1896. Under the doctrine, racial segregation regarding public facilities was legal, provided the facilities were of equal quality. However, there were massive disparities regarding the quality of facilities such as the public school system. Schools designated to African Americans were under-resourced in terms of supplies, quality of facilities, and the curriculum[3]. By the 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) spearheaded a campaign to undermine the segregation laws’ legal foundation. The NAACP filed lawsuits on behalf of plaintiffs who have been barred from attending all-white schools in states such as Kansas, Virginia, South Carolina, and Delaware. In 1945, Thurgood Marshall presented the Brown v. Board of Education case in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court’s unanimous decision declared racial segregation in public schools as unconstitutional since it violated the 14^th amendment. The 14^th amendment of the U.S. Constitution granted equal rights to all citizens regardless of color. The ruling abolished the separate but equal doctrine, which was practiced in the public school system since segregated schools were inherently unequal.

The decision set the legal precedent used to overrule laws enforcing segregation in other public sectors. Th verdict inspired the African American population to defy restrictive and punitive laws aimed at segregation based on color. This ultimately resulted in the civil rights movement’s growth aimed at challenging segregation laws and demanding equality of black people regarding the law. By extension, the damaging effect of segregation in parks and transport systems was deemed equal to segregation in the public school system; thus, such punitive laws ought to be disregarded. The Supreme Court’s support emboldened black citizens to push for reforms in other segregate areas.

Rosa Parks and Montgomery Bus Boycott

Montgomery, Alabama, allowed racial segregation on the city buses where blacks were required to sit in the back half of the bus and the whites were to sit in the front. In situations where there was no more room in the front half of the city bus, the blacks were required to give up their seats. However, on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, an African American commuting home on a Montgomery bus, refused to give up her seat in the front row section reserved for whites. Rosa Parks was arrested and fined for failure to follow the commuter bus segregation law. The effects of her decision to disregard the segregation law and her subsequent arrest led to the first large-scale U.S. boycott against segregation. On December 5, 1955, the American civil rights movement began through boycotts organized by the Women’s Political Council (WPC) and Montgomery Improvement Association.

The demands presented included treating black passengers with courtesy, seat allocation on a first-come, first-serve basis, African American bus drivers use routes frequented by the blacks, and ultimately racial integration in the buses[4]. During the boycott, some blacks used carpools while others walked to work. The boycott ensured economic sabotage since the local government funded the buses, thus starving the funds’ circular flow. This was possible since 75 % of African Americans rode the buses and participated in the boycott. The bus companies lost thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

In 1955, The Federal Interstate Commission banned segregation on interstate buses and trains. The MIA filed a suit, Browder v. Gayle, challenging the legality of bus segregation in Montgomery.  In June 1956, a Montgomery Federal Court ruled racial segregation in buses was unconstitutional as it violated the 14^th amendment. The Supreme Court upheld the decision in November 1956 after an appeal by the city representatives. The Montgomery buses were finally integrated in December that year. The ruling triggered boycotts in the South and placed Martin Luther King as the civil rights movement’s acknowledged de facto leader.

Martin Luther King

Martin Luther King, Jr was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. He studied theology and later became a pastor at a Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Montgomery was a highly segregated city and soon became the civil rights movement headquarters in 1954 after Rosa Park’s arrest for disregarding the bus segregation laws. The ripple effect of the arrest was organized boycotts against the segregated system. Martin Luther’s journey as a civil rights activist thus kicked off with the Montgomery boycott organization. The boycott led to the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) formation, whose members elected the 26-year-old Martin Luther as the movement’s president and official spokesperson[5]. The Montgomery bus boycott’s success and the failed assassination attempt by Izola Ware Curry reinforced King’s desire to shape the civil rights movement declaring the need to protest.

In 1957, Martin Luther and other ministers founded the Southern Christen Leadership Conference (SCLC). The SCLC was dedicated to achieve equal civil rights for black Americans and help end the legal segregation laws. The SCLC was founded on the basis that there would be no harm would come to the protesters. Martin Luther advocated for nonviolent techniques in the fight for equal opportunities. Mahatma Gandhi and Henry Thoreau influenced Martin Luther’s tactics. Martin Luther’s civil rights movements used peaceful protests, boycotts, sit-ins, and civil disobedience.

In the Montgomery bus boycott, King encouraged private carpools to compete with company buses while other black residents walked to work. In 1957, King aimed to replicate the successful nonviolent method across the southern states as they pushed to disband the Jim Crow system. Martin Luther created awareness among the African American population, recruiting thousands to be involved in the non- violent protests.Martin Luther’s influence grew each day as reports of arrest were plastered all over the newspapers. The arrests gave him a national platform to influence the black community towards equal opportunities for African Americans. King encouraged college students and children to participate in the protests to pressure the local and federal governments to listen to their grievances. Under King’s leadership, marches were organized in Birmingham, Albany, and Washington. The Washington march is widely regarded as the watershed moment in the American civil rights movement’s history.

Malcolm X

Malcolm X’s inspiration to fight for black people’s rights originated from the racist slurs he and his family endured from the Ku Klux Klan when growing up in Nebraska. Malcolm was convicted of theft and sent to prison. It was in prison that he encountered a political and religious group, The Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad led the Nation of Islam. The Nation of Islam ideology included; members believed in the supremacy of the black people and identified Islam as the ideal religion of the black people. The controversial group ideologies were in direct conflict with equality, which the civil rights movement was advocating. Malcolm joined the group and changed his name to Malcolm X.  Malcolm X’s membership to the Nation of Islam shaped the debate over how to achieve freedom and equality for the African Americans who had long been denied their full protection of the rights.

After his release from prison, Malcolm X was appointed the minister of a Mosque in Harlem. His passionate sermons and excellent oratory skills attracted new admirers to the cult. He preached in favor of self-defense, urging black Americans to use any means necessary to protect themselves against white oppression[6]. This put his teachings at odds with Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent teachings. Both leaders had the same goal of defeating white supremacism and civil rights protection under the law; however, both used different tactics to convey their message.

Malcolm X preached black separation from the white society since he believed that blacks were god’s chosen people. He believed the whites were destined for divine punishment for oppressing blacks. Malcolm X sought to achieve separation regarding color, thus rejected the SCLC’s integration idea. He vehemently opposed the non-violence means of attaining freedom and believed blacks should never yield their self-defense against white oppression. He equated nonviolent tactics with being defenseless. Malcolm X preached that for the advancement of rights of the black people, separation was inevitable. Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam and began working with nonviolent civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr.

Techniques Used in the Civil Rights Movement

The U.S. civil rights movement used various platforms to air their grievances to the federal, state, local governments, and business communities. The civil rights movements orchestrated nonviolent techniques to implement their strategy. The nonviolent sanctions fall into three categories; protests, non-cooperation, and nonviolent intervention. The protest methods included demonstrations, marches, petitions, and vigils. The civil rights leaders organized marches to demand desegregation, such as the marches in Birmingham and Albany. The march in Birmingham organized children protests to pile pressure on the local government to desegrated the city. On August 28, 1963, King, with other civil rights movement leaders, organized a massive march in Washington, D.C. attended by close to 300,000 participants. The march aimed at shedding light on the injustices propagated towards black Americans. They demanded equal rights, end of racial discrimination in schools and the workforce.

Non-cooperation methods entailed; suspending cooperation with authorities, economic sabotages such as consumer boycotts and strikes, and civil disobedience where blacks deliberately violated segregation laws and decrees. The most successful non-cooperation methods were the Montgomery bus boycott and the Birmingham boycott. The fear of economic disruptions led the local government to end discriminatory policies against the black community[7]. The most common nonviolent intervention method used was sit-ins. Sit-ins involved African Americans’ direct action to occupy a segregated area to promote political and social change. The Greensboro sit-in was the most successful. In Greensboro, North Carolina, the sit-ins occurred in 1960, which forced the Woolworth department store to recant its segregation policy. The nonviolent tactics’ main aim was to raise awareness among the U.S. population of the discrimination against African Americans and create a public opinion on legal recognition and federal protection.

The Impact of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965

The civil rights bill was adopted by the U.S. Senate on June 11, 1964, by 73 to 27 votes after intense resistance from the southern states. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited segregation based on race, religion, sex, or national origin[8]. The Act also contained provisions that banned segregation in public facilities such as parks and federally funded programs such as education. The Act under Title VII created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. EEOC was established to ensure employees are not discriminated against based on race, color, religion, sex, or nationality. The Act also authorized the federal government to allocate funds to communities that struggled to disintegrate schools.

Though the Civil Rights Act of 1964 strengthened the enforcement of voting rights, the measures did not weaken officials’ resolve to deny southern blacks the right to vote. This led to the civil rights march in 1965 from Selma to Montgomery to protest their American civil rights’ continued violations. These actions led to the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Act banned poll taxes and literacy tests that prevented the southern blacks from voting[9]. The Act authorized the federal officials to register black voters and oversee elections in areas that continued disfranchising African Americans. The voting laws shifted the political patterns of the South. African Americans joined the Democratic Party while many white southerners defected to the Republican Party in the Southern strategy movement.

Conclusion

The abolishment of slavery and the declaration of equal protection under the U.S. constitution led to resentment of black citizens by the white supremacists. This resentment led to the creation of the Jim Crow laws that aimed to discriminate against black citizens based on their color. However, African Americans grew tired of the segregation laws and started the civil rights movements that lasted from 1954 to 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was enacted by congress. Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X were one of the most influential civil rights activists. King used nonviolent tactics, while Malcolm X encouraged violent actions. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 paved the way for the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which gave black citizens the same voting rights as whites.

Bibliography

Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Brown Anna, and Cox Kianna. “Race in America 2019.” (2019). https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/04/09/race-in-america-2019/

Trevon Logan, and Temin Peter. “Inclusive American Economic History: Containing Slaves, Freedmen, Jim Crow Laws, and the Great Migration.” Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series 110 (2020).

John A. Torres, and Harvey Fireside. Desegregating Schools: Brown v. Board of Education. Enslow Publishing, LLC, 2016.

Kayla Jene Richard. “Beyond the Bus Boycott: The Impact of Rosa Parks on the Civil Rights Movement.” Ph.D. diss., 2020.

Vanessa Cook. “Martin Luther King, Jr., and the long social gospel movement.” Religion and American Culture 26, no. 1 (2016): 74-100.

Peter B Levy. The Civil Rights Movement: A Reference Guide. ABC-CLIO, 2019.

August H Nimtz. “Violence and/or Nonviolence in the Success of the Civil Rights Movement: The Malcolm X–Martin Luther King, Jr. Nexus.” New Political Science 38, no. 1 (2016): 1-22. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07393148.2015.1125116

Kenneth T. Andrews, Beyerlein Kraig, and Tucker Farnum Tuneka. “The legitimacy of protest: explaining White Southerners’ attitudes toward the civil rights movement.” Social Forces 94, no. 3 (2016): 1021-1044. https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/94/3/1021/2461697

Julian Maxwell Hayter. “To end divisions: reflections on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” In Reconstruction and the Arc of Racial (in) Justice. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018.

Sophie Schuit, and C. Rogowski Jon. “Race, representation, and the voting rights act.” American Journal of Political Science 61, no. 3 (2017): 513-526. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26379507

[1] Horowitz, Juliana Menasce, Anna Brown, and Kiana Cox. “Race in America 2019.” (2019).

[2] Logan, Trevon, and Peter Temin. “Inclusive American Economic History: Containing Slaves, Freedmen, Jim Crow Laws, and the Great Migration.” Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series 110 (2020).

[3] Torres, John A., and Harvey Fireside. Desegregating Schools: Brown v. Board of Education. Enslow Publishing, LLC, 2016.

[4] Richard, Kayla Jene. “Beyond the Bus Boycott: The Impact of Rosa Parks on the Civil Rights Movement.” PhD diss., 2020.

[5]Cook, Vaneesa. “Martin Luther King, Jr., and the long social gospel movement.” Religion and American Culture 26, no. 1 (2016): 74-100.

[6] Nimtz, August H. “Violence and/or Nonviolence in the Success of the Civil Rights Movement: The Malcolm X–Martin Luther King, Jr. Nexus.” New Political Science 38, no. 1 (2016): 1-22.

[7] Andrews, Kenneth T., Kraig Beyerlein, and Tuneka Tucker Farnum. “The legitimacy of protest: explaining White Southerners’ attitudes toward the civil rights movement.” Social Forces 94, no. 3 (2016): 1021-1044.

[8] Hayter, Julian Maxwell. “To end divisions: reflections on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” In Reconstruction and the Arc of Racial (in) Justice. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018.

[9] Schuit, Sophie, and Jon C. Rogowski. “Race, representation, and the voting rights act.” American Journal of Political Science 61, no. 3 (2017): 513-526.

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