From 1954 until 1968, the United States saw the civil rights movement[b], a nonviolent social movement and campaign, to end legislated racial discrimination, racial segregation, and racial disenfranchisement. Although the movement gained its biggest legislative successes in the 1960s following years of direct actions and grassroots protests, it began in the late 19th century during the Reconstruction era and had its modern roots in the 1940s [1].
The social movement’s significant campaigns of civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance led to the eventual passage of new federal legislation protecting everyone’s civil rights.
All African Americans, the majority of whom had just recently been slaves, were granted liberation and constitutional rights of citizenship by the Reconstruction Amendments to the United States Constitution following the American Civil War and the ensuing abolition of slavery in the 1860s.
African-American men were allowed to vote and hold political office for a brief while, but as time went on, they lost more and more civil rights, frequently as a result of the discriminatory Jim Crow laws, and African Americans in the South faced ongoing violence and discrimination from white supremacists. African Americans made a number of attempts throughout the course of the next century to protect their legal and civil rights, including the civil rights movements of 1865–1896 and 1896–1954.
The movement was typified by peaceful large-scale demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience in the wake of well reported incidents like Emmett Till’s lynching. These included “sit-ins” in Greensboro and Nashville, a series of protests during the Birmingham campaign, a march from Selma to Montgomery, and boycotts like the one against the Montgomery bus.[2–3]
Following a legal campaign spearheaded by African Americans, the Supreme Court declared many of the laws permitting racial discrimination and segregation in the US to be unconstitutional in 1954.[4, 5, 6, 7, ] In important decisions against racist discrimination, the Warren Court established the separate but equal concept.
The segregationist Jim Crow laws that were in place in the Southern states were eventually repealed in large part due to the verdicts.[11] Moderates within the movement collaborated with the US Congress in the 1960s to pass numerous important federal statutes authorizing the supervision and implementation of civil rights legislation. Racial segregation in public places, businesses, and educational institutions was expressly prohibited by the Civil Rights Act of 1964[12].13]
By allowing federal supervision of voter registration and elections in regions where minority voter representation has historically lagged, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 safeguarded and restored the right to vote. Discrimination in the purchase or leasing of real estate was outlawed by the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
In the South, African Americans resumed their political careers, and youth movements spread throughout the nation. A surge of black community riots and protests from 1964 to 1970 reduced white middle class support but boosted backing from private foundations.In [14][More information required]
Black leaders of the Black Power movement faced challenges when it emerged in 1965–1975 due to its cooperative approach and commitment to legalism and nonviolence. Its founders pushed for the community’s economic independence in addition to legal equality. African Americans, who continued to endure discrimination in employment, housing, education, and politics despite significant progress toward civil rights since the movement’s zenith in the mid-1960s, provided support for the Black Power movement.
Background of Civil rights movement
Eight presidents held slaves before to the American Civil War; about four million Black people were still held in slavery in the South; the Naturalization Act of 1790 restricted U.S. citizenship to white people; and most importantly, only white men who possessed property were allowed to vote.In 1618] Three constitutional amendments were passed after the Civil War: the 13th Amendment (1865), which outlawed slavery; the 14th Amendment (1869), which granted black people citizenship and increased their allotment to Congress; and the 15th Amendment (1870), which granted voting rights to black males (at the time, only men were allowed to vote in the United States).19]
The stormy Reconstruction era in the United States, which lasted from 1865 to 1877, saw the federal government attempt to establish free labor and the civil rights of freedmen in the South following the abolition of slavery. Numerous white people opposed the social changes, which gave rise to rebel groups like the Ku Klux Klan, whose members attacked Republicans who were black and white in order to uphold white supremacy.
Under the Enforcement Acts, President Ulysses S. Grant, the U.S. Army, and U.S. Attorney General Amos T. Akerman launched an effort to suppress the Klan in 1871.20] A few states expressed reluctance to implement the act’s federal measures. Furthermore, by the early 1870s, other rebel paramilitary groups and white supremacist organizations had emerged.
Disenfranchisement after Reconstruction
Whites in the South reclaimed political control of the state legislatures in the region following the contentious election of 1876, which led to the end of Reconstruction and the evacuation of federal troops. Although they persisted in intimidating and violently attacking Black voters in order to prevent them from casting ballots, the final African Americans from the South were elected to Congress prior to Black voters’ rights being taken away by state governments throughout the region, as will be explained below.
Will James was lynched in Cairo, Illinois, in 1909 in a mob-style manner.
Southern states enacted new constitutions and legislation between 1890 and 1908 in an attempt to deny African Americans and many Poor Whites the right to vote by erecting obstacles to voter registration. As a result, the number of registered voters fell sharply, and Blacks and Poor Whites were driven out of electoral politics.
Black political participation increased in the Rim South and Acadiana following the historic Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Allwright (1944), which outlawed white primaries. However, this progress was mostly concentrated in urban areas and a few rural communities where the majority of Black residents were employed outside of plantations.24]
The rest of the South, particularly North Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, maintained the status quo of barring African Americans from the political system until the mid-1960s, when national civil rights legislation was established to allow federal enforcement of the right to vote guaranteed by the constitution.
Blacks in the South were virtually shut out of politics for nearly 60 years, unable to choose representatives to represent their concerns in Congress or local government.21] They were ineligible to serve on local juries since they were unable to vote.
The Democratic Party, which is predominately white, continued to hold political sway in the South during this time. Whites had a strong voting bloc in Congress since they held every seat in Congress, which represented the whole population of the South. Suppressing black voter registration, the Republican Party—the “party of Lincoln” and the one that the majority of black people had previously belonged to—became increasingly irrelevant, with the exception of isolated Unionist regions in Appalachia and the Ozarks.
By keeping black people out, the Republican lily-white movement also grew stronger. The white Democrats controlled a one-party system in the “Solid South” until 1965. With the exception of the historically significant Unionist strongholds already mentioned, the Democratic Party nomination was equivalent to running for local and state office.Reference [25]
Booker T. Washington, the president of the Tuskegee Institute, was the first African American to attend an official supper in the White House when President Theodore Roosevelt asked him to eat there in 1901. “The invitation was roundly criticized by southern politicians and newspapers.”(26] Washington tried to get the president to try to increase African-American leadership in state Republican organizations and to appoint more Black people to federal positions in the South.
Racial segregation was enforced by law at the same time that African Americans were losing their rights. This was done by white southerners. Around the turn of the century, there were more lynchings and other acts of violence against Black people. The “Jim Crow” system was the name given to the de facto state-sanctioned system of racial oppression and discrimination that arose in the South after Reconstruction.
In its 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, the nearly all-Northern United States Supreme Court maintained the validity of state statutes mandating racial segregation in public spaces, giving them legal standing under the “separate but equal” theory.(28) Jim Crow regulations, which maintained the segregation that had started with slavery, included signs designating the areas where Black people were allowed to converse, move, drink, rest, and eat.29]
Non-White patrons at racially mixed establishments had to wait until every White customer was attended to before proceeding.29] After winning the presidency in 1912, President Woodrow Wilson implemented workplace segregation across the federal government in response to pressure from Southern members of his cabinet.[/30]
Many people refer to the early 20th century as the “nadir of American race relations” because it was during this time that lynchings peaked. Social discrimination against African Americans affected them in other locations as well, even if civil rights infractions and tensions were concentrated in the South.(31 ) On a national scale, the Southern bloc dominated significant congressional committees, thwarted the enactment of federal legislation against lynching, and wielded significant influence beyond the region’s white population.
This dictatorship was opposed by African Americans and other ethnic minorities. They opposed it in a variety of ways, pursuing improved prospects via legal action, the founding of new groups, political action, and labor unionization (refer to the Civil rights movement (1896–1954)). Established in 1909, the NAACP is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Via court cases, outreach programs, and lobbying, it battled to eradicate racial prejudice.
Its greatest accomplishment was winning the legal battle in the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954), in which the Warren Court declared that public school segregation in the US was unconstitutional. This ruling effectively struck down the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” theory.(8)33]
Many states started to progressively integrate their schools after the unanimous Supreme Court decision, although some Southern states opposed this by closing their public schools completely.(8)33]
Following protests and rallies that employed strategies similar to those seen in other facets of the broader civil rights movement, Southern public libraries were integrated.34] White resistance, beatings, and sit-ins were all part of this.For instance, two black clergymen in Anniston, Alabama, were severely attacked in 1963 when they tried to integrate the public library.34] The integration of libraries happened, on the whole, more quickly than the integration of other public institutions, despite opposition and violence.34]