1953 was a seminal year for the Civil Rights Movement since in that year future President John F Kennedy was first elected to the US Senate, that Senate which was a bastion of conservatism.
And in 1954 less than a year later the first major achievement in the Civil Rights crusade post war was achieved, that of the Brown vs Board of Education where it was declared by the Supreme Court that separate but equal was unconstitutional and called on all states to move ‘with all deliberate speed’ to desegregate schools.
Interestingly there were several instances where the ruling of the Supreme Court was not accepted and several senators who hailed from the Deep South went in open defiance of the court’s decision. The most infamous was Senator Harry Byrd’s ‘Massive Resistance’ campaign which called for the blocking of the integration decision.
The Supreme Court decision in Brown led to the opening of the floodgates regarding racial discrimination cases and unfortunately this also led to instances of violence especially with regard to states where lynching had been commonplace such as Mississippi and Alabama. The Emmett Till murder in 1955 set the stage for a brutal civil rights campaign which also looked forward even when the 1957 Little Rock case showed that it was extremely difficult to implement the Brown decision if local authorities and populations stubbornly resisted it.
Another important landmark of the 1950’s was the Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott which catapulted Martin Luther King to fame on the back of the Rosa Parks story. The 1957 Civil Rights Act although largely toothless saw some sort of recognition for the struggle against white supremacy and was ironically piloted by a Senator from the South who was Lyndon Johnson
The 1960’s began with the election of President Kennedy and rapidly several landmark civil rights protests began across the South. The Alabama Freedom Riders caused consternation by attempting to desegregate buses whilst the Greensboro Lunch counter sit ins in North Carolina provided a backdrop to the urgency of more effective civil rights legislation. Martin Luther King stepped up the tempo of protest with the confrontations in Birmingham, Alabama and the landmark March on Washington in late 1963 clamouring for legislation that would make blacks and whites equal under the eyes of the law. This eventually came with the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 which gave sweeping new powers to states to implement desegregation. However this was not before some landmark racial murders such as the one of NAACP leader Medgar Evers and the three boys in Philadelphia, Mississippi where the racial tension reached fever pitch. The major achievement achieved by the Civil Rights Movement must be the Voting Rights Act of 1965 however where this meant that all blacks now had the right to vote even in the deepest of the Deep South.
The 1970’s and 80’s were rather quiet on the Civil Rights front with the nation grudgingly accepting equality although sporadic incidents of violence still occurred. In the 90’s there were blasts from the past with the trial of Byron de la Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers in 1963 and the first conviction of a mixed jury in the South on a Civil Rights case. That was certainly a great achievement indeed.
Works Cited:
Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen; A Patriot’s History of the United States; FROM COLUMBUS’S GREAT DISCOVERY TO THE WAR ON TERROR, SENTINEL, Print, 2004
