In the 100 years between the end of the Civil War and the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, African Americans continued to experience the violence and racism that they had endured as slaves. This racism was not only social and political separation, but also legal separation. The legal segregation was codified into law so that African Americans were denied equal access to service and opportunities such as housing, medical care, education, employment, transportation, and entertainment. Because this separation was established in state and local laws, any resistance by African Americans resulted in arrest and prosecution. However, after World War II, African American leaders and organizations began to challenge this legal segregation in order to advance the rights of their people. This challenge is often referred to as the Modern Civil Rights Movement and is commonly accepted as the time period after World War II until 1965 when Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. During this roughly fifteen year period, organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. worked to end discrimination and racism against African Americans. Instead of focusing on ending all forms of discrimination, African American organizations and leaders focused specifically on ending legal discrimination in order to establish that African Americans had a legitimate and equal place in society to white Americans. Because they focused on correcting legal discrimination instead of social discrimination, African Americans gained greater equality during the 1960s through the efforts of the NAACP and civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr.
Although racism existed in all parts of America, racism in the South was more virulent than other places. The South had worked for over a century to codify into law segregation and inequality. As opposed to the North which had a system of de facto segregation, that is, segregation of facilities that resulted from social practices, the South had a system of de jure segregation, that is, segregation policies written into law. These laws were known as Jim Crow laws and were backed by the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson which stated that public facilities could be separated according to race if the facilities were equal—in other words, established the idea of “separate but equal.” In reality, the facilities for African Americas were far from equal to those for whites. Public facilities such as bathrooms and drinking fountains were often dirty and in various states of disrepair, transportation systems had policies of segregation which relegated African Americans to the back of buses or cramped, inconvenient train cars, and African American educational institutions had substandard, if any, supplies a facilities. Leland Ware describes this segregation as “a regime of systematic degradation and oppression that was all encompassing.” African Americans endured persistent racism and segregation and, because the segregation was backed by laws, had no avenues of recourse. However, beginning in the early 1900s, organizations began to form expressly for the purpose of fighting and changing this system of segregation.
The most powerful organization that formed was the NAACP. Established in 1909 after a race riot in Springfield, Illinois that led to the deaths of six African Americans, the NAACP immediately began to take steps to combat racism and legal segregation. Through publications from its Director of Publications and Research and noted early civil rights activist W.E.B. Dubois, the NAACP appealed to Americans, both black and white, to support the organization and reverse the trends of violence and hatred. After only ten years in existence, the NAACP had more than 50,000 members and 220 branches nationwide. The NAACP’s early mission was to “secure for all people the rights guaranteed in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution, which promised an end to slavery, the equal protection of the law, and universal adult male suffrage, respectively.” As an organization, they chose to focus on gaining legal equality for African Americans. Although still a difficult task, legal equality through court and legislative action would be easier to attain rather than attempting to erase the social inequality so deeply embedded in society. One of the first actions of the NAACP was to send to Congress an anti-lynching bill to fight the rampant violence that existed in the South. After several important legal victories including a successful defense against unequal pay for African Americans in Oklahoma, the NAACP decided to “attempt a bold, all-out frontal attack on segregation.” The organization began to support cases that would establish legal equality for African Americans. Perhaps the most important of these was the Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education which negated the separate but equal justification for segregation established in Plessy v. Ferguson. The ruling from the Supreme Court specifically addressed one of the NAACP’s main missions which was to enforce the 14th Amendment. The court said, “Segregation of white and Negro children in public schools of a State solely on the basis of racedenies the Negro children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment” and mentions the phrase “equal protection under the law” several other times throughout the Opinion written by Chief Justice Earl Warren. By focusing on eliminating the legal precedent for school segregation as opposed to attempting to change the social conditions that led to children of different races being sent to separate schools (such as the idea that African American and white children learn differently and therefore should be educated differently), the NAACP won a victory for legal change by targeting schools which were “institutions at the very heart of everyday community life.”
The NAACP also chose to focus on other areas of segregation of public facilities like the transportation system. The Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896 was a dispute over separate railway cars for whites and African Americans. Almost 60 years later, segregation in public transportation remained entrenched in the legal system. In 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the front of the bus and move to the back of the bus, a method of segregation codified into Alabama law. Parks’ refusal led to her removal from the bus and sparked outrage among the bus system’s biggest clientele—African Americans. With the backing of the NAACP and the leadership of charismatic men, most notably Martin Luther King Jr., African Americans in Montgomery organized the Montgomery Improvement Association—a boycott of the bus system. This association of African Americans refused to use the bus system as long as the policy of segregation remained in place; their actions led to profit loss and, most importantly, a Supreme Court ruling in 1956 that stated that segregation in public transportation was unconstitutional.” The success of the boycotts spurred a wave of protests throughout the South intended to change policies of segregation at lunch counters, restaurants and public facilities. These protests often ended in arrest of the protesters who needed NAACP funds for bail and legal defense. The NAACP supported these individuals and defended, sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully, their right to equal protection under the law.
These types of protests were known as nonviolent means of protest and were supported mostly by Christian civil rights organizations. Martin Luther King Jr. was the most recognizable and influential advocate of the nonviolent approach. Born in 1929 to a Baptist minister, King learned from his parents at a young age not to react to racism “with violence or aggression” but instead to follow the “Christian commandment to love one’s enemies.” King preached this approach to his supporters and implemented nonviolent protest in an attempt to reverse legal segregation. One of the biggest and most important applications of the nonviolent approach took place in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. King, along with the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, organized “mass demonstrations” in Birmingham after the demands of “desegregation of restaurants, toilets, water fountains in city businesses as well as the hiring of a certain percentage of black salespeople” were not met. These protests resulted in attacks, beatings and arrests by police officers of the protester. King was one of those arrested. He served his time in solitary confinement writing an open letter to those who asserted that his actions were too radical and that the country was not ready for the kind of desegregation he was fighting for. In this letter, known as the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” King explained his reasoning and methods. He emphasizes his nonviolent approach and contrasts that approach with the Birmingham police’s record of brutality and violence. Most importantly, King makes the distinction between “just and unjust laws.” He explains the distinction by comparing man-made laws to moral laws. He wrote:
“An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statues are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives segregators a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.”
King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” provided eloquent justification for not only the protesters’ actions but also for the case of desegregation and equality for African Americans.
In the years from 1962 to 1965, and with the help of presidential action, African Americans made their most significant gains in legal equality. In “Reform’s Mating Dance: Presidents, Social Movements, and Racial Realignments,” Sidney M. Milkis and Daniel Tichenor explain that social movements rarely succeed without the support of presidential action. The Modern Civil Rights Movement is no exception and despite the significant gains made by organizations like the NAACP and leaders like King, legal equality for African Americans could not have been achieved if not for presidential action. John F. Kennedy, who served as president from 1961 until 1963, and Lyndon B. Johnson, who served as president from 1963 until 1968, were the two presidents who provided the most legal support to the Modern Civil Rights Movement. The landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education is an example of how the Civil Rights Movement needed support from presidential action. The Supreme Court decision ruled that school desegregation must be implemented with “all due haste.” While the Supreme Court decision was a major victory for African American civil rights, the verbiage of the ruling left opportunities for state and local education systems to delay and continue to deny African Americans equal access to quality education.
In September of 1962, a student named James Meredith attempted to become the first African American to enroll in The University of Mississippi. In response to this attempt, segregationists Mississippi governor Ross Barnett decreed that the University of Mississippi would not accept Meredith and would continue its practice of school segregation despite the ruling of the Supreme Court. Under the direction of the United States Attorney General Robert Kennedy, President Kennedy ordered troops to Mississippi to ensure Meredith’s safety and help him register for classes at the University of Mississippi. Kennedy had to again take action in 1963 when two African American students wanted to enroll at the University of Alabama and Governor George Wallace refused to let them enter. On June 11, 1963, in a televised speech to the nation regarding civil rights, Kennedy said:
“It ought to be possible, therefore, for American students of any color to attend any public institution they select without having to be backed up by troops. It ought to be possible for American consumers of any color to receive equal service in places of public accommodation, such as hotels and restaurants and theaters and retail stores, without being forced to resort to demonstrations in the street, and it ought to be possible for American citizens of any color to register and to vote in a free election without interference or fear of reprisal.”
This speech and his actions show Kennedy’s commitment to civil rights despite the public backlash from Southerners. By using federal power to enforce the ruling of the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, Kennedy supported African American’s claims to equality under the law.
While Kennedy’s actions helped establish a precedence for presidential engagement in civil rights issues, Lyndon Johnson’s devotion to ensuring legal equality for African Americans provided the most significant and long-lasting gains in civil rights. Milkis and Tichenor explain that “LBJ put himself out front on civil rights, seeking from the start to lead the movement toward its goalsand tying his presidency to the cause from the beginning.” Johnson established important relationships with civil rights leaders, including King, at the beginning of his presidency and worked towards the two landmark pieces of legislation of his presidency—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, originally conceived under Kennedy, was signed into law by Johnson in July of 1964. The act “destroyed Jim Crow in public accommodations with amazing speed and with virtually self-executing finality.” The act outlaws the discrimination against any individual based on his or her race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 paved the way for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed in January of 1965, which outlawed the use of any device intended to deny any person the right to vote. This act specifically addressed measures such as literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and poll taxes—methods that had been used for decades to deny African Americans the right to vote. These two acts were the culmination of legal equality for African Americans. Here finally was the means to enforce the legal reforms sought by civil rights organizations and leaders for decades.
During the Modern Civil Rights Movement, African American organizations and leaders focused not on reversing socially embedded ideas of racism and hatred that led to entrenched segregation, but instead focused on changing laws that allowed and enforced segregation. The landmark Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education was the first major stepping stone to legal equality for African Americans and many view the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as the culmination of a struggle to end segregation that spanned a century. However, in 2013 the Supreme Court ruled that key parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 no longer applied to society and politics because the country has “fundamentally changed since the racially motivated laws of the civil rights era.” Many activists who still fight discrimination and racism in today’s society assert that the Supreme Court’s decision is a step backwards for African American. The decision, combined with the increase in voter identification laws in many southern states is a step backwards for those who dedicated their lives and their work to achieving legal equality for African Americans.
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