African Americans - Civil Rights, Equality, Activism (2024)

At the end of World War II, African Americans were poised to make far-reaching demands to end racism. They were unwilling to give up the minimal gains that had been made during the war.

The campaign for African American rights—usually referred to as the civil rights movement or the freedom movement—went forward in the 1940s and ’50s in persistent and deliberate steps. In the courts the NAACP successfully attacked restrictive covenants in housing, segregation in interstate transportation, and discrimination in public recreational facilities. In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court issued one of its most significant rulings. In the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (Kansas), the court overturned the “separate but equal” ruling of the Plessy v. Ferguson case and outlawed segregation in the country’s public school systems. White citizens’ councils in the South fought back with legal maneuvers, economic pressure, and even violence. Rioting by white mobs temporarily closed Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, when nine Black students were admitted to it in 1957, prompting Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower to dispatch federal troops to protect the students.

Direct nonviolent action by African Americans achieved its first major success in the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955–56, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. This protest was prompted by the quiet but defiant act of an African American woman, Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus to a white passenger on December 1, 1955. Resistance to African American demands for the desegregation of Montgomery’s buses was finally overcome when the Supreme Court ruled in November 1956 that the segregation of public transportation facilities was unconstitutional. To coordinate further civil rights action, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was established in 1957 under King’s guidance.

Within 15 years after the Supreme Court outlawed all-white primary elections in 1944, the registered Black electorate in the South increased more than fivefold, reaching 1.25 million in 1958. The Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first federal civil rights legislation to be passed since 1875, authorized the federal government to take legal measures to prevent a citizen from being denied voting rights.

Beginning in February 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina, student sit-ins forced the desegregation of lunch counters in drug and variety stores throughout the South. In April 1960 leaders of the sit-in movement organized the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In the spring of 1961, to defy segregation on interstate buses, “freedom rides” in Alabama and Mississippi were organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) under its national director, James Farmer.

The NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, and CORE cooperated on a number of local projects, such as the drive to register Black voters in Mississippi, launched in 1961. In April 1964 they worked together to help found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which later that year challenged the seating of an all-white Mississippi delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Activist African Americans adopted “Freedom Now” as their slogan to recognize the Emancipation Proclamation centennial in 1963 (indeed, a short-lived all-Black Freedom Now Party was formed in Michigan and ran candidates in the general election of 1964). National attention in the spring of 1963 was focused on Birmingham, Alabama, where King was leading a civil rights drive. The Birmingham authorities used dogs and fire hoses to quell civil rights demonstrators, and there were mass arrests. In September 1963 four African American girls were killed by a bomb thrown into a Birmingham church.

Civil rights activities in 1963 culminated in a March on Washington organized by Randolph and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. From the Lincoln Memorial, King addressed the throng of some 250,000 demonstrators gathered on the Mall. The march helped secure the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbade discrimination in voting, public accommodations, and employment and permitted the attorney general of the United States to deny federal funds to local agencies that practiced discrimination. Efforts to increase African American voter participation were also helped by the ratification in 1964 of the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which banned the poll tax.

The difficulties in registering African American voters in the South were dramatized in 1965 by events in Selma, Alabama. Civil rights demonstrators there were attacked by police who used tear gas, whips, and clubs. Thousands of demonstrators were arrested. As a result, however, their cause won national sympathy and support. Led by King and by John Lewis of SNCC, some 40,000 protesters from all over the country marched from Selma to Montgomery, the Alabama state capital. Shortly thereafter Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which eliminated all discriminatory qualifying tests for voter registrants and provided for the appointment of federal registrars.

Urban upheaval

During the 1960s the country’s predominantly African American inner cities were swept by outbreaks of violence. Their basic causes were long-standing grievances—police insensitivity and brutality, inadequate educational and recreational facilities, high unemployment, poor housing, and high prices. Yet the outbreaks were mostly unplanned. Unlike the “race riots” of earlier decades, when whites menaced African Americans, the outbreaks of the 1960s involved the looting and burning of mostly white-owned property in Black neighborhoods by African Americans. The fighting that took place was mainly between African American youths and the police. Hundreds of lives were lost, and tens of millions of dollars’ worth of property was destroyed. The most serious disturbances occurred in the Watts area of Los Angeles, California, in August 1965 and in Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit, Michigan, in July 1967.

During the 1960s, militant Black nationalist and Marxist-oriented African American organizations were created, among them the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Deacons for Defense, and the Black Panther Party. Under such leaders as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, SNCC adopted increasingly radical policies. Some of the militant Black leaders were arrested, and others, such Eldridge Cleaver, fled the country. This loss of leadership seriously weakened some of the organizations.

“Black Power” became popular in the late 1960s. The slogan was first used by Carmichael in June 1966 during a civil rights march in Mississippi. However, the concept of Black power predated the slogan. Essentially, it refers to all the attempts by African Americans to maximize their political and economic power.

Among the outstanding modern advocates of Black Power was Malcolm X, who rose to national prominence in the early 1960s as a minister in the Nation of Islam, or Black Muslim movement. Malcolm broke with the leader of the Black Muslims, Elijah Muhammad, and founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity before he was assassinated in February 1965.

The Black Power movement was stimulated by the growing pride of Black Americans in their African heritage. This pride was strikingly symbolized by the Afro hairstyle and the African garments worn by many young Black men and women. Black pride was also manifested in student demands for Black studies programs, Black teachers, and dedicated facilities and in an upsurge in African American culture and creativity. The new slogan—updated from Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes—was “Black is beautiful.”

The Vietnam War, in which African American soldiers participated in disproportionately high numbers, tended to divide the Black leadership and divert white liberals from the civil rights movement. Some NAACP and National Urban League leaders minimized the war’s impact on the African American home front. A tougher view—that U.S. participation had become a “racist” intrusion in a nonwhite country’s affairs—was shared by other African American leaders, including King. He organized the Poor People’s Campaign, a protest march on Washington, D.C., before he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, in April 1968. Anger and frustration over his assassination set off more disturbances in the inner cities. (James Earl Ray, a white small-time crook, was tried and convicted of the murder.)