The Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968The fight for civil rights (legal rights guaranteed to citizens by the Constitution) for blacks and other minorities dates back to the colonial era when religious minorities fought for toleration. The challenge on behalf of African Americans dates to the days of slavery. But the civil rights movement is a specific event, with a beginning and an end, and with a specific cast of characters that dates from the day Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in 1955 to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1968.

The grassroots civil rights movement began a year after the NAACP’s victory in Brown (when the Supreme Court reversed the Plessy doctrine of “separate but equal”). It began in Montgomery, Alabama. On buses, blacks had to ride at the back; if there were no seats in the black section, then they had to stand; if the white section filled up, then they had to give up their seats to whites. In December 1955, a forty-two year old seamstress trained in the tactic of civil disobedience, Rosa Parks, fought back. Tired from a day’s work, she sat down at the front of the black section of a bus. The white section filled up and when a white man told her to give up her seat, Parks refused. She was arrested and spent the night in jail. When her community heard about the incident, it began a boycott of the bus company. Blacks refused to ride the buses, instead walking or car-pooling to work. The boycott lasted for more than a year, ending when the Supreme Court ruled segregation on buses unconstitutional.

The key organizations of the Civil Rights Movement were:

• National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

• National Urban League• Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)• Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (“Snick”)• Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)• Nation of Islam• Black Panther Party

Not all groups agreed with each other on tactics or strategy. For example, the Nation of Islam advocated self-segregation and violent retaliation. These divisions proved useful to the moderate organizations, such as the SCLC, because they could say that if government did not meet their demands, then African Americans might move to the more radical organizations. Ironically, even though government did meet those demands, the “Movement” still became more radical and violent over time.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott also brought forward a unifying leader of the civil rights movement.

The boycott showed the importance of organizing coherent protests. Indeed, the real story of the “Movement” involves not spontaneous responses to discrimination by individuals, but rather it demonstrates the importance of organizations, training, planning, and adapting.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: From Atlanta, Dr. King was the intelligent, articulate, and charismatic face of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a coalition of southern clergymen.

He pursued a philosophy called “militant non-violent direct action.” It called for blacks to protest segregation by purposely putting themselves in harm’s way to provoke a violent response by police or other whites, and then would not fight back. They focused attention on discrimination and won the sympathy of moderate whites throughout the country.

The SCLC’s most effective use of nonviolent direct action occurred in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. After a week of protest little resulted, except that King was put in jail and wrote his famous plea for justice, “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” The Letter was a response to a New York Times editorial advertisement in which several nationally-renowned clergymen called on King to wait and let racial tensions settle for a time. King rejected the suggestion, declaring: “This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see . . . that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”

In the second week of protest, the SCLC recruited school children to draw attention to discrimination. Thousands of children marched and were arrested—at one point some 700 children were in jail. When they met to march one day in early May, the Birmingham police tried to break-up the demonstration. Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor ordered the police to use dogs and the fire department to use fire hoses to stop the protest. Graphic newsfilm shows the viciousness of the attacks—little children being pushed across Kelly Ingram Park by the force of water sprayed by fire hoses. On the evening newscasts, viewers across the country and around the world saw how fierce massive resistance could become. It was a terrible day, but a major victory for the tactic of nonviolence.

Many organizations joined the NAACP and the SCLC in the fight for justice. Young blacks formed the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), pronounced, “snick). SNCC adopted tactics used by NAACP youth members. It would hold what was called a “sit-in.” Black students would enter a restaurant and sit down at the counter and wait for service. They would remain there, taking abuse from whites and not being served, until the police carted them off to jail. The famous early lunch counter sit-in occurred in 1960 at the Woolworth’s in Greensboro and was led by students from UNC A&T.

SNCC’s most prominent action, Freedom Summer, occurred in 1964. Hundreds of students, led by Robert Moses, spent the summer in Mississippi registering blacks to vote. They formed a political party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, to challenge the white-controlled Democratic Party. And brought national attention to the voting rights issue. Freedom Summer also saw one of the worst tragedies of the movement. Three SNCC activists, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, disappeared while driving in eastern Mississippi. Searchers discovered the bodies of the young men buried in a levee. The experience of Freedom Summer led many of SNCC activists to reject integration and kick whites out of the organization.

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), created a different tactic. CORE’s white and black student members held a “Freedom Ride:” a bus trip through the South to integrate bus stations in 1961. The trip caused tension throughout the South, but it flared into violence in Anniston, Alabama, and led to a near riot when the demonstrators got to Montgomery.

With the assistance of the NAACP, James Meredith led a protest to integrate the University of Mississippi. An Air-Force veteran and student at Jackson State College, Meredith applied for admission to the all-white university in 1961 and was denied. Meredith sued, with help from the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, led by Thurgood Marshall. In the fall of 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Ole Miss to admit Meredith. When he tried to enter the school on September 30th, however, he was blocked by student protests. President John Kennedy sent troops to Ole Miss and the next day Meredith, escorted by federal agents, attended his first class.

Despite occasional disagreement and jealousy among the civil rights groups, they came together for a day in 1963. On August 28, 1963, all the leading groups (except the Black Muslims and their main spokesman Malcolm X) led a March on Washington to protest discrimination and force the Kennedy administration to enact a meaningful civil rights law. More than 250,000 people, black and white, joined in the event on the brutally hot summer day.

They marched from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial (recognizing the importance of the Great Emancipator) where they gathered and listened to speeches, including the most famous: Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream.” The march marked the high point of the civil rights movement, both in its unity and its effectiveness.

Two weeks later, however, the movement would fracture and begin its slow decline into factionalism, when four young girls were killed and several others were injured in the Klan bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

Cynthia Wesley Addie Mae Collins Carole Robertson Denise McNair

Bloody Sunday, Selma, Alabama: On March 7, 1965, SCLC and SNCC marchers began a march from Selma to the state capital, Montgomery, demanding voting rights and to ask Governor George Wallace to protect blacks trying to register to vote. As John Lewis, Hosea Williams, and the nearly 600 marchers crossed the Edmund Pettis Bridge, Dallas County police and Alabama State Troopers blocked their way and told them to disperse. The non-violent marchers declared their right to march and the police attacked them. Using tear gas, whips, and clubs, the police wailed on the marchers for several minutes.

The shocking police attack was filmed and played-back on news programs that evening and for the next several weeks. Public opinion was outraged. A second march, with Martin Luther King in attendance was planned, but stopped because of the murder of the Rev. James Reeb, a white minister who had joined the march, causing further outrage. A third march began the following week, reaching Montgomery on the 24th. But it too was not without violence. Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit woman who had joined the march after seeing the events of “Bloody Sunday,” was run off the road and murdered by Klansmen while taxiing marchers back to Selma.

By the summer of 1965, Congress had passed Lyndon Johnson’s proposal for a Voting Rights Act.

The civil rights movement moved north after its victories of 1964 and 1965

In 1964 and 1965 the civil rights movement bore fruit. Partly in response to the murder of John F. Kennedy and because of the leadership of Lyndon Johnson, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (forbidding discrimination on account of race in public facilities, among other things) and Voting Rights Act of 1965 (guaranteeing minorities full right of participation in elections: removing literacy tests and other hurdles).

Father James Groppi and the NAACP Youth Council

By 1965, the mood of many blacks had changed. Many were tired of the battles and the struggle and of the violence that they were having to put up with. More radical voices started to yell out to meet white violence with black violence. Just days after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, a minor incident in Watts, the black section of Los Angeles, blew up into a major riot. African Americans rioted in the streets, burning cars, smashing windows and looting stores, and shooting at police and firemen. The Watts riot marked the beginning of the decline of the civil rights movement. It was followed by riots in the “long, hot summers” of 1966 and 1967. Race riots in Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit in 1967 destroyed millions of dollars of property, left many dead and most clearly expressed the mood that blacks were tired of waiting for their rights, tired of police brutality, tired of not having a job and not being able to get one.

New leaders emerged, calling for Black Power to fight white power. A militant organization called the Black Panthers took up weapons (machine guns) to threaten the overthrow of the white establishment.

Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)

Amid the urban racial violence and tension, Congress enacted the Housing and Urban Development Act to provide nearly $3 billions for urban renewal and public housing. In 1966, a new cabinet-level agency was created, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Everyone new it was time to appoint an African-American to cabinet; so President Johnson named a longtime-housing advocate to the post. Robert C. Weaver, co-founder of the informal Roosevelt Black Cabinet, became the first African American in the federal cabinet.

1968, a crucial year for many reasons, marked the final gasp of the civil rights movement and the tactic of nonviolence. Blacks continued to demonstrate, this time in northern cities and this time to end housing discrimination. They won the last piece of major civil rights legislation: Civil Rights Act of 1968 (better known as the Fair Housing Act), which prohibited discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. But on April 4th, the movement lost its great leader. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated by a white Alabamian, James Earl Ray, in Memphis. Upon King’s death, blacks throughout the country took to the streets in riot. Washington, DC, saw some of the worst of it.

Some of King’s colleagues tried to continue the movement, notably with the Poor People’s March in 1968, but it had lost its focus and its force. The Supreme Court limited the scope of laws ordering busing to integrate public schools. In 1978, the policy of government, business, and educational institutions giving special preference to minority applicants to redress past discrimination—affirmative action—came under fire. The court ruled that schools could not use quotas to ensure racial representation in student bodies in the Bakke case. But the Court upheld the idea of affirmative action for purposes of creating diversity in the University of Michigan cases in 2003.

In the end, the civil rights movement can be viewed as a major success if we look at its initial strategy: to end segregation by law (de jure segregation) in the South and elsewhere and to give blacks the same political rights as whites. If we look at it as a movement to improve race relations throughout the U.S. and to create a society wherein a person is judged by the “content of his character” rather than the color of his skin (as Martin Luther King, Jr., declared), then the movement was a mixed success. Things improved for blacks (politically and economically) but whites resisted social equality. Rather than live peaceably with blacks many whites fled increasingly black cities to live in “lily-white” suburbs. The residential segregation that resulted made integration of schools more difficult and kept the races apart. The race war of the late 1960s became an uncomfortable truce that flares into conflict from time to time—whether in the example of the O.J. Simpson trials, the Rodney King incident, or the Cincinnati riots of 2001. The “color line” has been America’s great problem, throughout its history, and it is still not solved.