After the American Civil War of between 1861and 1865, the federal government abolished slavery in the United States through the endorsement of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Subsequently, before the law, persons of African descent were free from the yoke of bondage and concurrently, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments declared black people as citizens of the United States and gave them the rights to vote respectively. In other words, racial divisions were no longer recognizable before the law and as a result, equality among blacks and whites was possible. The problem was that white supremacy was not a simple matter of legislation; on the contrary, the ideologies of Caucasians being the superior individuals defined American cultural norms. Hence, the Civil War and the government’s efforts did little to change the perceptions of black inferiority, with a particular interest in the Southern States. To that end, this paper presents the conditions that warranted the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement and the goals of the activists before determining their triumphs from the late 1960s and the early1970s.
Foremost, to understand the grounds on which the Civil Rights Movement became necessary, the fact that the Southerners thrived on racial prejudice is worth mentioning. Apparently, in the years leading to the Civil War referred to above, the Southern States assumed a pro-slavery position as they opposed the notion of slave emancipation since their societies revolved around the same. Plantations in the South relied on the free and hard labor of slaves and their communities placed whites in a steady state of authority regardless of age and gender. Consequently, the idea of free blacks did not sit well with their communities and by the closing of the nineteenth century; the Southerners were on the move to reconstruct the antebellum social order in the postbellum societies of their areas. Naturally, the Southern whites sought to define freedom for African Americans “in the narrowest manner” because in their views, “freedom for the Negro [did not mean] the same thing as freedom for them” (Foner 446). Accordingly, just as before, the Southern laws and traditions turned towards protecting the position of the whites in the highest class of the social hierarchy.
The first move was the endorsement of new legislation to restrict African American men and women within the specific confines that went on to dictate their rights from the social to State levels. Southerners could not stand the idea of ex-slaves voting or an African American holding office: the privileges had until then been subject to Caucasian males only. Therefore, segregation laws came into play as a means to separate the races. Initially, “railroads, theaters, and hotels” separated their customers “by race or excluded blacks altogether” on mere principle to appease the Caucasian clients, (Foner 521). However, after the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that declared the separate but equal doctrine as Constitutional, segregation became acceptable before the law (Foner 521). Therefore, public and private institutions, including parks and schools operated under the terms of the discrimination laws: the federal government did not interfere. The same decision went on to nullify the conditions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that had outlawed racial discrimination in public facilities. The segregation laws created Jim Crow South, States in which African Americans had no voice within the sociopolitical and economic fields of the Southern societies. Notably, the separate but equal conditions set by the Plessy v. Ferguson case was a mere illusion because African American children unquestionably attended inferior schools as opposed to the white students. For instance, the schools meant for black students did not have “running water or indoor toilets and were not provided with [school] buses” (Foner 757). It was no wonder that white children recorded more successful in their studies than their African American counterparts did in the years leading to the peak of the Civil Rights Movement.
Unlike in the case of the Civil War that ended slavery through battles, the Civil Rights Movement adopted Civil Disobedience as a tactic in fighting black inferiority to end segregation and brutality against their masses. Evidently, the fact that they did not turn to violence, aided their efforts because the activists were successful by the end of the 1970s. Notably, just as the Caucasians utilized the government to meet their aims, the activists adopted similar methods as they targeted the government to push for change. In 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren declared the separate but equal doctrine that the Supreme Court had endorsed through the Plessy v. Ferguson case as a violation of “the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment”; much to the chagrin of the white supremacists (Foner 757). Earl Warren’s declaration came as part of the decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954 and for that reason, marked a momentous victory for civil rights activists.
In 1956, Martin Luther King Jr. joined the fight for desegregation with the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference through which black ministers and the civil rights activists joined forces to protest black inferiority (Foner 760). The movement’s achievements under King’s Philosophy of Civil Disobedience are the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ratified by Congress cemented the victories of the movement. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 “prohibited racial discrimination” and was the outcome of public protests against black segregation (Foner 776). For example, on August 28, 1963, the March on Washington took place with the slogan Jobs and Freedom to demand equality between the races in public and government institutions while calling for an increase in the minimum wage. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 came after law enforcers responded with violence where non-violent protestors under the leadership of King sought to complain against black disfranchisement in Selma, Alabama after only three hundred and fifty-five out of fifteen thousand blacks could vote. Hence, Voting Rights Act of 1965 “allowed federal officials to register voters” and coupled with the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the American Constitution, which “outlawed the poll tax” even poor blacks were eligible voters (Foner 780).
In conclusion, the Civil Rights Movement sought to enfranchise African Americans and end the notion of black inferiority that warranted their mistreatment at the hands of the white public. To that end, the achievements of the protests were apparent in the government’s decision to not only outlaw segregation, but allow persons of African descent into the American ballot boxes. By that logic, whites and blacks became equal before the law.
Works Cited
Foner, Eric. Give Me Liberty!: An American History. 4th. Vol. II. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. Print.
