Civil Rights movement in the 1950s

The Event National movement led by African Americans to extend full rights to all citizens, regardless of race or creed

Date Mid-1950’s to the late 1960’s

The Civil Rights movement coalesced around several key events during the 1950’s to move Congress to pass the first new federal civil rights legislation and launch an era of unparalleled social change.

Although it is difficult to assign a precise time to the beginning of the modern Civil Rights movement, the 1950’s can be identified as the decade when efforts to achieve equal rights for minorities in the United States became a mass movement. At this time, several historical trends promoting such a movement came together. America’s largest minority group, African Americans, lived mainly in rural areas at the beginning of the twentieth century. By the 1950’s, many were living in cities, where they had sufficient concentration and organization to begin a widespread political struggle.

Groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had developed the skills and strategies to challenge legal discrimination. The American fight against Nazi Germany in World War II had heightened awareness of the embarrassing gap between democratic American ideals and racially oppressive American realities. African Americans who served in the military during World War II and the Korean War were frustrated by the failure of the nation they served to recognize their full rights of citizenship. Moreover, during the 1950’s, television entered homes throughout the United States, bringing scenes from Little Rock, Arkansas, Montgomery, Alabama, and other civil rights flashpoints to all Americans.

Historical Origins

With the end of the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865), Americans were faced with the question of the status of newly freed slaves. In order to protect these former slaves from those who had claimed to own them, the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 over the veto of President Andrew Johnson. This key piece of legislation guaranteed equal protection of the law in contracts, lawsuits, trials, property transactions, and purchases, and it prescribed penalties for interfering with this equal protection.

The U.S. Congress passed two more pieces of Civil Rights legislation during the 1870’s: the Civil Rights Act of 1871 (the Enforcement Act), which was intended to overturn laws preventing black Americans from voting, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which sought to guarantee freedom of access to public places and to give jurisdiction over cases of violation of this freedom to the federal courts. However, in 1877, the troops who could protect black citizens in the South were withdrawn, and in 1883, the Supreme Court declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional.

Throughout the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, state and local governments acted to limit the freedoms of African Americans and members of other minority groups. Segregation, the forced separation of minority groups from the institutions of the majority population, became the law of the land in many places. By 1950, the following states had laws requiring racial segregation: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. Arizona, Kansas, New Mexico, and Wyoming did not require segregation, but these four states allowed local governments to pass ordinances for segregation.

Key Organizations

In the absence of governmental assistance, African Americans began to develop institutions of their own to protect their interests. African American church congregations emerged in the United States during the years immediately following slavery and served as centers of community life. During the 1950’s, these organizations would serve as bases for action in events such as the Montgomery bus boycott, which followed Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her bus seat to a white rider. Perhaps the most important explicitly political organization of black Americans has been the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909 as a response to lynchings. Through its Legal Defense Fund, the NAACP would win critical civil rights victories in the courts during the 1950’s.

At the same time that the NAACP came into existence, a white philanthropist, Ruth Standish Baldwin, and a black social worker and scholar, George Edmund Haynes , founded the Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes in New York to work to lessen the discrimination and other problems faced by African Americans moving to northern cities. Merging with several other organizations over the following decade, in 1920 the organization became known as the National Urban League (NUL). African Americans also formed labor unions in the years before 1950. One of the most active and effective of the black labor organizations was the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters , organized and led by A. Philip Randolph .

Civil Rights During the 1940’s

In September of 1940, after the military draft had been established, Walter White of the NAACP and T. Arnold Hill of the NUL met President Franklin D. Roosevelt to discuss racial discrimination in the armed forces and in the defense industries. When Roosevelt took no action, Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters began to organize a black protest march on Washington, D.C. Under this pressure, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 , creating the wartime Fair Employment Practices Committee. Although this order had little practical effect, African Americans began to feel that the time for equal citizenship was coming, and membership in the NAACP increased rapidly during and immediately after World War II.

In 1948 President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981 , which ordered the racial integration of America’s armed forces. The Korean War, during 1950-1953, saw the first racially integrated combat units since the Civil War, demonstrating that racially integrated institutions were possible for Americans.

During the late 1940’s, under the leadership of Legal Defense Fund director Thurgood Marshall , the NAACP began a struggle to end the segregation of American educational institutions. At first, legal efforts concentrated on graduate and professional schools, on the grounds that exclusion from these whites-only institutions usually left aspiring black students without any options and therefore such exclusion could not claim the justification of “separate but equal.”

Civil Rights and the Schools

In 1950, the new decade saw one of the first major legal victories for school desegregation. In that year, in the case Sweatt v. Painter, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state of Texas could not deny a black man entry to the University of Texas law school by quickly setting up a separate law school for African Americans. As NAACP legal efforts turned from graduate and professional schools to elementary and secondary schools, the Sweatt decision served as a precedent recognizing that separate schools were often unequal schools.

In several cases around the nation, the NAACP backed African American families who were suing school districts because state laws had forbidden their children to attend schools with whites, even when the white schools were closer and had better resources than black schools. The case Oliver Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas went to the Supreme Court to test the legality of school segregation in all parts of the United States. The Brown case began in 1951 when the daughter of a minister in Kansas had been refused entry to a local white school.

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court, under the leadership of Chief JusticeEarl Warren, ruled that separate schools were inherently unequal and that separate schools were therefore illegal. This ruling is generally known as Brown I. A year later, on May 31, 1955, the court issued a second ruling on the case, known as Brown II. This ruling ordered local school boards to desegregate “with all deliberate speed,” and it handed over direction of school desegregation to lower federal courts.

Opposition to School Desegregation

The Brown decision made the segregation of schools illegal, but it also met with opposition. In 1956, one hundred southern senators and congressmen signed what became known as the Southern Manifesto, declaring that the Brown decision itself had been illegal. Little Rock, Arkansas, became the site of the most famous struggle to enforce the Brown decision.

Initially, it appeared as if Little Rock schools would quietly follow the orders of the Supreme Court. The school superintendent of Little Rock, Virgil Blossom, had devised a plan to first integrate the city’s Central High School in 1957 and then gradually integrate lower grades. By concentrating on bringing good students from middle-class African American families into white schools, he hoped to avoid conflict.

At the time, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus was searching for political support to win a third term in office. He decided that he could appeal to whites eager to preserve segregation. Governor Faubus declared that he would not be able to maintain order if Central High School were integrated, and he ordered the National Guard to protect the area around the school. His stand drew public attention to the situation and attracted white segregationist mobs into the streets. The NAACP, under the local leadership of Daisy Bates, organized the African American students slated to enroll in Central High to arrive in a group. They were met by National Guardsmen, who turned the students away with bayonets. One of the students arrived after the others and was confronted by screaming segregationists. Television, which occupied a central place in most American homes by 1957, broadcast the scenes from Little Rock around the nation.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower was forced to send in the 101st Airborne Division to enable the nine African American students to attend Central High. After that, Eisenhower placed the National Guard under federal control and ordered it to see that Little Rock conformed to national law. Eight of the nine students remained at Central High until they graduated.

Other places in the South showed resistance to school desegregation. In New Orleans, Louisiana, where a federal judge had ordered white schools to admit African American pupils in 1956, the school board president conducted an opinion poll of parents. In this poll, 82 percent of white parents said that they would rather shut down the public schools than accept any integration. The Virginia Assembly passed legislation authorizing the closing of any school that allowed blacks and whites to attend together. In 1959, the Prince Edward County school board in Virginia did shut down the entire school system for five years rather than allow black children to sit next to white children in the same classrooms.

Opposition in Mississippi

Some of the most determined opposition to the extension of civil rights took place in the state of Mississippi. After the Brown decision, white Mississippians formed White Citizens’ Councils to oppose school desegregation. These councils organized economic pressure against African Americans known to work for desegregation, refusing credit and taking away jobs from those who asserted their rights.

The struggle involved violence as well as economic pressure. In the spring of 1955, the Reverend George Lee, an NAACP official involved in trying to register African American voters, died from gunshot wounds in Belzoni, Mississippi. A few weeks later, Lamar Smith, an African American who had registered to vote and was encouraging other voters, was shot and killed in the middle of the day in front of the Brookhaven, Mississippi, courthouse.

The most widely reported act of violence in Mississippi was not committed against a potential voter, but against a fourteen-year-old boy. Emmett Till had come from Chicago to visit his mother’s family in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. After he reportedly flirted with a white woman, Till was beaten, shot, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River. The trial of the accused murderers drew attention to the absence of even the most basic civil rights for African Americans in Mississippi.

Resistance in Montgomery

While the legal struggle for school desegregation proceeded, a different kind of struggle began in Montgomery, Alabama. Segregation laws required separate public facilities for African Americans and whites. On public transportation, such as buses and streetcars, African Americans frequently had to sit in the rear, with front seats reserved for whites. In Montgomery, according to law there had to be a row of vacant seats on buses between white and African American riders.

On December 1, 1955, Montgomery seamstress Rosa Parks, who had earlier served as secretary for the local chapter of the NAACP, refused to give up her seat so that the vacant row could be maintained after a white man sat down. Parks was arrested. After she was bailed out of jail, black leaders of Montgomery began to organize a boycott to force the bus system to drop its discriminatory practices. E. D. Nixon , head of the Alabama NAACP, contacted two ministers, the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy and the Reverend Martin Luther King , Jr., and a leader of local African American women’s groups, Jo Ann Robinson. The leadership created the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), which was directed by the young King, then only twenty-six years old. The MIA managed the boycott and arranged carpools to enable African American citizens to avoid riding the buses.

The boycott lasted for a year. Dr. King received national attention for his calls for nonviolent resistance, which became the primary strategy of the Civil Rights movement in the years that followed. As the Montgomery bus company lost money, the police and local government began to harass those taking part in the boycott. Police arrested some of the drivers and arrested Dr. King himself, supposedly for speeding. Dozens of members of the MIA faced legal charges of conspiracy. The houses of Dr. King and other leaders were dynamited. Once again, events reached the American public through the mass media.

In February of 1956, five African American women sued to overturn the law requiring separate seating. By November, the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. A month later, the Court ordered that Montgomery end segregation on its buses.

The Civil Rights Act of 1957

The growth of civil rights activities throughout the nation pushed the United States government to act. The federal government had not enacted any major civil rights laws since 1875. From 1945 to 1957, however, bills for a new civil rights act came before Congress every year.

In many parts of the United States, particularly in the South, African Americans had been systematically denied the right to vote during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their votes were taken away either by outright threats of violence or by maneuvers such as competency tests administered by white voter registrars. As the Little Rock school crisis brought national attention to civil rights, Congress considered a new law intended to protect voting rights.

Opposition to a new act was strong in the South. However, Texas senator Lyndon Baines Johnson , the Senate majority leader, put his support behind the bill. A skillful politician, Johnson managed to move the act through Congress. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 established the Civil Rights Commission, which would investigate complaints of civil rights violations. Interference with the right to vote was made a federal crime, to be acted on by the attorney general. It also gave the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department the higher status of a division and placed an assistant attorney general at the head of this new division.

Although African Americans in some southern states continued to be denied the right to vote after 1957, the new act was an important legal step. It set the stage for additional Civil Rights Acts in 1960, 1964, 1968, and 1991, as well as for the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 and 1982. By the end of the twentieth century, there were no known locations that still denied African Americans the right to vote, and the federal government gave extensive protections to the legal and political rights of minority group members.

Impact

Civil rights activities during the 1950’s began a long struggle to achieve equal rights for all groups of people in the United States. These activities met with opposition from many white Americans, but many other white Americans began to recognize the injustice of racial inequality. After the events in Little Rock and in Montgomery, the nation entered a decade of protest, legislation, and debate concerning the obligations of government to protect the rights of minority citizens.

Subsequent Events

Throughout the 1960’s both the quest for civil rights and the concept of civil rights became wider in scope as activists moved into many arenas of effort. In 1960, protesters, primarily students, participated in widespread sit-in demonstrations against segregated lunch counters and other segregated public facilities. The sit-in movement was quickly taken up in other cities. In a series of cases, beginning with 1961’s Garner v. Louisiana, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of protesters to use restaurants and other public facilities.

The freedom rides grew out of the sit-in movement and had the same goal of desegregating facilities. These began in 1961, when the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sponsored a bus tour to desegregate terminals. Others began freedom rides on the railroads. These activities pushed the Interstate Commerce Commission, in September of 1961, to prohibit discrimination in interstate buses and bus facilities.

Voter registration became a major part of the Civil Rights movement in 1961 and 1962. The movement reached its highest point in the August, 1963, March on Washington. More than 200,000 marchers from all over the country gathered in the capital to demand immediate equality in political rights, employment, and other areas.

Bibliography

Abernathy, Donzaleigh. Partners to History: Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph David Abernathy, and the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Crown, 2003. An insider’s view of the Civil Rights movement, written by the daughter of a prominent activist. Text is supported with more than 350 candid and news photos of notable activists and events.

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988. One of the best-known histories of the Civil Rights movement, told with a focus on the central figure of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Brinkley, Douglas. Rosa Parks. New York: Viking, 2000. A biography of the woman who touched off the Montgomery bus boycott, written by a prominent historian.

"Civil Rights Movement." History, 18 Jan. 2022, www.history.com/topics/black-history/civil-rights-movement. Accessed 18 Mar. 2022.

"The Civil Rights Movement and the Second Reconstruction, 1945–1968." History, Art & Archives, US House of Representatives, history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/BAIC/Historical-Essays/Keeping-the-Faith/Civil-Rights-Movement/. Accessed 18 Mar. 2022.

Kasher, Steven. The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History, 1954-1968. New York: Abbeville Press, 2000. Provides photographs, with text, of the main events of the Civil Rights movement during the 1950’s and 1960’s.

Levy, Peter B. The Civil Rights Movement. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Six essays examine such topics as the role of women in the movement and the lasting effects of the events during the 1950’s and 1960’s. Also includes twenty biographies of prominent activists, photographs, and a time line.

Rowan, Carl T. Dream Makers, Dream Breakers: The World of Justice Thurgood Marshall. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993. A well-known African American newspaper columnist tells the story of Thurgood Marshall, main attorney for the NAACP during the Brown case and later Supreme Court Justice.

Severino, Joe. "In 2021, the Fight for Civil Rights Looks Different, Charleston Pastor Says." Charleston Gazette, 2 Feb. 2021, www.wvgazettemail.com/news/kanawha‗valley/in-2021-the-fight-for-civil-rights-looks-different-charleston-pastor-says/article‗eab84e29-c1b0-5f74-b66f-0bb3400d00b6.html. Accessed 18 Mar. 2022.