Before and during the Second World War the African Americans were segregated in most aspects of life. For instance, as recent as 1945, the African Americans in Georgia did not have the right to vote, they faced increased segregation in almost all aspects of life, and encountered discrimination and violence from the whites. During the reconstruction period following the compromise of 1850, the Fourteenth Amendment was passed in 1868, which provided equal protection before the law. Consequently, the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870 granting all males the right to vote regardless of their race. Accordingly, the northern troops occupied the southern territories between 1865 and 1877 to enforce the foregoing rights and to implement the abolition of slavery practices. However, the southern whites took control of the south in 1877 during the end of the reconstruction period, passing various laws that were discriminatory on the basis of race (Parker 113). These laws were regarded as the Black Codes and segregated the blacks in the housing, education, fair trial, and in the use of private and public facilities. An example of the violence that the Blacks faced was the lynching of about 17 African Americans between 1940 and 1943. Such lynching triggered riots in urban areas. The worst of the riots were experienced in Detroit (Bates 148).
However, the Second World War provided a chance for the poor African Americans to escape the cycle of poverty and segregation in the rural areas. Many African Americans enrolled in the armed forces during the 1940s. However, the blacks faced segregation even in the armed forces. For instance, the army assimilated the African American enlistees but established different infantry regiments that were under the command of white commanders. This form of segregation in the armed forces was also experienced in the Navy, the Army Air Corps’, and even in the marines. However, the chaos that Americans faced following the war, the segregation aspects subsided because it became very challenging to separate the races while all were facing attacks from outside their borders. Nevertheless discrimination was being experienced within the American society.
After the war, when the African American, Native American, and the Hispanic combatants returned they found out that the country still did not guarantee full rights for them. However, the civil rights movement that advocated for the expansion of the civil rights had been established. Some of the African American soldiers that had abandoned firm jobs at the South for an opportunity to join the armed forces decided that they should not return to their homes. They moved into cities and towns to seek employment that would be comparable to what they had learned from their time in the armed forces. The movement intensified migration of the blacks in the late 1940s.
The civil rights movement comprised various movements that characterized the clamor for reforms and political struggles between 1945 and 1970s. The movement’s main objectives included bringing an end to racial segregation and ending the discrimination against the African Americans and other marginalized groups, particularly in the American South. The movement changed the way other movements operated in the past. For instance, instead to organizing riots, the civil rights movement used peaceful means to show its dissatisfaction and to plead with the government to end segregation. The civil rights leaders requested its members to use what they referred to as the “Double V” campaign to fight for the victory against the shared American foreign enemies and for the victory within the American borders against racism.
The earlier period of the struggle against discrimination was epitomized by the two Supreme Court decisions. The first decision was in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson where the Supreme Court upheld the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine as constitutional. However, this decision was later overturned in the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education. This was an era that was promising and frustrating in equal measure, where some of the successful abolitionists and movements aimed at fighting for equal rights and freedoms or the blacks failed to establish lasting legacies. A good example is the Marcus Garvey’s Negro Association.
Work Cited
Bates, Beth Tompkins, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1929–
1945. California: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Parker, Christopher. “When Politics Becomes Protest: Black Veterans and Political Activism in
the Postwar South,” Journal of Politics, 71, 2009, 113–31.
