CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

in the United States, mass movement starting in the late 1950s that, through the application of nonviolent protest action, broke the pattern of racially segregated public facilities in the South and achieved the most important breakthrough in equal-rights legislation for blacks since the Reconstruction period (186577). Denied constitutional guarantees (1787) because of their mainly slave status at the founding of the republic, black Americans were first promised fundamental citizenship rights in the 13th15th constitutional amendments (186570; see Reconstruction). The Civil Rights Act of 1875 required equal accommodations for blacks with whites in public facilities (other than schools), but this legislation was effectively voided by the Supreme Court in 1883. By 1900, 18 states of the North and West had legislated public policies against racial discrimination, but in the South new laws eroded the franchise (see grandfather clause) and reinforced segregation practices (see Jim Crow Law), while the U.S. Supreme Court upheld separate but equal facilities for the races in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), thus legitimizing the segregation of blacks from whites. During World War II, progress was made in outlawing discrimination in defense industries (1941) and after the war in desegregating the armed forces (1948). During the late 1940s and early 1950s, lawyers for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) pressed a series of important cases before the Supreme Court in which they argued that segregation meant inherently unequal (and inadequate) educational and other public facilities for blacks. These cases culminated in the Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan. (May 17, 1954), in which it declared that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional. This historic decision was to stimulate a mass movement on the part of blacks and white sympathizers to try to end the segregationist practices and racial inequalities that were firmly entrenched across the nation and particularly in the South. The movement was strongly resisted by many whites in the South and elsewhere. After a black woman, Rosa Parks, was arrested for refusing to move to the Negro section of a bus in Montgomery, Ala. (Dec. 1, 1955), blacks staged a one-day local boycott of the bus system to protest her arrest. Fusing these protest elements with the historic force of the Negro churches, a local Baptist minister, Martin Luther King, Jr., succeeded in transforming a spontaneous racial protest into a massive resistance movement, led from 1957 by his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). After a protracted boycott of the Montgomery bus company forced it to desegregate its facilities, picketing and boycotting spread rapidly to other communities. During the period from 1955 to 1960, some progress was made toward integrating schools and other public facilities in the upper South and the border states, but the Deep South remained adamant in its opposition to most desegregation measures. In 1960 the sit-in movement (largely under the auspices of the newly formed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; SNCC) was launched at Greensboro, N.C., when black college students insisted on service at a local segregated lunch counter. Patterning its techniques on the nonviolent methods of Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi, the movement spread across the nation, forcing the desegregation of department stores, supermarkets, libraries, and movie theatres. In May 1961 the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sent Freedom Riders of both races through the South and elsewhere to test and break down segregated accommodations in interstate transportation. By September it was estimated that more than 70,000 students had participated in the movement, with approximately 3,600 arrested; more than 100 cities in 20 states had been affected. The movement reached its climax in August 1963 with a massive march on Washington, D.C., to protest racial discrimination and demonstrate support for major civil-rights legislation that was pending in Congress. The federal government under presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower (195361) and John F. Kennedy had been reluctant to vigorously enforce the Brown decision when this entailed directly confronting the resistance of Southern whites. In 196163 President Kennedy won a following in the black community by encouraging the movement's leaders, but Kennedy's administration lacked the political capacity to persuade Congress to pass new legislation guaranteeing integration and equal rights. After President Kennedy's assassination (November 1963), Congress, under the prodding of President Lyndon B. Johnson, in 1964 passed the Civil Rights Act (q.v.). This was the most far-reaching civil rights bill in the nation's history (indeed, in world history), forbidding discrimination in public accommodations and threatening to withhold federal funds from communities that persisted in maintaining segregated schools. It was followed in 1965 by the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the enforcement of which eradicated the tactics previously used in the South to disenfranchise black voters. This act led to drastic increases in the numbers of black registered voters in the South, with a comparable increase in the numbers of blacks holding elective offices there. Up until 1966 the Civil Rights Movement had united widely disparate elements in the black community along with their white supporters and sympathizers, but in that year signs of radicalism began to appear in the movement as younger blacks became impatient with the rate of change and dissatisfied with purely nonviolent methods of protest. This new militancy split the ranks of the movement's leaders and also alienated some white sympathizers, a process that was accelerated by a wave of rioting in the black ghettos of several major cities in 196567. After the assassination of King (April 1968) and further black rioting in the cities, the movement as a cohesive effort disintegrated, with a broad spectrum of leadership advocating different approaches and varying degrees of militancy. In the years that followed, many civil rights leaders sought to achieve greater direct political power through elective office, and they sought to achieve more substantive economic and educational gains through affirmative-action programs that compensated for past discrimination in job hiring and college admissions. During the later 1970s and the '80s the civil rights movement was less militant but still persevering.