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Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement
The American Civil Rights Movement
For Grades 6-8
This Pack contains:
7 ARTICLES
2 PRIMARY SOURCES
3 IMAGES
1 VIDEO
© 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 1 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement civil rights movement The mass movement for racial equality in the United States known as the civil rights movement started in the late 1950s. Through nonviolent protest actions, it broke through the pattern of racial segregation, the practice in the South through which Black Americans were not allowed to use the same schools, churches, restaurants, buses, and other facilities as white Americans. The movement also achieved the passage of landmark equal- rights laws in the mid-1960s intended to end discrimination against people because of their race (seeracism). This article provides an overview of some of the main events of the civil rights movement. To read about the movement in greater depth in its historical context, seeBlack Americans. Civil rights supporters carry placards at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Warren K. Leffler (digital file: cph ppmsca 03128) © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 2 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement Martin Luther King, Jr., addresses the crowd during the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. More … AP Images A Black man stands beneath a sign designating the “colored waiting room” at a bus station in Durham, … Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-ppmsc-00199) © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 3 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) to the Constitution of the United States formally abolished slavery. NARA When the United States first became a country, the majority of the Black people who lived there were enslaved. They were not considered citizens and so were not granted the basic rights of citizens in the U.S. Constitution, which was ratified in 1788. This was changed several decades later with three amendments to the Constitution. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) granted citizenship to people who had formerly been enslaved. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) gave Blacks the same voting rights as whites (in other words, the men could vote but the women could not). In the South, however, new laws were passed to effectively prevent Blacks from voting and to reinforce segregation practices (seeReconstruction Period). In addition, the U.S. Supreme Court sanctioned racial segregation by allowing “separate but equal” facilities for Blacks and whites, in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). (See alsoBlack codes; poll tax.) The central figure in the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial in Richmond is Barbara Johns. In 1951… Frank Tozier/Alamy © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 4 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was illegal. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. African American students walk to school in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. Troops sent by the… CSU Archive/Everett Collection/age fotostock In the late 1940s and early 1950s, lawyers for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) argued a series of desegregation cases before the Supreme Court. They culminated in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (Kansas). In that case, the court ruled on May 17, 1954, that having separate schools for Blacks made the schools inherently unequal and was thus unconstitutional. This historic decision inspired a mass movement by Blacks and sympathetic whites to end racial segregation and inequality. Many whites, especially in the South, however, strongly resisted this movement. (See alsoLittle Rock Nine.) Rosa Parks sits on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956. Underwood Archives/UIG/REX/Shutterstock.com On December 1, 1955, a Black woman named Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. This sparked a major protest, the Montgomery bus boycott, which helped ignite the civil rights movement. Two local Baptist ministers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ralph Abernathy, led a long, nonviolent boycott of the bus system that eventually forced the bus company to desegregate its © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 5 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement buses. Similar protest actions soon spread to other communities in the South. King became the leading voice of the civil rights movement. In 1957 he founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to coordinate and lead this massive resistance movement. A student holds a sit-in at a drugstore lunch counter in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. The use of… AP Images In 1960 a group of Black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, insisted on being served a meal at a segregated lunch counter (seeGreensboro sit-in). This was one of the first of the movement’s many prominent civil rights sit-ins, a form of nonviolent protest in which participants enter a business or public place and remain seated until they are forcibly removed or their grievances are addressed. The sit-in movement was largely led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and its techniques were patterned on the nonviolent civil disobedience methods of the Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi. As the movement spread across the United States, it forced the desegregation of department stores, supermarkets, libraries, and movie theaters. Freedom Riders prepare to board a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on May 24, 1961. Perry Aycock/AP Images In May 1961 the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), under the leadership of James Farmer, began sending participants on nonviolent Freedom Rides on buses and trains throughout the South and elsewhere. The purpose of the rides was to test and break down segregation practices on interstate transportation. By September of that year, some 70,000 students, both Black and white, were thought to have participated in the movement. Roughly 3,600 of the participants were arrested for their participation. All together, they traveled to more than 20 states. © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 6 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement Martin Luther King, Jr. (center), and other civil rights supporters participate in the March on… AP Images The movement reached its climax on August 28, 1963, in the March on Washington, a massive demonstration in Washington, D.C., to protest racial discrimination and to demonstrate support for civil rights laws then being considered in Congress. The highlight of the march, which attracted more than 200,000 Black and white participants, was King’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech, which rallied civil rights advocates throughout the country. U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act as Martin Luther King, Jr., and others… Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum; photograph, Cecil Stoughton In the years that followed, the civil rights movement won several important legal victories. On July 2, 1964, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. One of the most comprehensive civil rights laws to be enacted by Congress, the act outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin in public accommodations, employment, and federal programs. It also regulated literacy tests and other registration requirements for voting to ensure they were not biased against Blacks. A year later, Johnson enacted © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 7 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement the Voting Rights Act. The enforcement of this act ended the tactics that had been used in the South to prevent Blacks from voting, and it led to great increases in the numbers of Blacks who registered to vote. Plow mules pull the farm wagon bearing the casket of Martin Luther King, Jr., along the funeral… AP/REX/Shutterstock.com The progress of the period was accompanied by violence against Blacks and civil rights workers, however. On June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers, the field secretary of the Mississippi branch of the NAACP, was killed near his home in Jackson. During the summer of 1964, members of the SNCC and other civil rights workers who were attempting to register voters in Mississippi were routinely beaten and jailed. In mid-June three of the workers were arrested and killed by local law officials in Philadelphia, Mississippi. On April 4, 1968, the civil rights movement suffered a devastating blow when King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Police use dogs to attack a civil rights demonstrator during a march in Birmingham, Alabama, on May… Bill Hudson/AP Images © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 8 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement Black Panther Party national chairman Bobby Seale (left) and defense minister Huey Newton. AP Even before the death of King, some Blacks, particularly residents of poor urban areas, had begun to look for new leadership. Many urban residents had grown increasingly impatient with the slow progress of the nonviolence movement and the failure of recently enacted civil rights legislation to make significant changes in their lives. In 1965 nearly one half of American Blacks lived below the poverty level, and the majority still experienced discrimination or violence daily. In the mid-1960s this frustration erupted into race riots, including a major disturbance in the Watts area of Los Angeles, California, in 1965 (seeWatts Riots of 1965). In this period the civil rights movement as a unified effort disintegrated, with civil rights leaders advocating different approaches and varying degrees of militancy. The growing militancy of Black activists was inspired in part by Black nationalist Malcolm X, who had been assassinated in 1965. Increasingly, African Americans sought to achieve political power and cultural autonomy by building Black-controlled institutions. The more militant Black power movement split off from the civil rights movement. Black nationalist organizations such as the Black Panthers were established, and the SNCC adopted a more radical stance. A moving tribute to the African American struggle for dignity and equality, the Civil Rights… Carol M. Highsmith Archive/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. LC-DIG-highsm-04786) © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 9 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement
In the decades that followed, many civil rights leaders sought to achieve greater direct political power by being
elected to political office. They also sought to improve employment and educational opportunities for Blacks
through affirmative-action programs, which give preference to minorities in job hiring and college admissions
decisions.
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Black Americans, or African Americans
Britannica Note:
Learn about this topic by reading the section "The Civil Rights Movement."
Black people make up one of the largest of the many racial and ethnic groups in the United States. The Black
people of the United States are mainly of African ancestry, but many have non-Black ancestors as well.
Barack Obama, the first African American to be elected president of the United States, waves to the…
© Everett Collection/Shutterstock.com
© 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 10 of 75Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement Learn how the work of Frederick Douglass can inspire young people today, with Dr. Noelle Trent of… Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. American Blacks are largely the descendants of enslaved people—people who were brought from their African homelands by force to work as slaves for whites in the New World. Their rights were severely limited, and they were long denied a rightful share in the economic, social, and political progress of the United States. Nevertheless, African Americans have made basic and lasting contributions to American history and culture. The Du Sable Museum of African American History, in Chicago, Illinois, is named after the Black… Great Museums Television In 2010 more than half of the country’s 42 million African Americans lived in the South. Ten Southern states had Black populations exceeding 1 million each. Blacks were concentrated in the country’s largest cities, with more than 2.2 million living in New York, New York, and more than 900,000 in Chicago, Illinois. Cities that each had a Black population between 500,000 and 700,000 were Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Detroit, Michigan; and Houston, Texas. (See alsoAfrican American history at a glance and African American history timeline.) Names and Labels As Americans of African descent have reached each new plateau in their struggle for equality, they have reevaluated their identity. During the period of slavery, white people used the labels black and negro (Spanish for the color black) to describe the enslaved peoples. These slaveholding terms were offensive, so Americans of African descent chose the term colored for themselves when they were freed. Capitalized, Negro became acceptable in the early 20th century during the migration to the North for factory jobs. Later, civil rights activists adopted the term Afro-American to express pride in their ancestral homeland. However, black—as a symbol of power and revolution—proved more popular. All these terms are still reflected in the names of dozens of organizations. To reestablish “cultural integrity” in the late 1980s, Jesse Jackson proposed African American, which—unlike a color label—proclaims kinship with a historical land base. In the 21st century the terms black and African American both were widely used. Over time, many people began capitalizing the B in Black as a sign of respect for the shared history, culture, and identity of Black Americans. The Early History of Blacks in the Americas © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 11 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement The Early History of Blacks in the Americas Black Africans assisted the Spanish and the Portuguese during their early exploration of the Americas. In the 16th century, some Black explorers settled in the Mississippi River valley and in the areas that became South Carolina and New Mexico. The most-celebrated Black explorer of the Americas was the Estéban, an enslaved person who traveled through the Southwest in the 1530s. The uninterrupted history of Blacks in the United States began in 1619, when 20 Africans were landed in the English colony of Virginia. They had been carried on a Portuguese slave ship sailing from Angola to Mexico that was attacked off the coast of Virginia. The two attacking ships captured about 50 enslaved Black Africans—men, women, and children—and brought them to outposts of Jamestown. More than 20 of the enslaved Africans were purchased there. Records concerning these first African Americans are very limited. They were likely put to work on the tobacco harvest. English law at this time did not recognize hereditary slavery. The Africans may have been treated at first not as slaves but as indentured servants—persons bound to an employer for a limited number of years—as were many of the white settlers. In any case, however, the Africans were forced into servitude. Over time, more Africans were captured, brought to the English colonies, and forced to become indentured servants. Eventually, many of them did complete their period of servitude and were freed. By the 1660s large numbers of Africans were being brought to the English colonies. In 1790 Blacks numbered almost 760,000 and made up nearly one-fifth of the population of the United States. Meanwhile, white colonists sought a permanent labor source. Attempts to hold servants beyond the normal term of indenture resulted in the legal establishment of Black slavery in the English colonies, beginning with Massachusetts in 1641. The shift from indentured servitude to slavery happened gradually, with a series of laws and court decisions. In Virginia a Black indentured servant named John Punch was sentenced to slavery for life in 1640 as punishment for trying to escape his labor contract. The two white indentured servants with whom he had fled did not receive this punishment. In 1655 a civil court in Virginia ruled that another Black indentured servant, John Casor, was enslaved for life. Black slavery in general became encoded in law in Virginia in 1661 and by 1750 had been legalized in all the 13 colonies. Black people were easily distinguished by their color from the rest of the population, making them highly visible targets for enslavement. Moreover, the racist belief that they were an “inferior race” with a “heathen” culture made it easier for whites to rationalize Black slavery. The enslaved Blacks were put to work clearing and cultivating the farmlands of the New World. Most of the millions of Africans captured for the slave trade were taken from western Africa. They… Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 12 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement Of an estimated 10 million Africans brought to the Americas by the slave trade, about 430,000 came to the territory of what is now the United States. The overwhelming majority were taken from the area of western Africa stretching from present-day Senegal to Angola, where political and social organization as well as art, music, and dance were highly advanced. On or near the African coast had emerged the major kingdoms of Oyo, Ashanti, Benin, Dahomey, and Kongo. In the Sudanese interior had arisen the empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai; the Hausa states; and Kanem-Bornu. Such African cities as Djenné and Timbuktu, both now in Mali, were at one time major commercial and educational centers. Slave traders used shackles to restrain captured Africans on ships crossing the Atlantic to the… Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C. (object no. 2008.10.4) The slave trade was highly profitable for European traders. Some Africans themselves sold captives to the European slave traders. The captured Africans were generally marched in chains to the coast and crowded into the holds of European slave ships for the dreaded Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean, usually to the West Indies. Shock, disease, and suicide killed off large numbers of the enslaved Africans during the crossing. In the West Indies the survivors were “seasoned”—taught the rudiments of English and drilled in the routines and discipline of plantation life. Black Slavery in the United States Enslaved Black people played a major, though unwilling and generally unrewarded, role in laying the economic foundations of the United States—especially in the South. Blacks also played a leading role in the development of Southern speech, folklore, music, dancing, and food, blending the cultural traits of their African homelands with those of Europe. During the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Black people worked mainly on the tobacco, rice, and indigo plantations of the Southern seaboard. Eventually, slavery became rooted in the South’s huge cotton and sugarplantations. Although Northern businessmen made great fortunes from the slave trade and from investments in Southern plantations, slavery was never widespread in the North. © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 13 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement Crispus Attucks. © Archive Photos—Hulton Archive/Getty Images James Armistead (right), an enslaved Black man, served as a spy for the marquis de Lafayette (left)… Iberfoto/SuperStock Crispus Attucks, a former slave killed in the Boston Massacre of 1770, was the first martyr to the cause of American independence from Great Britain. During the American Revolution, some 5,000 Black soldiers and sailors fought on the American side. After the Revolution, some slaves—particularly former soldiers—were freed, and the Northern states abolished slavery. But with the ratification of the United States Constitution, in 1788, slavery became more firmly entrenched than ever in the South. The Constitution counted a slave as three-fifths of a person for purposes of taxation and representation in Congress. It also extended the African slave trade for 20 years and provided for the return to their owners of enslaved people who tried to escape. © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 14 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement An illustration from Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin depicts a slave trader… © Photos.com/Thinkstock The official end of the African slave trade in 1808 spurred the growth of the domestic slave trade in the United States, especially as a source of labor for the new cotton lands in the Southern interior. Increasingly, the supply of slaves came to be supplemented by the practice of “slave breeding,” in which enslaved women were encouraged—or forced—to conceive as early as 13 years of age and to give birth as often as possible. Laws known as the slave codes regulated the slave system to promote absolute control by the master and complete submission by the slave. Under these laws the enslaved person was treated as chattel—a piece of property and a source of labor that could be bought and sold like an animal. Enslaved people were allowed no stable family life and little privacy. They were prohibited by law from learning to read or write. The “meek slave” received tokens of favor from the master; the “rebellious slave” provoked brutal punishment. A social hierarchy among the plantation slaves helped keep them divided. At the top were the house slaves; next in rank were the skilled artisans; and at the bottom were the vast majority of field hands, who bore the brunt of the harsh plantation life. © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 15 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement Title page of The Confessions of Nat Turner (1832), an account of a slave rebellion, as told to and… Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. 3b05966u) Because of this tight control, there were few successful slave revolts. Slave plots were invariably betrayed and were brutally put down. The New York slave rebellion of 1712 led to the enactment of harsher slave codes. In 1739 some 60 enslaved Black people rebelled near the Stono River in South Carolina, killing more than 20 white people. Most of the enslaved people involved in the uprising were eventually caught and executed. An alleged slave revolt in New York City in 1741 caused mass hysteria and heavy property damage. About 30 Black people and 4 white people were executed for their supposed involvement in the conspiracy, though modern historians doubt there actually was a revolt. Some slave revolts, such as those of Gabriel in Richmond, Virginia, in 1800 and Denmark Vesey in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822, were elaborately planned. The slave revolt that was perhaps most frightening to whites was the one led by Nat Turner in Southampton, Virginia, in 1831. Before Turner and his coconspirators were captured, they had killed about 60 whites. Individual resistance by enslaved people took such forms as mothers killing their newborn children to save them from slavery, the poisoning of slave owners, destruction of machinery and crops, arson, malingering, and running away. Thousands of runaway slaves were led to freedom in the North and in Canada by Black and white abolitionists who organized a network of secret routes and hiding places that came to be known as the Underground Railroad. One of the greatest heroes of the Underground Railroad was Harriet Tubman, who had herself been enslaved. On numerous trips to the South, she helped hundreds of enslaved people escape to freedom. Free Blacks and Abolitionism © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 16 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement Free Blacks and Abolitionism A tin carrying case holds a document from 1852 certifying that Joseph Trammell, a Black man, was… Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.; gift of Elaine E. Thompson, in memory of Joseph Trammell, on behalf of his direct descendants (object no. 2014.25) During the period of slavery, free Blacks made up about one-tenth of the entire Black population. In 1860 there were almost 500,000 free Blacks—half in the South and half in the North. The free Black population originated with former indentured servants and their descendants. It was augmented by free Black immigrants from the West Indies and by Blacks freed by individual slave owners. But free Blacks were only technically free. In the South, where they posed a threat to the institution of slavery, they suffered both in law and by custom many of the restrictions imposed on slaves. In the North, free Blacks were discriminated against in such rights as voting, property ownership, and freedom of movement, though they had some access to education and could organize. Free Blacks also faced the danger of being kidnapped and enslaved. Richard Allen. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. 03643u) © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 17 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement The earliest leaders among African Americans emerged among the free Blacks of the North, particularly those of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Boston, Massachusetts; and New York City. The free Blacks of the North established their own institutions—churches, schools, and mutual aid societies. One of the first of these organizations was the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, formed in 1816 and led by Bishop Richard Allen of Philadelphia. Among other noted free Blacks was the astronomer and mathematician Benjamin Banneker. Frederick Douglass, about 1850. National Park Service Free Blacks were among the first abolitionists. They included John B. Russwurm and Samuel E. Cornish, who in 1827 founded Freedom’s Journal, the first African American-run newspaper in the United States. Black support also permitted the founding and survival of the Liberator, a journal begun in 1831 by the white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Probably the most-celebrated of all African American journals was the North Star, founded in 1847 by Frederick Douglass, who had been formerly enslaved. He argued that the antislavery movement must be led by Black people. © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 18 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement Henry Highland Garnet. Prints and Photographs Division/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. LC-DIG-pga-02252) Beginning in 1830, Black leaders began meeting regularly in national and state conventions. But they differed on the best strategies to use in the struggle against slavery and discrimination. Some, such as David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet, called on enslaved people to revolt and overthrow their masters. Others, such as Russwurm and Paul Cuffe, proposed that a major modern Black nation be established in Africa. Supported by the white American Colonization Society, Black Americans founded Liberia in West Africa in 1822. Their ideas foreshadowed the development of Pan-African nationalism under the leadership of AME Bishop Henry M. Turner a half century later. However, most Black leaders then and later regarded themselves as Americans and felt that the problems of their people could be solved only by a continuing struggle at home. The Civil War Era Maps show the compromises over the extension of slavery into the territories: the areas affected by… Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. The extension of slavery to new territories had been a subject of national political controversy since the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery in the area now known as the Midwest. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 began a policy of admitting an equal number of slave and free states into the Union. But © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 19 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857 opened all the territories to slavery. In an advertisement from 1854, a slave owner offers a reward for the return of an enslaved person… Printed Ephemera Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (call no. Portfolio 186, Folder 43) By the end of the 1850s, the North feared complete control of the country by slaveholding interests, and the white South believed that the North was determined to destroy its way of life. White Southerners had been embittered by Northern defiance of the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The act provided for the capture and return of enslaved people who tried to escape to freedom. In 1859 white Southerners had been alarmed by the raid at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, led by the white abolitionist John Brown. After Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860 on the antislavery platform of the new Republican Party, the Southern states seceded from the Union and formed the Confederacy. Overview of African American soldiers' involvement in the American Civil War. © Civil War Trust More than 37,000 Black soldiers lost their lives during the American Civil War, many while leading… Kurz & Allison/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-pga-01949) © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 20 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement The Civil War, which liberated the country’s enslaved people, began in 1861. But preservation of the Union, not the abolition of slavery, was the initial objective of President Lincoln. Lincoln believed in gradual emancipation, or freeing people from slavery, with the federal government compensating the slaveholders for the loss of their “property.” But in September 1862 he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that all enslaved people residing in states in rebellion against the United States as of January 1, 1863, were to be free. Thus, the Civil War became in effect a war to end slavery. Martin Robinson Delany was an influential Black abolitionist, physician, and editor. During the… Hulton Archive/Getty Images Black leaders such as the author William Wells Brown, the physician Martin R. Delany, and Frederick Douglass vigorously recruited Blacks into the Union armed forces. Douglass declared in the North Star, “Who would be free themselves must strike the blow.” By the end of the Civil War more than 186,000 Black men were in the Union army. They performed heroically despite discrimination in pay, rations, equipment, and assignments and the unrelenting hostility of the Confederate troops. The Confederacy used enslaved people as a labor force, but thousands of them dropped their tools and escaped to the Union lines. Reconstruction and After © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 21 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement A group of people who had been freed from slavery pose for a photograph in Richmond, Virginia. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. After the Civil War, the United States went through a period of rebuilding known as Reconstruction. As a result of the Union victory in the war and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1865), nearly four million enslaved Black people were freed. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) granted Blacks citizenship, and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) guaranteed their right to vote. Yet the Reconstruction period was one of disappointment and frustration for Black people, for these new provisions of the Constitution were often ignored, particularly in the South. After the Civil War, the people who had formerly been enslaved, known then as freedmen, were thrown largely on their own meager resources. Landless and uprooted, they moved about in search of work. They generally lacked adequate food, clothing, and shelter. The Southern states enacted laws resembling the slave codes of slave times. These laws were known as the Black codes. They restricted the movement of the Black people who had been enslaved in an effort to force them to work as plantation laborers—often for their former masters—at absurdly low wages. In 1865 Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau to assist people who had been freed from slavery. It distributed food and helped people find jobs and homes. The bureau established hospitals and schools, including such institutions of higher learning as Fisk University and Hampton Institute (now Hampton University). Northern philanthropic agencies, such as the American Missionary Association, also aided people who had formerly been enslaved. (See alsohistorically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).) Hiram Rhoades Revels. Brady-Handy photograph collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-cwpbh-00554) During the Reconstruction period, Blacks wielded political power in the South for the first time. Their leaders were largely clergymen, lawyers, and teachers who had been educated in the North and abroad. Among the ablest were Robert B. Elliott of South Carolina and John R. Lynch of Mississippi. Both were speakers of their respective state House of Representatives and were members of the U.S. Congress. Pinckney B.S. Pinchback was elected lieutenant governor of Louisiana and served briefly as the state’s acting governor. Jonathan Gibbs served © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 22 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement as Florida’s secretary of state and superintendent of education. Between 1869 and 1901, 20 Black representatives and 2 Black senators—Hiram R. Revels and Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi—sat in the U.S. Congress. But Black political power was short-lived. Northern politicians grew increasingly conciliatory to the white South, so that by 1872 virtually all leaders of the Confederacy had been pardoned and were able to vote and hold office. By means of economic pressure and the terrorist activities of violent anti-Black groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, most Blacks were kept away from the polls. By 1877, with the withdrawal of the last federal troops from the South, Southern whites were again in full control. Blacks were disfranchised, or deprived of the right to vote, by the provisions of new state constitutions such as those adopted by Mississippi in 1890 and by South Carolina and Louisiana in 1895. These constitutions included voting requirements that were designed to be difficult for Black people to meet or that would be enforced only when Black people tried to vote. Among the requirements were literacy tests and the poll tax, or a fee one had to pay in order to vote. Only a few Southern Black elected officials lingered on. No Black person was to serve in the U.S. Congress for three decades after the departure of George H. White of North Carolina in 1901. A cafe in Durham, North Carolina, has separate entrances for white and Black people. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (reproduction no. LC-USF33-020513-M2) A sign at a Greyhound bus terminal in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1943 designates a waiting room for… Esther Bubley, FSI/OWI, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (reproduction no. LC-DIG-fsa-8d33399) The rebirth of white supremacy in the South was accompanied by the growth of enforced racial separation. Starting with Tennessee in 1870, all the Southern states reenacted laws prohibiting racial intermarriage. They © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 23 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement also passed Jim Crow lawssegregating Blacks and whites in almost all public places. By 1885 most Southern states had officially segregated their public schools. In the post-Reconstruction years, Blacks received only a small share of the increasing number of industrial jobs in Southern cities. And relatively few rural Blacks in the South owned their own farms, most remaining poor sharecroppers heavily in debt to white landlords. The largely urban Northern Blacks fared little better. The jobs they sought were given to white European immigrants. In search of improvement, many Blacks migrated westward. African American military men known as buffalo soldiers protected travel routes and fought American… Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Some people who had been freed from slavery went to Texas, which offered higher wages for agricultural work. Others went to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) or Kansas to seek land to farm. In Kansas and later Oklahoma territory, Blacks as well as whites could become homesteaders, pioneers who received essentially free land from the government if they settled it and cultivated it for a set period. Many Blacks believed that Kansas, which had been the site of much antislavery activity, would provide the greatest opportunities for political, social, and economic equality. The Southern Blacks who moved to Kansas to become homesteaders were called Exodusters. Some Black men, known as buffalo soldiers, joined the U.S. Army, fighting Indians on the frontier. Learn why Frederick Douglass was the most photographed American man of the 19th century, with Dr.… Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. During and after the Reconstruction period, Blacks in the cities organized historical, literary, and musical societies. The literary achievements of Blacks included the historical writings of T. Thomas Fortune and George Washington Williams. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) became an autobiographical classic. Blacks also began to make a major impact on American mass culture through the popularity of such groups as the Fisk Jubilee Singers. © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 24 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement The Age of Booker T. Washington Booker T. Washington. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. From 1895 until his death in 1915, Booker T. Washington was the country’s dominant Black leader. Washington, who had formerly been enslaved, built Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama into a major center of industrial training for Black youths. He urged whites to employ the masses of Black laborers. He called on Blacks to cease agitating for political and social rights and to concentrate instead on working to improve their economic conditions. Washington felt that excessive stress had been placed on liberal arts education for Blacks. He believed that their need to earn a living called instead for training in crafts and trades. In an effort to spur the growth of Black business enterprise, Washington also organized the National Negro Business League in 1900. But Black businesspeople were handicapped by insufficient capital and by the competition of white-owned big businesses. © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 25 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement Illinois state militia helped restore order in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908 after a mob of white… Sangamon Valley Digital Collection/Lincoln Library, Springfield, Illinois Washington was highly successful in winning influential white support. He became the most powerful Black man in the country’s history to that time. But his program of vocational training did not meet the changing needs of industry, and the harsh reality of discrimination prevented most of his Tuskegee Institute graduates from using their skills. The period of Washington’s leadership proved to be one of repeated setbacks for Black Americans. More Blacks lost the right to vote. Segregation became more deeply entrenched. Anti-Black violence increased. Between 1900 and 1914 there were more than 1,000 known lynchings. Anti-Black riots raged in both the South and the North, the most sensational taking place in Brownsville, Texas, in1906), in Atlanta in 1906, and in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908. The Crisis is the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored… The New York Public Library © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 26 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement Meanwhile, Black leaders opposed to Washington began to emerge. The historian and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois criticized Washington’s accommodationist philosophy in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Others were William Monroe Trotter, the militant editor of the Boston Guardian, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a journalist and a crusader against lynching. They insisted that Blacks should demand their full civil rights and that a liberal education was necessary for the development of Black leadership. At a meeting in Niagara Falls, Ontario, in 1905, Du Bois and other Black leaders who shared his views founded the Niagara Movement. Members of the Niagara group joined with concerned liberal and radical whites in 1909 to organize what became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The NAACP magazine The Crisis, edited by Du Bois, became an effective outlet for the promotion of Black rights. The NAACP won its first major legal case in 1915, when the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the “grandfather clause,” a constitutional device used in the South to disfranchise Blacks (seepoll tax). Black contributions to scholarship and literature continued to mount. Historical scholarship was encouraged by the American Negro Academy, whose leading figures were Du Bois and the theologians Alexander Crummell and Francis Grimké. Charles W. Chesnutt was widely acclaimed for his short stories. Paul Laurence Dunbar became famous as a lyric poet. Washington’s autobiography Up from Slavery (1901) won international acclaim. Black Migration to the North and World War I The Great Migration significantly altered the distribution of the African American population. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. In New York City during World War I the NAACP led a march protesting brutality against African… Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. When slavery was abolished in 1865, Blacks were an overwhelmingly rural people. In the years that followed, there was a slow but steady migration of Blacks to the cities, mainly in the South. Migration to the North was © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 27 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement relatively small. Nearly eight million Blacks—about 90 percent of the total Black population of the United States— were still living in the South in 1900. But between 1910 and 1920, crop damage caused by floods and by insects—mainly the boll weevil—deepened an already severe economic depression in Southern agriculture. Destitute Blacks swarmed to the North in 1915 and 1916, as thousands of new jobs opened up in industries supplying goods to Europe, then embroiled in World War I. Between 1910 and 1920, an estimated 500,000 Blacks left the South, in what became known as the Great Migration. Southern Blacks who migrated northward to escape repression and to find jobs settled in the big… Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library The Blacks who fled from the South soon found that they had not escaped segregation and discrimination. They were confined mainly to overcrowded and dilapidated housing, and they were largely restricted to poorly paid, menial jobs. Again there were anti-Black riots, such as that in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917. But in the Northern cities the economic and educational opportunities for Blacks were immeasurably greater than they had been in the rural South. In addition, they were helped by various organizations, such as the National Urban League, founded in 1910. A series of maps show the percentage of African Americans in each state. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Some Blacks opposed involvement in World War I. The Black socialists A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen argued that the fight for democracy at home should precede the fight for it abroad. But when the United States entered World War I in April 1917, most Blacks supported the step. During the war about 1,400 Black officers © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 28 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement were commissioned. Some 200,000 Blacks served abroad, though most were restricted to labor battalions and service regiments. (See alsoHarlem Hellfighters.) The Garvey Movement and the Harlem Renaissance Blacks became disillusioned following World War I. The jobs that they had acquired during the war all but evaporated in the postwar recession, which hit Blacks first and hardest. The Ku Klux Klan, which had been revived during the war, unleashed a new wave of terror against Blacks. Mounting competition for jobs and housing often erupted into bloody race riots such as those that spread over the United States in the “Red Summer” of 1919. In the face of such difficulties, a “new Negro” developed during the 1920s—the proud, creative product of the American city. The growth of racial pride among Blacks was greatly stimulated by the Black nationalist ideas of Marcus Garvey. Born in Jamaica, he had founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association there in 1914. He came to the United States in 1917 and established a branch of the association in the Harlem district of New York City. By 1919 the association had become the largest mass movement of American Blacks in the country’s history, with a membership of several hundred thousand. The Garvey movement was characterized by colorful pageantry and appeals for the rediscovery of the Black African heritage. Its goal was to establish an independent Africa through the return of a revolutionary vanguard of Black Americans. Garvey’s great attraction among poor Blacks was not matched, however, among the Black middle class, which resented his flamboyance and his scorn of their leadership. Indeed, one of Garvey’s sharpest critics was Du Bois. Du Bois shared Garvey’s basic goals and organized a series of small but largely ineffectual Pan-African conferences during the 1920s. The Garvey movement declined after Garvey was jailed for mail fraud in 1925 and was deported to Jamaica in 1927. Cover of Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, June 1925. © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 29 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement Photographs and Prints Division; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; The New York Public Library; Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations The flowering of African American creative talent in literature, music, and the arts in the 1920s was centered in New York and became known as the Harlem Renaissance. Like the Garvey movement, it was based on a rise in race consciousness among Blacks. The principal contributors to the Harlem Renaissance included not only well- established literary figures such as Du Bois and the poet James Weldon Johnson but also new young writers such as Claude McKay. McKay’s militant poem If We Must Die is perhaps the most-quoted Black literary work of this period. Other outstanding writers of the Harlem Renaissance were the novelist Jean Toomer and the poets Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. During the 1920s the artists Henry Ossawa Tanner and Aaron Douglas and the performers Paul Robeson, Florence Mills, Ethel Waters, and Roland Hayes were also becoming prominent. The Black cultural movement of the 1920s was greatly stimulated by Black journals, which published short pieces by promising writers. These journals included the NAACP’s The Crisis and the National Urban League’ s Opportunity. The movement was popularized by Black philosopher Alain Locke in The New Negro, published in 1925, and by the Black historian Carter G. Woodson. Woodson was the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro (now African American) Life and History and the editor of the Journal of Negro History. Blacks in the Great Depression and the New Deal Workers, many of them migrants, grade beans at a canning plant in Florida in 1937. The economic… Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Arthur Rothstein (neg. no. LC-USF34-005788-D) TheGreat Depression of the 1930s worsened the already bleak economic situation of Black Americans. Again the first to be laid off from their jobs, they suffered from an unemployment rate two to three times that of whites. In early public assistance programs, Blacks often received substantially less aid than whites, and some charitable organizations even excluded Blacks from their soup kitchens. Their intensified economic plight sparked major political developments among Black Americans. Beginning in 1929, the St. Louis Urban League launched a national “jobs for Negroes” movement by boycotting chain stores that had mostly Black customers but hired only white employees. Efforts to unify Black organizations and youth groups later led to the founding of the National Negro Congress in 1936 and the Southern Negro Youth Congress in 1937. Virtually ignored by the Republican administrations of the 1920s, Black voters drifted to the Democratic Party, especially in the Northern cities. In the presidential election of 1928, Blacks voted in large numbers for the Democrats for the first time. In 1930 Republican President Herbert Hoover nominated John J. Parker, a man of pronounced anti-Black views, to the U.S. Supreme Court. The NAACP successfully opposed the nomination. In the © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 30 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement 1932 presidential race, Blacks overwhelmingly supported the successful Democratic candidate, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Mary McLeod Bethune. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Gordon Parks, photographer (LC-USW3- 013518-C) The Roosevelt administration’s accessibility to Black leaders and the New Deal reforms strengthened Black support for the Democratic Party. Many Black leaders, members of a so-called “Black cabinet,” were advisers to Roosevelt. Among them were the educator Mary McLeod Bethune, who served as the National Youth Administration’s director of Negro affairs, and William H. Hastie, who in 1937 became the first Black federal judge. Others of these advisers included Eugene K. Jones, executive secretary of the National Urban League; Robert Vann, editor of the Pittsburgh Courier; and the economist Robert C. Weaver. Blacks benefited greatly from New Deal programs, though discrimination by local administrators was common. Low-cost public housing was made available to Black families. The National Youth Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps enabled Black youths to continue their education. The Work Progress Administration gave jobs to many Blacks, and its Federal Writers’ Project supported the work of many authors, among them Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, Waters Turpin, and Melvin B. Tolson. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), established in the mid-1930s, organized large numbers of Black workers into labor unions for the first time. By 1940 there were more than 200,000 Blacks in the CIO, many of them officers of union locals. © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 31 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement World War II Poster of a member of the Tuskegee Airmen promoting war bonds during World War II. Hulton Archive/Getty Images The industrial boom that began with the outbreak of World War II in Europe in 1939 ended the depression. However, unemployed whites were generally the first to be given jobs. Discrimination against Blacks in hiring impelled A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, to threaten a mass protest march on Washington. To forestall the march, scheduled for June 25, 1941, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 banning “discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government” and establishing a Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to investigate violations. Although discrimination remained widespread, during the war Blacks secured more jobs at better wages in a greater range of occupations than ever before. © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 32 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement An African American woman inspects artillery cartridge cases at her job at Frankford Arsenal in… National Archives, Washington, D.C. In World War II as in World War I, there was a mass migration of Blacks from the rural South. Some 1.5 million Blacks left the South during the 1940s, mainly for the industrial cities of the North. Once again, serious housing shortages and job competition led to increased racial tension. Race riots broke out, the worst being the Detroit Race Riot of 1943. The United States had entered World War II in December 1941. During the war, a large proportion of Black soldiers overseas were in service units, and combat troops remained segregated. In the course of the war, however, the army introduced integrated officer training, and Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., became its first Black brigadier general. He organized and commanded the Tuskegee Airmen, the first African American flying unit in the U.S. military. In 1949, four years after the end of World War II, the armed services finally adopted a policy of integration. During the Korean War, in the early 1950s, Blacks for the first time fought side by side with whites in fully integrated units. The Civil Rights Movement A moving tribute to the African American struggle for dignity and equality, the Civil Rights… Carol M. Highsmith Archive/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. LC-DIG-highsm-04786) © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 33 of 75
Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement At the end of World War II, Black Americans were poised to make far-reaching demands to end racism. They were unwilling to give up the minimal gains that had been made during the war. African American students walk to school in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. Troops sent by the… CSU Archive/Everett Collection/age fotostock The campaign for Black rights went forward in the 1940s and 1950s in persistent and deliberate steps. In the courts, the NAACP successfully attacked racially restrictive practices in housing, segregation in interstate transportation, and discrimination in public recreational facilities. In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court issued one of its most significant rulings. In the case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (Kansas), the court overturned the “separate but equal” ruling of 1896. It thus outlawed segregation in U.S. school systems. White citizens’ councils in the South fought back with legal maneuvers, economic pressure, and even violence. Rioting by white mobs temporarily closed Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, when nine Black students were admitted to it in 1957 (seeLittle Rock Nine). Rosa Parks sits on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956. Underwood Archives/UIG/REX/Shutterstock.com Direct nonviolent action by Blacks achieved its first major success in the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955–56. It was led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. This protest was prompted by the quiet but defiant act of a Black woman, Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger on December 1, 1955. Parks was arrested for that act. Black residents then boycotted, or refused to ride, the city buses until the buses were desegregated, so that people of any race could sit anywhere on the buses. Resistance to their demand was finally overcome when the Supreme Court ruled in November 1956 that the segregation of public transportation facilities was unconstitutional. To coordinate further civil rights action, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was established in 1957 under King’s leadership. © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 34 of 75
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