civil right movement essay

At the midpoint of the twentieth century, African Americans once again answered the call to transform the world. The social and economic ravages of Jim Crow era racism were all-encompassing and deep-rooted. Yet like a phoenix rising from the ashes of lynch mobs, debt peonage, residential and labor discrimination, and rape, the black freedom movement raised a collective call of No More ! The maintenance of white power had been pervasive and even innovative, and hence those fighting to get out from under its veil had to be equally unrelenting and improvisational in strategies and tactics. What is normally understood as the Civil Rights movement was in fact a grand struggle for freedom extending far beyond the valiant aims of legal rights and protection. From direct-action protests and boycotts to armed self-defense, from court cases to popular culture, freedom was in the air in ways that challenged white authority and even contested established black ways of doing things in moments of crisis. Dixie and Beyond By the middle of the twentieth century, black people had long endured a physical and social landscape of white supremacy, embedded in policy, social codes, and both intimate and spectacular forms of racial restriction and violence. The social and political order of Jim Crow—the segregation of public facilities—meant schools, modes of transportation, rest rooms, and even gravesites were separate and unequal. Yet the catch-all phrase Jim Crow hardly accounts for the extralegal dictates of black professionals working cotton fields, landholders thrown off their property, black women fending off sexual assault and rape, and the constant threats of public humiliation and the lynch rope. All of these day-to-day constraints were justified by myths about inferior black character and intelligence, reproduced in films, books, radio programs, and magazine ads. Jim Crow.
  The Civil Rights Movement:1919-1960s Kenneth R. Janken Professor, Department of African and Afro-American Studies andDirector of Experiential Education, Office of Undergraduate Curricula University of North Carolina National Humanities Center Fellow ©National Humanities Center Overview When most Americans think of the Civil Rights Movement, they have in mind a span of time beginning with the 1954 Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed segregated education, or the Montgomery Bus Boycott and culminated in the late 1960s or early 1970s. The movement encompassed both ad hoc local groups and established organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Despite the fact that they were not always united around strategy and tactics and drew members from different classes and backgrounds, the movement nevertheless cohered around the aim of eliminating the system of Jim Crow segregation and the reform of some of the worst aspects of racism in American institutions and life. Much of our memory of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s is embodied in dramatic photographs, newsreels, and recorded speeches, which America encountered in daily papers and the nightly news. As the movement rolled across the nation, Americans absorbed images of hopeful, disciplined, and dedicated young people shaping their destinies. They were met with hostility, Students of Central High School in Little Rock, AR, 1957. Freedom Riders, Anniston, AL, 1961. federal ambivalence and indifference, as well as mob and police violence. African Americans fought back with direct action protests and keen political organizing, such as voter registration drives and the Mississippi.
From the earliest years of European settlement in North America, whites enslaved and oppressed black people. Although the Civil War finally brought about the abolition of slavery, a harsh system of white supremacy persisted thereafter. In the early twentieth century, African Americans in the South and in many parts of nearby border states were banned from associating with whites in a host of institutions and public accommodations—schools, hospitals, old folks’ homes, rest rooms, waiting rooms, railroad cars, hotels, restaurants, lunch counters, parks and beaches, swimming pools, libraries, concert halls, and movie theaters. Some recreational areas posted signs, “Negroes and Dogs Not Allowed.” Racial discrimination deprived Southern blacks of decent jobs and schools and of elementary rights of citizenship, including voting. White intimidation and violence, including lynching, remained an ever-present threat. Outside of the South, blacks had legal rights, but they suffered from widespread discrimination and from de facto residential and school segregation. Black and white liberal reformers struggled to ameliorate these oppressive practices, forming groups like the NAACP in 1909 and the National Urban League in 1911. South Carolina’s Septima Clark established Citizenship Schools for civil rights across the South, and North Carolina’s Ella Baker worked to improve conditions in the South. Their efforts remind us that civil rights activism has a considerable history predating the 1940s and that it featured largely unsung grassroots workers. The 1940s brought renewed efforts, however. In 1941, A. Philip Randolph threatened to stage an all-black March on Washington unless President Franklin D. Roosevelt acted to end racial discrimination in employment and racial segregation of the armed forces. Roosevelt agreed to a Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to investigate.