CHALLENGING SEGREGATION. KEY EVENTS

Challenging segregation

PLESSY v. FERGUSON (1896)

On June 7, 1892, 30-year-old Homer Plessy was jailed for sitting in the "White" car of the East Louisiana Railroad. Plessy could easily pass for white but under Louisiana law, he was considered black despite his light complexion and therefore required to sit in the "Colored" car. He was a Creole of Color, a term used to refer to black persons in New Orleans who traced some of their ancestors to the French, Spanish, and Caribbean settlers of Louisiana before it became part of the United States. When Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act, legally segregating common carriers in 1892, a black civil rights organization decided to challenge the law in the courts. Plessy deliberately sat in the white section and identified himself as black. He was arrested and the case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. 

Plessy's lawyer argued that the Separate Car Act violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. In 1896, the Supreme Court of the United States heard the case and held the Louisiana segregation statute constitutional. Speaking for a seven-man majority, Justice Henry Brown wrote: "A statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races -- has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races. ... The object of the Fourteenth Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either." Justice John Harlan, the lone dissenter, saw the horrific consequences of the decision. "Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. ... The present decision, it may well be apprehended, will not only stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, but will encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to defeat the beneficent purposes which the people of the United States had in view when they adopted the recent amendments of the Constitution." The Plessy decision set the precedent that "separate" facilities for blacks and whites were constitutional as long as they were "equal." The "separate but equal" doctrine was quickly extended to cover many areas of public life, such as restaurants, theaters, restrooms, and public schools. The doctrine was a fiction, as facilities for blacks were always inferior to those for whites. Not until 1954, in the equally important Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, would the "separate but equal" doctrine be struck down. -- Richard Wormser

Brown v. Board of Education 

After World War II, the NAACP continued to challenge segregation in the courts. From 1939 to 1961, the NAACP’s chief counsel and director of its Legal Defense and Education Fund was the brilliant African American attorney Thurgood Marshall. After World War II, Marshall focused his efforts on ending segregation in public schools. In 1954 the Supreme Court decided to combine several different cases and issue a general ruling on segregation in schools. One of the cases involved a young African American girl named Linda Brown, who was denied admission to her neighborhood school in Topeka, Kansas, because of her race. She was told to attend an all-black school across town. With the help of the NAACP, her parents then sued the Topeka school board. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional and violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Chief Justice Earl Warren summed up the Court’s decision when he wrote: “In the field of public education, the doctrine of separate but equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” 

The Southern Manifesto 

The Brown decision marked a dramatic reversal of the ideas expressed in the Plessy v. Ferguson case. Brown v. Board of Education applied only to public schools, but the ruling threatened the entire system of segregation. Although it convinced many African Americans that the time had come to challenge other forms of segregation, it also angered many white Southerners, who became even more determined to defend segregation, regardless of what the Supreme Court ruled.

Although some school districts in border states integrated their schools in compliance with the Court’s ruling, anger and opposition was a far more common reaction. In Washington, D.C., Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia called on Southerners to adopt “massive resistance” against the ruling. Across the South, hundreds of thousands of white Americans joined citizens’ councils to pressure their local governments and school boards into defying the Supreme Court. Many states adopted pupil assignment laws. These laws created an elaborate set of requirements other than race that schools could

use to prevent African Americans from attending white schools. The Supreme Court inadvertently encouraged

white resistance when it followed up its decision in Brown v. Board a year later. The Court ordered school districts to proceed “with all deliberate speed” to end school segregation. The wording was vague enough that many districts were able to keep their schools segregated for many more years. Massive resistance also appeared in the halls of Congress. In 1956 a group of 101 Southern members of Congress signed the Southern Manifesto, which denounced the Supreme Court’s ruling as “a clear abuse of judicial power” and pledged to use “all lawful means” to reverse the decision. Although the Southern

Manifesto had no legal standing, the statement encouraged white Southerners to defy the Supreme Court.

Crisis in Little Rock 

In September 1957, the school board in Little Rock, Arkansas, won a court order to admit nine African American students to Central High, a school with 2,000 white students. Little Rock was a racially moderate Southern city, as was most of the state of Arkansas. A number of Arkansas communities, as well as the state university, had already begun to desegregate their schools. The governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, was believed to be a moderate on racial issues, unlike many other Southern politicians. Faubus was determined to win re-election, however, and so he began to campaign as a defender of white supremacy. He ordered troops from the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the nine African American students from entering the school. The next day, as the National Guard troops surrounded the school, an angry white mob joined the troops to protest the integration plan and to intimidate the African American students trying to register. Television coverage of this episode placed Little Rock at the center of national attention. Faubus had used the armed forces of a state to oppose the authority of the federal government—the first such challenge to the Constitution since the Civil War. Eisenhower knew that he could not allow Faubus to defy the federal government. After a conference between Eisenhower and Faubus proved fruitless, the district court ordered the governor to remove the troops. Instead of ending the crisis, however, Faubus simply left the school to the mob. After the African American students entered the school, angry whites beat at least two African American reporters and broke many of the school’s windows. The mob came so close to capturing the terrified African American students that the police had to take them away to safety. The mob violence finally pushed President Eisenhower’s patience to the breaking point. Federal authority had to be upheld. He immediately ordered the U.S. Army to send troops to Little Rock. By nightfall 1,000 soldiers of the elite 101st Airborne Division had arrived. By 5:00 A.M. the troops had encircled the school, bayonets ready. A few hours later, the nine African American students arrived in an army station wagon, and they walked into the high school. The law had been upheld, but the troops were forced to remain in Little Rock for the rest of the school year.

The Sit-In Movement

In the fall of 1959, four young African Americans—Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair, Jr., David Richmond, and Franklin McCain—enrolled at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro. The four freshmen became close friends and spent evenings talking about the civil rights movement. In January 1960, McNeil told his friends that he thought the time had come to take action, and he suggested a sit-in at the whites-only lunch counter in the nearby Woolworth’s department store. “All of us were afraid,” Richmond later recalled, “but we went and did it.” On February 1, 1960, the four friends entered the Woolworth’s. They purchased school supplies and then sat at the lunch counter and ordered coffee. When they were refused service, Blair said, “I beg your pardon, but you just served us at [the checkout] counter. Why can’t we be served at the counter here?” The students stayed at the counter until it closed, then announced that they would sit at the counter every day until they were given the same service as white customers. As they left the store, the four were excited. McNeil recalled, “I just felt I had powers within me, a superhuman strength that would come forward.” McCain was also energized, saying, “I probably felt better that day than I’ve ever felt in my life.”

News of the daring sit-in at the Woolworth’s store spread quickly across Greensboro. The following day, 29 African American students arrived at Woolworth’s determined to sit at the counter until served. By the end of the week, over 300 students were taking part.

Starting with just four students, a new mass movement for civil rights had begun. Within two months, sit-ins had spread to 54 cities in 9 states. Sit-ins were staged at segregated stores, restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, and swimming pools. By 1961 sit-ins had been held in more than 100 cities. 

The sit-in movement brought large numbers of idealistic and energized college students into the civil rights struggle. Many African American students had become discouraged by the slow pace of desegregation. Students like Jesse Jackson, a student leader at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, wanted to see things change. The sit-in offered them a way to take matters into their own hands. 

At first the leaders of the NAACP and the SCLC were nervous about the sit-in movement. They feared that students did not have the discipline to remain nonviolent if they were provoked enough. For the most part, the students proved them wrong. Those conducting sit-ins were heckled by bystanders, punched, kicked, beaten with clubs, and burned with cigarettes, hot coffee, and acid—but most did not fight back. They remained peaceful, and their heroic behavior grabbed the nation’s attention.

SNCC 

As the sit-ins spread, student leaders in different states realized that they needed to coordinate their efforts. The person who brought them together was Ella Baker, the 55-year-old executive director of the SCLC. In April 1960, Baker invited student leaders to attend a convention at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. At the convention, Baker urged students to create their own organization instead of joining the NAACP or the SCLC. Students, she said, had “the right to direct their own affairs and even make their own mistakes.” 

The students agreed with Baker and established the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). They then chose Marion Barry, a student leader from Nashville who later served as mayor of Washington, D.C., to be SNCC’s first chairperson. African American college students from all across the South made up the majority of SNCC’s members, although many whites also joined. 

Between 1960 and 1965, SNCC played a key role in desegregating public facilities in dozens of Southern communities. SNCC also began sending volunteers into rural areas of the Deep South to register African Americans to vote. The idea for what came to be called the Voter Education Project began with Robert Moses, an SNCC volunteer from New York. Moses pointed out that the civil rights movement tended to focus on urban areas. He urged SNCC to fill in the gap by helping rural African Americans. Moses himself went to rural Mississippi, where African Americans who tried to register to vote frequently met with violence. 

Despite the danger, many SNCC volunteers headed to Mississippi and other parts of the Deep South. Several had their lives threatened, and others were beaten. In 1964 local officials in Mississippi brutally murdered three SNCC workers as the workers attempted to register African American voters. 

One SNCC organizer, a former sharecropper named Fannie Lou Hamer, had been evicted from her farm after registering to vote. She was then arrested in Mississippi for urging other African Americans to register, and she was severely beaten by the police while in jail. She then helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and she challenged the legality of the segregated Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

The Freedom Riders 

Despite rulings outlawing segregation in interstate bus service, bus travel remained segregated in much of the South. In 1961 CORE leader James Farmer asked teams of African Americans and whites to travel into the South to draw attention to Reading Check Reading Check Sit-Ins Fight Segregation African American students challenged Southern segregation laws by demanding equal service at lunch counters. How did the NAACP initially feel about the sit-in movement? History the South’s refusal to integrate bus terminals. The teams became known as the Freedom Riders. 

In early May 1961, the first Freedom Riders boarded several southbound interstate buses. When the buses carrying them arrived in Anniston, Birmingham, and Montgomery, Alabama, angry white mobs attacked them. The mobs slit the bus tires and threw rocks at the windows. In Anniston, someone threw a firebomb into one bus, although fortunately no one was killed. 

In Birmingham the riders emerged from a bus to face a gang of young men armed with baseball bats, chains, and lead pipes. They beat the riders viciously. One witness later reported, “You couldn’t see their faces through the blood.” The head of the police in Birmingham, Public Safety Commissioner Theophilus Eugene (“Bull”) Connor, explained that there had been no police at the bus station because it was Mother’s Day, and he had given many of his officers the day off. FBI evidence later showed that Connor had contacted the local Ku Klux Klan and told them he wanted the Freedom Riders beaten until “it looked like a bulldog got a hold of them.” 

The violence in Alabama made national news, shocking many Americans. The attack on the Freedom Riders came less than four months after President John F. Kennedy took office. The new president felt compelled to do something to get the violence under control.

James Meredith 

As the Freedom Riders were trying to desegregate bus terminals, efforts continued to integrate Southern schools. On the very day John F. Kennedy was inaugurated, an African American air force veteran named James Meredith applied for a transfer to the University of Mississippi. Up to that point, the university had avoided complying with the Supreme Court ruling ending segregated education. 

In September 1962, Meredith tried to register at the university’s admissions office, only to find Ross Barnett, the governor of Mississippi, blocking his path. Although Meredith had a court order directing the university to register him, Governor Barnett stated emphatically, “Never! We will never surrender to the evil and illegal forces of tyranny.” 

Frustrated, President Kennedy dispatched 500 federal marshals to escort Meredith to the campus. Shortly after Meredith and the marshals arrived, an angry white mob attacked the campus, and a fullscale riot erupted. The mob hurled rocks, bottles, bricks, and acid at the marshals. Some people fired shotguns at them. The marshals responded with tear gas, but they were under orders not to fire. 

The fighting continued all night. By morning, 160 marshals had been wounded. Reluctantly Kennedy ordered the army to send several thousand troops to the campus. For the rest of the year, Meredith attended classes at the University of Mississippi under federal guard. He graduated the following August. 

Violence in Birmingham 

The events in Mississippi frustrated Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders. Although they were pleased that Kennedy had intervened to protect Meredith’s rights, they were disappointed that the president had not seized the moment to push for a new civil rights law. When the Cuban missile crisis began the following month, civil rights issues dropped out of the news, and for the next several months, foreign policy became the main priority at the White House. 

Reflecting on the problem, Dr. King came to a difficult decision. It seemed to him that only when violence and disorder got out of hand would the federal government intervene. “We’ve got to have a crisis to bargain with,” one of his advisers observed. King agreed. In the spring of 1963, he decided to launch demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, knowing they would probably provoke a violent response. He believed it was the only way to get President Kennedy to actively support civil rights. 

The situation in Birmingham was volatile. Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor, who had arranged for the attack on the Freedom Riders, was now running for mayor. Eight days after the protests began, King was arrested and held for a time in solitary confinement. While in prison, King began writing on scraps of paper that had been smuggled into his cell. The “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” that he produced is one of the most eloquent defenses of nonviolent protest ever written. 

In his letter, King explained that although the protesters were breaking the law, they were following a higher moral law based on divine justice. To the charge that the protests created racial tensions, King argued that the protests “merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.” Injustice, he insisted, had to be exposed “to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.” ; (See page 1056 for more on “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.”)

After King was released, the protests, which had been dwindling, began to grow again. Bull Connor responded with force, ordering the police to use clubs, police dogs, and high-pressure fire hoses on the demonstrators, including women and children. Millions of people across the nation watched the graphic violence on television. Outraged by the brutality and worried that the government was losing control, Kennedy ordered his aides to prepare a new civil rights bill. 

The March on Washington 

Dr. King realized that Kennedy would have a very difficult time pushing his civil rights bill through Congress. Therefore, he searched for a way to lobby Congress and to build more public support. When A. Philip Randolph suggested a march on Washington, King agreed. 

On August 28, 1963, more than 200,000 demonstrators of all races flocked to the nation’s capital. The audience heard speeches and sang hymns and songs as they gathered peacefully near the Lincoln Memorial. Dr. King then delivered a powerful speech outlining his dream of freedom and equality for all Americans:

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed . . . that all men are created equal. . . . I have a dream that one day . . . the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood. . . . I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream . . . when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing . . . ‘Free at last, Free at last, Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.’” 

—quoted in Freedom Bound: A History of America’s Civil Rights Movement 

King’s speech and the peacefulness and dignity of the March on Washington had built momentum for the civil rights bill. Opponents in Congress, however, continued to do what they could to slow the bill down, dragging out their committee investigations and using procedural rules to delay votes. ; (See page 1078 for an excerpt from Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.)

The Selma March Even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, voting rights were far from secure. The act had focused on segregation and job discrimination, and it did little to address voting issues. The Twenty-fourth Amendment, ratified in 1964, helped somewhat by eliminating poll taxes, or fees paid in order to vote, in federal (but not state) elections. African Americans still faced hurdles, however, when they tried to vote. As the SCLC and SNCC stepped up their voter registration efforts in the South, their members were often attacked and beaten, and several were murdered. 

Across the South, bombs exploded in African American businesses and churches. Between June and October 1964, arson and bombs destroyed 24 African American churches in Mississippi alone. Convinced that a new law was needed to protect African American voting rights, Dr. King decided to stage another dramatic protest. 

In January 1965, the SCLC and Dr. King selected Selma, Alabama, as the focal point for their campaign for voting rights. Although African Americans made up a majority of Selma’s population, they comprised only 3 percent of registered voters. To prevent African Americans from registering to vote, Sheriff Jim Clark had deputized and armed dozens of white citizens. His posse terrorized African Americans and frequently attacked demonstrators with clubs and electric cattle prods. 

Just weeks after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway, for his work in the civil rights movement, Dr. King stated, “We are not asking, we are demanding the ballot.” King’s demonstrations in Selma led to approximately 2,000 African Americans, including schoolchildren, being arrested by Sheriff Clark. Clark’s men attacked and beat many of the demonstrators, and Selma quickly became a major story in the national news. 

To keep pressure on the president and Congress to act, Dr. King joined with SNCC activists and organized a “march for freedom” from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery, a distance of about 50 miles (80 km). On Sunday, March 7, 1965, the march began. The SCLC’s Hosea Williams and SNCC’s John Lewis led 500 protesters toward U.S. Highway 80, the route that marchers had planned to follow to Montgomery. As the protesters approached the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which led out of Selma, Sheriff Clark ordered them to disperse. While the marchers kneeled in prayer, more than 200 state troopers and deputized citizens rushed the demonstrators. Many were beaten in full view of television cameras. This brutal attack, known later as “Bloody Sunday,” left 70 African Americans hospitalized and many more injured. 

The nation was stunned as it viewed the shocking footage of law enforcement officers beating peaceful demonstrators. Watching the events from the White House, President Johnson became furious. Eight days later, he appeared before a nationally televised joint session of the legislature to propose a new voting rights law.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 

On August 3, 1965, the House of Representatives passed the voting rights bill by a wide margin. The following day, the Senate also passed the bill. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 authorized the attorney general to send federal examiners to register qualified voters, bypassing local officials who often refused to register African Americans. The law also suspended discriminatory devices such as literacy tests in counties where less than half of all adults had been allowed to vote. 

The results were dramatic. By the end of the year, almost 250,000 African Americans had registered as new voters. The number of African American elected officials in the South also increased, from about 100 in 1965 to more than 5,000 in 1990. 

The passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 marked a turning point in the civil rights movement. The movement had now achieved its two major legislative goals. Segregation had been outlawed, and new federal laws were in place to prevent discrimination and protect voting rights. 

After 1965 the movement began to shift its focus. It began to pay more attention to the problem of achieving full social and economic equality for African Americans. As part of that effort, the movement turned its attention to the problems of African Americans trapped in poverty and living in ghettos in many of the nation’s major cities.

PS Dear students,

I promised you to publish the key events that we discussed in class. Here you go :)