Chapter 20 Section 3

1
Chapter 20Section 3

• Voices of
• Dissent

2
Brown vs. Board of Education

• In 1896 the Supreme Court established the
  legality of separate but equal schools.
• For a long time the NAACP campaigned against
  segregation in public education by trying to
  prove the inferiority of the African American
  schools
• One legal case the NAACP supported was the case
  of Brown vs. Board of Education which involved
  Linda Brown, an African American student from
  Topeka Kansas
• The all white school was close to her house, but
  she had to walk several miles which included
  crossing a dangerous railroad track to get to her
  school
• NAACP lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, argued on
  Browns behalf
• The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Brown vs.
  Board of Education that racial segregation in
  public schools was unconstitutional

3
(No Transcript)
4
Showdown in Little Rock

• Unsurprisingly, desegregation in the South moved
  slowly
• The Little Rock school board was the first to
  announce that it was going to comply with the
  courts decision and desegregate
• The day that Central High School was supposed to
  be integrated, Governor Orval Faubus ordered the
  Arkansas National Guard to surround the school
• Faubus claimed that it was to protect the school
  from protesters. What he actually ended up doing
  was exaggerated the danger and spread panic
• One of the nine black students, Elizabeth Eckford
  did not get the message that the students were
  advised not to go to school alone
• When she attempted to enter the school, an angry
  mob and the National Guardsmen stopped her
• For nearly three weeks the Little Rock Nine were
  prevented from entering the school

5

• When I got in front of the schoolI didnt know
  what to doJust then the guards let some white
  students throughI walked up to the guard who had
  let them inWhen I tried to squeeze past him, he
  raised hi bayonet, and then the other guard moved
  inSomebody in the crowd started yelling,
  Lynch her! Lynch her!. - -Elizabeth Eckford

6
Continued.

• The students continued to be harassed.
• Minnie-jean Brown was suspended for dumping a
  food tray on a boy who made a racist comment to
  her. She was later permanently expelled from
  school for verbally defending herself from racist
  and vulgar comments
• Despite such pressures the other students stayed
  in school
• But Governor Faubus was still looking for ways to
  avoid integration
• He shut down the Little Rock public school system
  in 1958 and 1959 and opened a private school for
  white kids only
• African Americans and poor white kids had no
  school to attend anymore
• In 1959 the schools were court ordered to reopen.
  

7
(No Transcript)
8
The Montgomery Bus Boycott

• On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, an African
  American seamstress was arrested for not giving
  up her seat on the bus to a white passenger
• In protest, 50,000 African Americans organized a
  boycott of the bus system in Montgomery
• The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA)
  persuaded the community to continue the boycott
  while the NAACP and Ms. Parks made their court
  appeals
• The MIA chose 26 year old Baptist minister
  Martin Luther King Jr. as its spokesperson
• The boycott went on for months. White protesters
  tried through intimidation and outright violence
  to end it.
• The houses of King and other MIA leaders were
  bombed
• King, having studied the nonviolent tactics on
  Mohandas Gandhi, urged the African American
  community not to respond to violence with violence

9
Dr. Kings house after it was bombed
10
The Boycott Succeeds

• Finally the nonviolent protests and boycotts
  worked and in November 1956 the Supreme Court
  declared Alabama segregation laws
  unconstitutional
• By the end of that year Montgomery had a new
  desegregated bus system and the civil rights
  movement had a new leader, Martin Luther King
• Congress then passed the Civil Rights Act of
  1957. This act made it a federal crime to prevent
  qualified persons from voting
• The act also established the Civil Rights
  Commission to investigate violations of the law
• A follow-up law in 1960 increased the courts
  power to protect the voting rights of African
  Americans

11

• Just because segregation was deemed
  unconstitutional does not mean things got any
  better right away. When these three college
  students sat down at a recently desegregated café
  they were accosted A huge mob gathered, with
  open police support while the three of us sat
  there for three hours. I was attacked with fists,
  brass knuckles and the broken portions of glass
  sugar containers, and was burned with cigarettes.
  I'm covered with blood and we were all covered by
  salt, sugar, mustard, and various other things

12

• But most of the time, rather than have to serve
  African Americans, business owners would just
  shut down their establishments
• This café went so far as to remove all of their
  seats from the front counter so that African
  Americans could not sit at the counter.

13
The Hispanic Experience

• Felix Longoria was a Mexican American soldier
  that gave his life for his country in WWII
• In 1948 his body was returned to the U.S. to be
  laid to rest in Three Rivers, Texas
• The towns only funeral home refused to allow
  Longorias family to use the chapel because the
  soldier was a Mexican American
• When the media publicized this many were outraged
  at such treatment of a veteran
• Texas Senator Lyndon B. Johnson arranged for
  Longoria to be buried with full military honors
  at Arlington National Cemetery
• This incident led to the formation of the
  American GI Forum, a group dedicated to
  protecting the rights of Hispanic veterans
• The GI Forum received aid from the League of
  United Latin American Citizens, which was much
  like the NAACP for Hispanics

14
Relocation of American Indians

• In 1953 the U.S. government adopted a policy of
  termination
• Termination was a plan to eradicate the Native
  American reservation system tribe-by-tribe, and
  to cut the federal funding for American Indians
• In backing of the termination policy the
  Eisenhower administration came up with the
  Relocation Act to encourage American Indians to
  relocate to urban areas and abandon their
  reservations
• Considering this policy an attempt to wipe out
  American Indian communities, many Native American
  groups led protests and presses lawsuits against
  the termination policy
• By 1958, the Eisenhower administration had
  abandoned the termination policy and stated that
  it would no longer support legislation to
  terminate tribes without their consent.

15
Questioning Conformity

• Many scholars argued that underneath its façade
  of conformity, prosperity and peace, there were
  some huge underlying problems that the U.S.
  needed to face.
• African American writer, Ralph Ellison published
  Invisible Man in 1952. In the novel a black man
  searches for his place in a world that is both
  hostile and indifferent toward him
• Economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote to warn
  the privileged in society that they were ignoring
  pressing social issues in their pursuit of
  material possessions
• The beats were a small group of writers that the
  lifestyles of the middle class as well. Beats
  wrote as they lived, on the spur of the moment.
• On of the best known beat works was On the Road
  written by Jack Kerouac The novel rejoices the
  search for ones OWN identity and at the
  refutation of precaution and consistency (Mrs.
  Epley recommends this novel)

16

• And my problem was that I always tried to go in
  everyones way but my own. I have also been
  called one thing and then another while no one
  really wished to hear what I called myself. So
  after years of trying to adopt the opinions of
  others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible
  man.

Ralph Ellison
17
Jack Kerouac
18
Urban Communities

• By 1960 more than 20 million city dwellers were
  living in poverty
• As more and more middle class white people were
  moving into the suburbs, poor inner city
  communities became comprised mostly of minorities
  
• Partly due to discriminatory real estate
  practices preventing minorities from getting
  decent housing
• Minorities were usually confined to crowded
  tenements and old housing in the poorest
  neighborhoods
• To improve the tenement housing the federal
  government proposed Urban Renewal programs to
  replace old run down tenements with new ones
• The new high rise buildings had a cold and
  impersonal aura and unfortunately most became run
  down themselves and were plagued by the same
  problems as before

19
(No Transcript)
20
(No Transcript)
21

• The following letters are from a freedom school
  in Seattle Washington. After the Supreme Court
  ruled that segregated schools were
  unconstitutional some schools still refused to
  integrate. In response the schools faculty,
  parents and students boycotted the schools. These
  are a few copies of the ACTUAL letters that were
  sent to the Board of Education by students that
  participated in the boycotts

22
(No Transcript)
23
(No Transcript)
24
(No Transcript)