Civil%20Rights,%20The%20Early%20Years

1
Civil Rights, The Early Years

• Integration and Equality

2
Civil Rights The Long View

• Building blocks? Trends towards justice?
• Ideals of equality, liberty, freedom
• Ideals of integration, public space
• Nonviolence
• Consumer society
• Obstacles?
• Inequality, discrimination in U.S. society (Jim
  Crow, marriage laws, education), ideas racial
  purity lack of legal or govt. protection/aid

3
Major Goals

• Desegregation
• Schools
• Public and private accommodations
• Jobs
• Transportation
• Medical care
• Neighborhoods, suburbs
• Integration
• Voting rights
• Political representation
• Equal protection/justice

• Equal pay, opportunity
• Education
• Fair housing
• End of discrimination
• To be heard
• Respect
• Freedoms
• End racism
• Fair economy

4
Major Goals

• Integration
• Schools
• Workplaces
• Military
• Churches
• Transportation
• Public and private spaces
• Economic advancement

• Equality
• Education
• Voting rights
• Treatment in public
• Respect
• Anti-discrimination
• Equal opportunity

5
Major Goals

• Empowerment
• Integration into mainstream American life
• Desegregation
• Respect and self-respect
• End of poverty
• End of racism and other forms of discrimination
• Mainstream Civil Rights Movement was part of
  liberal movement
• Question Could liberalism solve issues of civil
  rights, poverty, and injustice?

6
Factors in Success or Failure?

• How to get support
• Followers?
• Political support?
• Message?
• Goals?
• Strength of support?
• Willingness to sacrifice?
• Public perception

• Opponents?
• Money
• Media coverage
• Tactics

7
Factors in Success or Failure

• Recruitment good slogan, appealing
• Persuasion
• Get media attention
• Inspire action/change
• Clarity of goals
• Good leadership
• Delegation of power, responsibility
• Money
• Decide on methods of action violence,
  nonviolence, etc.
• Change minds

8
Positive Climate for Change

• Liberal shift in politics and culture, optimism
  and nonconformity
• Northern liberal support for racial equality
• Jewish support b/c of immigrant, discrimination,
  and Holocaust experiences
• JFK idealism
• Cold War made it important for U.S. to prove to
  world that it was meeting its ideals civil
  rights issue gave U.S. a black eye in world
  affairs

9
Obstacles

• De jure and de facto segregation (Jim Crow) in
  south and parts of north Plessy v. Ferguson,
  1896
• Failure of Operation Dixie, effort to organize
  unions in south in late 1940s
• Solid South, conservative southern white
  Democratic Party
• Massive Resistance, White Councils formed to
  oppose desegregation in 1950s
• Fickle white supporters how to keep them on
  board

10
Background Factors

• Great Migration
• WWII ideals against Nazi racism
• Returning black WWII veterans
• Existing civil rights orgs and leaders
• Strong church community
• Growth in liberal white support
• Cold War climate had to prove superiority of
  U.S.

11
Early Victories

• Fighting for Fairness, Equality, and
  Desegregation
• Precedent pressuring government to respond
• A. Philip Randolph and black pressure politics
• 1st March on Wash., Fair Employment rules during
  WWII
• 1948 desegregation of the military
• Jackie Robinson and desegregation of baseball,
  1947
• Symbolic power of Americas pastime

12
Early Victories (continued)

• Brown v. Board I II, 1954, 1955
• Thurgood Marshall segregated schools fostered
  sense of inferiority in black students
• Left-of-center Supreme Court New Deal
  appointees, moderate Republicans (Earl Warren)
• Unanimous decision, but desegregation with all
  deliberate speed????
• Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957
• Little Rock 9 forced Ike fed. govt. to act on
  civil rights, to use federal troops to protect
  students
• Arkansas governor Orville Faubus opposed
  desegregation based on states rights rhetoric

13
Southern Manifesto, 1956

• States rights over education
• Constitution does not lay out federal
  jurisdiction over education
• Activist judiciary
• No precedent for federal action
• 90 years of patient effort by the good people of
  both races southern way of doing things
• outside meddlers
• Support for resistance

14
Southern Manifesto Document
15
Strong Black Organizations and Leadership

• Strong black leadership in churches and civil
  rights organizations were necessary to movement
• SCLC, MLK, Ella Baker, various church leaders
• CORE, James Farmer, Bayard Rustin
• SNCC, Ella Baker, Stokely Carmichael
• NAACP
• Unions, A. Philip Randolph
• Northern black politicians
• Links to northern white churches, politicians,
  Democratic Party, unions

16
Nonviolence and Black Christianity

• MLK Nonviolence as ideal and strategy
• Combination of Christian ideals and Gandhian
  nonviolence
• Christian belief of turning the other cheek, but
  used as nonviolent strategy of resistance,
  protest, and for positive change
• Nonviolence as strategy to overcome armed
  violence of southern people and officials
• Conscious targeting of segregated public spaces
  or denial of public services
• Goal of creating wider public pressure
• Media exposure TV coverage of police brutality
  against nonviolent protesters

17
Nonviolence and Black Christianity (continued)

• Different methods
• Marches
• Sit-downs, sit-ins
• Mass jailings
• Ideals political and social problems had moral
  and religious underpinnings and solutions
• Churches, SCLC, MLK human equality under God,
  righteousness of their cause inequality,
  desegregation were social and moral evils
• Possibility of equality on earth, imagery and
  language of salvation, combined with realization
  of American ideals

18
Major Battles

• Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1956 - NAACP and Rosa
  Parks targeted bus system, segregated public
  service MLK joined boycott leadership
• Student Sit-ins at lunch counters started in
  Greensboro, NC in 1960
• SNCC founded as a result - student protesters
• Freedom Rides, 1961 desegregation of interstate
  commerce, violence spurred JFK to action

19
Major Battles

• Birmingham protests, 1963, Bull Connors violence
  spurred JFK TV broadcast against racism and
  segregation
• March on Washington, 1963, MLKs I Have a Dream
  speech, garnered public support
• M on W and JFK assassination push for 1964
  Civil Rights Act, outlawing discrimination in
  employment, equal access to public accommodations
  and schools
• Freedom Summer, 1965, murders of volunteers,
  marches, voter registration in south, Selma march
• Created pressure for Voting Rights Act of 1965
  and 24th Const. Amend., both outlawed barring of
  black voters

20
Civil Rights and the Democratic Party
Sympathies and Tensions

• Case Study MS Freedom Democrats and the 1964
  Democratic Convention, Atlantic City, NJ
• Fannie Lou Hamer, sharecropper turned SNCC civil
  rights activist
• Went to SNCC meeting, tried to register to vote,
  kicked off plantation, beaten
• Became fundraiser for SNCC and ran for Congress
  in MS, black votes not counted

21

• Hamer and MS Freedom Democrats challenged
  all-white MS Democratic Party and delegates to
  1964 Dem. Convention
• Failed to get seated, but spurred Voting Rights
  Act and changes within Democratic Party

22
1960 Presidential Election

• JFK
• Blue
• 49.7
• Nixon
• Red
• 49.5

23
1964 Presidential Election

• LBJ
• Blue
• 61.1
• Goldwater
• Red
• 38.5

24
Presidential Civil Rights

• Pushed by civil rights movement
• Liberals attempted to live up to ideals (Truman,
  JFK, LBJ)
• Eisenhower, detached, but was pushed to act at
  Little Rock
• JFK, overly cautious, was pushed to protect
  protesters optimism became spur to action
• LBJ, believed in racial equality
• Pushed for Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting
  Rights Act (1965)

25
LBJs Great Society War on Poverty

• Attention to the other America those who had
• not been able to share in postwar affluence
  poor,
• working poor, African Am., Appalachia
• LBJ used JFK assassination as reason to pursue
  social goals, continue JFKs legacy
• Great Society and War on Poverty set of social
  programs to complete the New Deal
• Empowerment Comm. Action Programs, Headstart,
  Legal Services, VISTA
• Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security expanded
  (welfare), public housing
• Affirmative Action rules, 1968
• Community Action Programs used by blacks to fight
  for political and social problems, not always the
  form or kind liberal whites wanted

26
Conclusions

• Successes framing of civil rights as moral,
  ethical problem, full attainment of American
  ideals
• Attainment of legal desegregation and voting
  rights
• Pushed Democratic Party to become party of civil
  rights, justice, and equality
• Decrease in poverty rate, 1960-1970, 23 to 15
• Programs Medicaid, Medicare, Headstart,
  Affirm.A.
• Continuing Issues
• Would de facto desegregation and civil rights be
  attained in north or south?
• Would Democratic coalition remain intact?
• What impact would Vietnam War have on civil
  rights and American politics?

27
Civil Rights, Further Issues

• Black Power, Stokely Carmichael
• Black unification to achieve civil rights why?
• Questioned integration
• Questioned nonviolence
• Take a stand, fight back

28
Civil Rights, Further Issues

• Malcolm X

29
The New Left Port Huron Statement, 1962
30
Jerry Rubin, Self-Portrait of a Child of
Amerika, 1970

• I am a child of Amerika.
•  
• If I'm ever sent to Death Row for my
  revolutionary "crimes," I'll order
•  
• as my last meal a hamburger, french fries and a
  Coke. I dig big cities.
•  
• I love to read the sports pages and gossip
  columns, listen to the radio
•  
• and watch color TV.
•  
• I dig department stores, huge supermarkets and
  airports. I feel secure (though not necessarily
  hungry) when I see Howard Johnson's on the
  expressway.
•  
• I groove on Hollywood movies-even bad ones.
•  
• I speak only one language-English.

31

• I love rock 'n' roll.
•  
• I collected baseball players' cards when I was a
  kid and wanted to play second base for the
  Cincinnati Reds, my home team.
•  
• I got a car when I was sixteen after flunking my
  first driver's test and crying for a week waiting
  to take it a second time.
•  
• I went to the kind of high school where you had
  to pass a test to get
•  
• in.
•  
• I graduated in the bottom half of the class.
•  
• My classmates voted me the "busiest" senior in
  the school.
•  
• I had short, short, short hair.
•  
• I dug Catcher in the Rye.
•  
• I didn't have pimples.

32

• I became an ace young reporter for the
  Cincinnati Post and
• Times-Star. "Son," the managing editor said to
  me, "someday
• you're going to be a helluva reporter, maybe the
  greatest
• reporter this city's ever seen."
•  
• I loved Adlai Stevenson.
•  
• My father drove a truck delivering bread and
  later became an organizer in the Bakery Drivers'
  Union. He dug Jimmy Hoffa (so do I). He died of
  heart failure at fifty-two.
•  
• My mother had a college degree and played the
  piano. She died of cancer at the age of
  fifty-one.
•  
• I took care of my brother, Gil, from the time he
  was thirteen.
•  
• I dodged the draft.
•  
• I went to Oberlin College for a year, graduated
  from the University of Cincinnati, spent 1 1/2
  years in Israel and started graduate school at
  Berkeley.

33

• I dropped out.
•  
• I dropped out of the White Race and the Amerikan
  nation.
•  
• I dig being free.
•  
• I like getting high.
•  
• I don't own a suit or tie.
•  
• I live for the revolution.
•  
• I'm a yippie!
•  
• I am an orphan of Amerika.

34
Common Enemies or Targets?
35
Major Goals

• Empowerment
• Integration into mainstream American life
• Desegregation
• Respect and self-respect
• End of poverty
• End of racism and other forms of discrimination
• Mainstream Civil Rights Movement was part of
  liberal movement
• Question Could liberalism solve issues of civil
  rights, poverty, and injustice?

36
Factors in Success or Failure

• Recruitment good slogan, appealing
• Persuasion
• Get media attention
• Inspire action/change
• Clarity of goals
• Good leadership
• Delegation of power, responsibility
• Money
• Decide on methods of action violence,
  nonviolence, etc.
• Change minds