Civil Rights Movement (1896–1954)

The civil rights movement (1896–1954) was a long, primarily nonviolent action to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to all Americans. The era has had a lasting impact on American society – in its tactics, the increased social and legal acceptance of civil rights, and in its exposure of the prevalence and cost of racism.

Two US Supreme Court decisions in particular serve as bookends of the movement: the 1896 ruling of '' Plessy v Ferguson'', which upheld "separate but equal" racial segregation as constitutional doctrine; and 1954's ''Brown v Board of Education'', which overturned ''Plessy''. This was an era of new beginnings, in which some movements, such as Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, were very successful but left little lasting legacy; while others, such as the NAACP's legal assault on state-sponsored segregation, achieved modest results in its early years, as in, '' Buchanan v. Warley'' (1917) (zoning), making some progress but also suffering setbacks, as in ''Corrigan v. Buckley'' (1926) (housing), gradually building to key victories, including in '' Smith v. Allwright'' (1944) (voting), '' Shelley v. Kraemer'' (1948) (housing), '' Sweatt v. Painter'' (1950) (schooling) and ''Brown''. In addition, the Scottsboro Boys cases led to a pair of 1935 rulings in ''Powell v. Alabama'', and '' Norris v. Alabama'', that served to make anti-racism jurisprudence more prominent in the context of criminal justice.

Following the civil war, the United States expanded the legal rights of African Americans. Congress passed, and enough states ratified, an amendment ending slavery in 1865 — the 13th amendment to the US constitution. This amendment only outlawed slavery; it provided neither citizenship nor equal rights. In 1868, the 14th amendment was ratified by the states, granting African Americans citizenship, whereby all persons born in the US were extended equal protection under the laws of the constitution. The 15th amendment (ratified in 1870) stated that race could not be used as a condition to deprive men of the ability to vote. During Reconstruction (1865–1877), northern troops occupied the South. Together with the Freedmen's Bureau, they tried to administer and enforce the new constitutional amendments. Many Black leaders were elected to local and state offices, and many others organized community groups, especially to support education.

Reconstruction ended following the Compromise of 1877 between northern and southern White elites. In exchange for deciding the contentious presidential election in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes, supported by northern states, over his opponent, Samuel J. Tilden, the compromise called for the withdrawal of northern troops from the South. This followed violence and fraud in southern elections from 1868 to 1876, which had reduced Black voter turnout and enabled southern White Democrats to regain power in state legislatures across the South. The compromise and withdrawal of federal troops meant that such Democrats had more freedom to impose and enforce discriminatory practices. Many African Americans responded to the withdrawal of federal troops by leaving the South in the Kansas Exodus of 1879.

The Radical Republicans, who spearheaded Reconstruction, had attempted to eliminate both governmental and private discrimination by legislation. Such effort was largely ended by the Supreme Court's decision in the civil rights cases, in which the court held that the 14th Amendment did not give Congress power to outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals or businesses.

Key events

Segregation

The Supreme Court's decision in '' Plessy v Ferguson'' (1896) upheld state-mandated discrimination in public transportation under the "separate but equal" doctrine. As Justice Harlan, the only member of the Court to dissent from the decision, predicted:

If a state can prescribe, as a rule of civil conduct, that whites and blacks shall not travel as passengers in the same railroad coach, why may it not so regulate the use of the streets of its cities and towns as to compel white citizens to keep on one side of a street, and black citizens to keep on the other? Why may it not, upon like grounds, punish whites and blacks who ride together in street cars or in open vehicles on a public road or street?

The ''Plessy'' decision did not address an earlier Supreme Court case, ''Yick Wo v. Hopkins'' (1886), involving discrimination against Chinese immigrants, that held that a law that is race-neutral on its face, but is administered in a prejudicial manner, is an infringement of the Equal Protection Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.
While in the 20th century, the Supreme Court began to overturn state statutes that disenfranchised African Americans, as in ''Guinn v. United States'' (1915), with ''Plessy'', it upheld segregation that Southern states enforced in nearly every other sphere of public and private life.
The Court soon extended ''Plessy'' to uphold segregated schools. In '' Berea College v. Kentucky'', the Court upheld a Kentucky statute that barred Berea College, a private institution, from teaching both black and white students in an integrated setting. Many states, particularly in the South, took ''Plessy'' and ''Berea'' as blanket approval for restrictive laws, generally known as ''Jim Crow laws'', that created second-class status for African Americans.

In many cities and towns, African Americans were not allowed to share a taxi with whites or enter a building through the same entrance. They had to drink from separate water fountains, use separate restrooms, attend separate schools, be buried in separate cemeteries and swear on separate Bibles. They were excluded from restaurants and public libraries. Many parks barred them with signs that read "Negroes and dogs not allowed." One municipal zoo listed separate visiting hours.

The etiquette of racial segregation was harsher, particularly in the South. African Americans were expected to step aside to let a white person pass, and black men dared not look any white woman in the eye. Black men and women were addressed as "Tom" or "Jane," but rarely as "Mr." or "Miss" or " Mrs.," titles then widely in use for adults. Whites referred to black men of any age as "boy" and a black woman as "girl;" both often were called by labels such as "nigger" or "colored."

Less formal social segregation in the North began to yield to change. In 1941, however, the United States Naval Academy, based in segregated Maryland, refused to play a lacrosse game against Harvard University because Harvard's team included a black player.

Jackie Robinson's Major League Baseball debut, 1947

Jackie Robinson was a sports pioneer of the civil rights movement, best known for becoming the first African American to play professional sports in the major leagues.
Robinson debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers of Major League Baseball on April 15, 1947. His first major league game came one year before the US Army was integrated, seven years before ''Brown v. Board of Education'', eight years before Rosa Parks, and before Martin Luther King Jr. was leading the movement.

Political opposition

Lily-white movement

Following the Civil War, black leaders made substantial progress in establishing representation in the Republican Party.

Among the most prominent was Norris Wright Cuney, the Republican Party chairman in the late 19th century Texas. These gains led to substantial discomfort among many white voters, who generally supported the Democrats. During the 1888 Texas Republican Convention, Cuney coined the term ''lily-white movement'' to describe efforts by white conservatives to oust black people from positions of party leadership and incite riots to divide the party. Increasingly organized efforts by this movement gradually eliminated black leaders from the party. The writer Michael Fauntroy contends that the effort was coordinated with Democrats as part of a larger movement toward disenfranchisement of black people in the South at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century by increasing restrictions in voter registration rules.

Following biracial victories by a Populist-Republican slates in several states, by the late 19th century the Democratic Party had regained control of most state legislatures in the South. From 1890 to 1908, they accomplished disenfranchisement of blacks and, in some states, many poor whites. Despite repeated legal challenges and some successes by the NAACP, the Democrats continued to devise new ways to limit black electoral participation, such as white primaries, through the 1960s.

Nationally, the Republican Party tried to respond to black interests. Theodore Roosevelt, president 1901–1909, had a mixed record on race relations. He relied extensively on the backstage advice of Booker T. Washington regarding patronage appointments across the South. He publicly invited Washington to dinner at the White House, thereby challenging racist attitudes. On the other hand, he began the system of segregating federal employees; and he cracked down on black soldiers who refused to testify against each other in the Brownsville Affair of 1906. In order to defeat his successor William Howard Taft for the Republican nomination in 1912, Roosevelt pursued a Lily-white policy in the South. This new progressive party of 1912 was supportive of black rights in the North, but excluded all black members in the South.

Republicans in Congress repeatedly proposed federal legislation to prohibit lynching, which was always defeated by the Southern block. In 1920 Republicans made opposition to lynching part of their platform at the Republican National Convention. Lynchings, primarily of black men in the South, had increased in the decades around the turn of the 20th century. Leonidas C. Dyer, a white Republican Representative from St. Louis, Missouri, worked with the NAACP to introduce an anti-lynching bill into the House, where he gained strong passage in 1922. His effort was defeated by the Southern Democratic block in the Senate, which filibustered the bill that year, and in 1923 and 1924.

Disenfranchisement

Opponents of black civil rights used economic reprisals and frequently violence at the polls in the 1870s and 1880s to discourage blacks from registering to vote or voting. Paramilitary groups such as the Red Shirts in Mississippi and the Carolinas, and the White League in Louisiana, practiced open intimidation on behalf of the Democratic Party. By the turn of the 20th century, white Democratic-dominated Southern legislatures disfranchised nearly all age-eligible African-American voters through a combination of statute and constitutional provisions. While requirements applied to all citizens, in practice, they were targeted at blacks and poor whites (and Mexican Americans in Texas), and subjectively administered. The feature "Turnout in Presidential and Midterm Elections" at the following University of Texas website devoted to politics, shows the drastic drop in voting as these provisions took effect in Southern states compared to the rest of the US, and the longevity of the measures.

Mississippi passed a new constitution in 1890 that included provisions for poll taxes, literacy tests (which depended on the arbitrary decisions of white registrars), and complicated record keeping to establish residency, which severely reduced the number of blacks who could register. It was litigated before the Supreme Court. In 1898, in ''Williams v. Mississippi'', the Court upheld the state. Other Southern states quickly adopted the "Mississippi plan", and from 1890 to 1908, ten states adopted new constitutions with provisions to disfranchise most blacks and many poor whites. States continued to disfranchise these groups for decades, until mid-1960s federal legislation provided for oversight and enforcement of constitutional voting rights.

Blacks were most adversely affected, and in many southern states black voter turnout dropped to zero. Poor whites were also disfranchised. In Alabama, for instance, by 1941, 600,000 poor whites had been disfranchised, as well as 520,000 blacks.

It was not until the 20th century that litigation by African Americans on such provisions began to meet some success before the Supreme Court. In 1915 in ''Guinn v. United States'', the Court declared Oklahoma's 'grandfather clause' to be unconstitutional. Although the decision affected all states that used the grandfather clause, state legislatures quickly employed new devices to continue disfranchisement. Each provision or statute had to be litigated separately. The NAACP, founded in 1909, litigated against many such provisions.

One device which the Democratic Party began to use more widely in Southern states in the early 20th century was the white primary, which served for decades to disfranchise the few blacks who managed to get past barriers of voter registration. Barring blacks from voting in the Democratic Party primaries meant they had no chance to vote in the only competitive contests, as the Republican Party was then weak in the South. White primaries were not struck down by the Supreme Court until '' Smith v. Allwright'' in 1944.

Criminal law and lynching

In 1880, the United States Supreme Court ruled in '' Strauder v. West Virginia'', that African Americans could not be excluded from juries. However, beginning in 1890 with new state constitutions and electoral laws, the South effectively disfranchised blacks in the South, which routinely disqualified them for jury duty which was limited to voters. This left them at the mercy of a white justice system arrayed against them. In some states, particularly Alabama, the state used the criminal justice system to reestablish a form of peonage, through the convict-lease system. The state sentenced black males to years of imprisonment, which they spent working without pay. The state leased prisoners to private employers, such as Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, a subsidiary of United States Steel Corporation, which paid the state for their labor. Because the state made money, the system created incentives for the jailing of more men, who were disproportionately black. It also created a system in which treatment of prisoners received little oversight.

Extrajudicial punishment was more brutal. During the last decade of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, white vigilante mobs lynched thousands of black males, sometimes with the overt assistance of state officials, mostly within the South. No whites were charged with crimes in any of those murders. Whites were so confident of their immunity from prosecution for lynching that they not only photographed the victims, but made postcards out of the pictures.

The Ku Klux Klan, which had largely disappeared after a brief violent career in the early years of Reconstruction, reappeared in 1915. It grew mostly in industrializing cities of the South and Midwest that underwent the most rapid growth from 1910 to 1930. Social instability contributed to racial tensions that resulted from severe competition for jobs and housing. People joined KKK groups because they were anxious about their place in American society, as cities were rapidly changed by a combination of industrialization, migration of blacks and whites from the rural South, and waves of increased immigration from mostly rural southern and eastern Europe.

Initially the KKK presented itself as another fraternal organization devoted to betterment of its members. The KKK's revival was inspired in part by the movie ''Birth of a Nation'', which glorified the earlier Klan and dramatized the racist stereotypes concerning blacks of that era. The Klan focused on political mobilization, which allowed it to gain power in states such as Indiana, on a platform that combined racism with anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic and anti-union rhetoric, but also supported lynching. It reached its peak of membership and influence about 1925, declining rapidly afterward as opponents mobilized.

Republicans repeatedly introduced bills in the House to make lynching a federal crime, but they were defeated by the Southern block. In 1920 the Republicans made an anti-lynching bill part of their platform and achieved passage in the House by a wide margin. Southern Democrats in the Senate repeatedly filibustered the bill to prevent a vote, and defeated it in the 1922, 1923 and 1924 sessions as they held the rest of the legislative program hostage.

Farmers and blue-collar workers

White society also kept blacks in a position of economic subservience or marginality. Most black farmers in the South by the early 20th century worked as sharecroppers or tenant farmers, and relatively few were landowners.

Employers and labor unions generally restricted African Americans to the worst paid and least desirable jobs. Because of the lack of steady, well-paid jobs, relatively undistinguished positions, such as those with the Pullman Porter or as hotel doorman, became prestigious positions in black communities in the North. The expansion of railroads meant that they recruited in the South for laborers, and tens of thousands of blacks moved North to work with the Pennsylvania Railroad, for example, during the period of the Great Migration. In 1900 Reverend Matthew Anderson, speaking at the annual Hampton Negro Conference in Virginia, said that "...the lines along most of the avenues of wage earning are more rigidly drawn in the North than in the South. There seems to be an apparent effort throughout the North, especially in the cities to debar the colored worker from all the avenues of higher remunerative labor, which makes it more difficult to improve his economic condition even than in the South."

The Golden Age of Black Entrepreneurship

The nadir of race relations was reached in the early 20th century, in terms of political and legal rights. Blacks were increasingly segregated. Cut off from the larger white community, however, black entrepreneurs succeeded in establishing flourishing businesses that catered to a black clientele, including professionals. In urban areas, north and south, the size and income of the black population was growing, providing openings for a wide range of businesses, from barbershops to insurance companies. Undertakers had a special niche in their communities, and often played a political role, as they were widely known and knew many of their constituents.

Historian Juliet Walker calls the 1900s-1930s the "Golden age of black business." According to the National Negro Business League, the number of black-owned businesses doubled rapidly, from 20,000 in 1900 to 40,000 in 1914. There were 450 undertakers in 1900, rising to 1000 in this time period. The number of black-owned drugstores rose from 250 to 695. Local retail merchants—most of them quite small—jumped from 10,000 to 25,000.Meier, August. 9631966. ''Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington'' (2nd ed.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. p. 140. One of the most famous entrepreneurs was Madame C.J. Walker (1867–1919), who built a national franchise business called Madame C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, based on her development of the first successful hair straightening process.

Booker T. Washington, who ran the National Negro Business League and was president of the Tuskegee Institute, was the most prominent promoter of black business. He traveled from city to city to sign up local entrepreneurs into the national league.

Charles Clinton Spaulding (1874–1952), an ally of Washington, was the most prominent black American business leader of his day. Behind the scenes he was an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, with the goal of promoting a black political leadership class. He founded North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, which became America's largest black-owned business, with assets of over $40 million at his death.

Although black business flourished in urban areas, it was severely handicapped in the rural South where the great majority of blacks lived. Blacks were farmers who depended on one cash crop, typically cotton or tobacco. They chiefly traded with local white merchants. The primary reason was that the local country stores provided credit, that is the provided supplies the farm and family needed, including tools, seeds, food and clothing, on a credit basis until the bill was paid off at harvest time. Black businessmen had too little access to credit to enter this business. Indeed, there were only a small number of wealthy blacks; overwhelmingly they were real estate speculators in the fast-growing cities, typified by Robert Church in Memphis.

Division of Negro Affairs in the Department of Commerce

Minority entrepreneurship entered the national agenda in 1927 when Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover set up a Division of Negro Affairs to provide advice, and disseminate information to both white and black businessmen on how to reach the black consumer. Entrepreneurship was not on the New Deal agenda of Franklin D. Roosevelt. However, when he turned to war preparation in 1940, he used this agency to help black business secure defense contracts. Black businesses had not been oriented toward manufacturing, and generally were too small to secure any major contracts. President Eisenhower disbanded the agency in 1953.

Executive Orders for non-discriminatory hiring by defense contractors

President Roosevelt issued two Executive Orders directing defense contractors to hire, promote and fire without regard for racial discrimination. In areas such as West Coast shipyards and other industries, blacks began to gain more of the skilled and higher-paying jobs and supervisory positions.

The Black church

As the center of community life, Black churches were integral leaders and organizers in the civil rights movement. Their history as a focal point for the Black community and as a link between the Black and White worlds made them natural for this purpose.

This period saw the maturing of independent black churches, whose leaders were usually also strong community leaders. Blacks had left white churches and the Southern Baptist Convention to set up their own churches free of white supervision immediately during and after the American Civil War. With the help of northern associations, they quickly began to set up state conventions and, by 1895, joined several associations into the black National Baptist Convention, the first of that denomination among blacks. In addition, independent black denominations, such as the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and AME Zion Church
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