Welcome to Module 22! This is the first of several modules where we'll address the impact of civil rights activism in the mid-twentieth century. However, we've already been examining civil rights activism in the twentieth-century for several weeks—for example, we’ve looked at Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s anti-lynching work, W.E.B. DuBois’ arguments for African American progress, Marcus Garvey’s black nationalism, the March on Washington Movement in the context of World War II, the “Double Victory” campaign of black service members, and more!
In this module, we’ll look at the beginning of what is commonly known as the “civil rights movement,” the organized effort to dissolve Jim Crow segregation in the South, starting in the mid-1950s. We'll explore the strategies employed by civil rights activists and the responses from resistant whites in the South.
Three questions will guide this module blog post:
How did civil rights activists articulate their demands for full citizenship? What was the response to this articulation?
How do we remember the civil rights movement?
What is the relationship between significant court cases and laws, individual leaders, and grassroots activism?
Let's get started!
Part I: "Sparks" of the Civil Rights Movement
The "Master Narrative" of the Civil Rights Movement
Word Cloud #1:
Based on your understanding of the civil rights movement (from previous history classes, popular culture, etc.), what events/people/dates are most significant? Submit a response to the embedded word cloud below, or access it here.
The “master narrative” of the civil rights movement goes something like this. This is a quote from activist Julian Bond, cited in Charles Payne’s book, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom:
“Traditionally, relationships between the races in the South were oppressive. Many Southerners were very prejudiced against Blacks. In 1954, the Supreme Court decided this was wrong. Inspired by the court, courageous Americans, Black and white, took protest to the street, in the forms of sit-ins, bus boycotts, and Freedom Rides. The nonviolent protest movement, led by the brilliant and eloquent Reverend Martin Luther King, aided by a sympathetic federal government, most notably the Kennedy brothers and a born-again Lyndon Johnson, was able to make America understand racial discrimination as a moral issue. Once Americans understood that discrimination was wrong, they quickly moved to remove racial prejudice and discrimination from American life, as evidenced by the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.” [1]
While we will definitely cover many of the topics in this “master narrative,” we will be examining a more nuanced and complicated trajectory of the civil rights movement.
For example, what was the role of the government? How “nonviolent” was the protest movement? Did civil rights legislation really change peoples’ minds? Should the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 be viewed as the “end” of the civil rights movement? Is Martin Luther King, Jr. the only leader of the movement worth mentioning?
Truman and Civil Rights
During the 1948 presidential campaign, a new political party emerged focused on maintaining racial order in the South. The “States’ Rights Democratic Party” (also known as the “Dixiecrats”) was created when the Democratic convention adopted a civil rights plank. Dixiecrats argued that the federal government’s civil rights proposals infringed on “states’ rights.” They asserted that “We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race.” Although the Dixiecrats no longer supported the Democratic Party, Truman still won the presidential election, with the support of black voters in the North and West.
In 1947, President Truman appointed a Commission on Civil Rights, which issued a report that called for the end to segregation in every area of American life, and recommended that steps be taken to ensure equality. Truman endorsed the report, and asked Congress to pass legislation that would have instituted a permanent federal civil rights commission, passed laws against lynching and poll taxes, and take action to ensure equal access to jobs and education. The package was defeated by Congress, mainly as a result of the campaigns of Southern Democrats.
One major achievement Truman managed was an executive order desegregating the armed forces. The Korean War would be the first American conflict since the Revolution fought by an integrated army.
Thus, at the end of the 1940s, the issue of civil rights and race was politically divisive. The desire to maintain racial segregation and discrimination was couched in the terms of individual freedom under the “states’ rights” banner.
Although in Module 21 we discussed postwar prosperity, in fact, over half of the nation’s Black families lived in poverty. Jim Crow segregation abounded throughout the South. Due to discrimination in housing, Blacks were mainly restricted from new suburban housing. In the North and West, segregation was not legally required—but had become customary. For example, in Las Vegas, Sammy Davis Jr. and Louis Armstrong were just two of the Black performers who were allowed to play in hotel-casinos on the strip, but could not stay as guests at the hotels where they performed.
So, what event “sparked” the civil rights movement? We’ll explore three significant events in 1954 and 1955.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954)
The landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education is often remembered as one of the main starting points of the modern civil rights movement. This case challenged the “separate but equal” doctrine that had been instituted with Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Thurgood Marshall, a lawyer working with the NAACP, argued the case on behalf of Oliver Brown, who went to court because his third grade daughter was forced to walk across dangerous railroad tracks each morning to get to school, rather than be allowed to attend a school nearby, which was restricted to whites.
Thurgood Marshall argued that segregation was inherently unequal, because it stigmatized one group of citizens as unfit to associate with others.
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of Brown. Justice Earl Warren argued:
“The separate but equal doctrine rests on the basic premise that the Negro race is inferior. That is the only way to sustain Plessy…We can’t set one group apart from the rest of us and say they are not entitled to the same treatment as all others. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were intended to make equal those who were once slaves.”
In their deliberations, the Supreme Court justices argued that the country had already made progress desegregating public facilities, and that Blacks had achieved much in the years following Plessy.
Indeed, slightly more than half of the nation supported Brown from the day it was decided. Therefore, the justices understood Brown as working with, not against, the current of history.
However, Brown was not inevitable. In 1954, 17 states and the District of Columbia segregated their schools and four more states permitted local communities to adopt segregation at their discretion. Therefore, Brown did not bring into line a few “renegade” states, it instituted a major change.
Brown II
Furthermore, the consequences of invalidating segregation were of major concern to the justices. Justice Frankfurter argued, “A declaration of unconstitutionality is not a wand by which these transformations can be accomplished.” They feared that the ruling would produce violence and school closures, especially in the hostile South. They were conflicted on how to actually implement the policy. In what has become known as Brown II, the justices determined how to carry out desegregation—should it be immediate? A gradual translation? Should there be a deadline?
The Court recommended gradualism and were particularly vague about how desegregation should be carried out. They required a “prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance,” with additional time allowed if “consistent with good faith compliance at the earliest practicable date.” District courts were to order the admission of black students to public schools on a nondiscriminatory basis “with all deliberate speed.”
With gradualism, the Court reasoned that Southern white resistance would be reduced. They argued that gradualism “would indicate to the South that the Court understands and is sympathetic to the problems which the decision raises in their states” and that it was “not trying to jam a new social order down their throats.”
Supporters of desegregation, including the NAACP, were disappointed. They would have rather had that desegregation be immediate.
And, the result of the Supreme Court’s ruling on desegregation in the South was not accommodation, but widespread resistance. [2]
Little Rock Nine
For example, in 1957, Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus posted 270 soldiers from the state National Guard to prevent nine Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School. A federal district court ordered to allow the children in the school, and Faubus withdrew the troops, leaving students to face a hostile crowd alone. President Eisenhower sent 1,100 paratroopers in and put the state national guard under federal authority, and the troops remained at the high school for the rest of the year. (The photo below is the subject of one of the optional readings for this module.)
Although the Little Rock Nine incident reveals that the federal government would not allow Southern states to violate the Supreme Court’s orders, massive resistance to integration like this case slowed desegregation efforts in the final years of the 1950s.
When Eisenhower left office in 1961, fewer than 2% of Black students attended desegregated schools in the South.
Poll #1:
In your opinion, was gradualism a good decision?
Yes, immediate desegregation would have led to even more violence and resistance; or no, segregation had been legal for almost 60 years, and waiting even longer to desegregate was detrimental to the wellbeing of both blacks and whites in the US?
Answer in the embedded poll below, or access the poll here.
Responses to School Desegregation
In response to Brown, White Citizens’ Councils (WCC) were formed throughout the South. WCCs were organizations that promoted white supremacy, but through “respectable” methods. Professionals, businessmen, and planters made up the membership rolls. Although they claimed that they used nonviolent tactics to enforce the racial status quo, in reality, violence frequently followed in the wake of WCC intimidation campaigns.
Although initially formed to fight against school desegregation, the WCC expanded its reach to a broader defense of white supremacy. WCC members intimidated Blacks who registered to vote, or who were involved in Black community organizations like the NAACP. In 1956, 101 Southern senators and congressmen signed the “Southern manifesto,” blasting the Supreme Court’s decision, and vowing to preserve segregation.
Lynching of Emmett Till
It was in the context of massive resistance to desegregation that Emmett Till was murdered in 1955. Till was a fourteen-year-old African American boy who was visiting his family in Mississippi from Chicago. He was murdered by Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, supposedly in retaliation for Till’s sexual advances towards Bryant’s wife, Carolyn. (Carolyn reported that Till had apparently whistled at her.) He was brutally beaten, shot, and dumped into a nearby river. Bryant and Milam were deemed “not guilty” of Till’s murder by an all-white, all-male jury.
Till’s murder and the trial became national news. Mamie Till Bradley, Till’s mother, insisted on holding an open-casket funeral, so that the nation could see what had been done to her son. She also published images of his body in the national press. Thousands stood in line to pay their respects to Till, mobilizing the black community.
Civil rights activist Anne Moody wrote in her autobiography: “Before Emmett Till’s murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was a new fear known to me—the fear of being killed just because I was black.” [3]
Mamie Till Bradley went on a national speaking tour in conjunction with the NAACP. Till’s murder stirred up significant outrage, both in the black community and among sympathetic whites, who saw the brutality of Till’s murder and were shocked at the verdict of the trial.
In 2017, Carolyn Bryant (now Carolyn Bryant Donham) spoke to historian Timothy Tyson about the case and admitted that her allegations of Emmett Till’s sexual advances were false. Read more about it here.
Montgomery Bus Boycott
We often think of the Montgomery Bus Boycott as a spontaneous act that sparked a whole movement—Rosa Parks quietly refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus and as a result, thousands of Blacks decided to boycott. Her act of defiance is represented in popular memory as revolutionary, but not radical. It was an individual act to retain her dignity, rather than an intentional act backed by her years of radical activism.
In reality, Parks’ history is more complicated. She joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP in 1943 and became the secretary. From 1943 to 1945 she tried numerous times to register to vote, and succeeded in 1945. She was then forced to pay back poll taxes ($1.50 for each year she had been old enough to vote).
Parks devoted her life to seeking justice for Black people within the criminal justice system. In 1944, she helped form the Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor, a Black woman who had been gang-raped by six white men at gun point. Indeed, she had been politically active for more than two decades before the bus incident. [4]
In 1955, the Montgomery NAACP was looking for a test case against bus segregation. A 15-year-old woman, Claudette Colvin, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus. Parks helped to raise money for Colvin’s case and brought Colvin into the NAACP Youth Council. But, Colvin was not the kind of plaintiff the NAACP wanted to back for a legal case. Colvin was unwed, pregnant, and a teenager. The NAACP worried that shining a spotlight on her would only fuel white stereotypes about Black women.
Later that year, Parks was riding a bus on the way home from work. She was ordered to move from her seat so a white man could sit down. She decided to remain seated and was arrested. Although she had not planned the protest, NAACP leaders saw her as the perfect test case they were looking for—middle-aged, religious, and well-respected. Although she is often represented as a tired seamstress who refused to get up because “her feet hurt” she contextualized her decision within her role as a political organizer. She felt she had a responsibility to act on behalf of the larger community. Parks agreed to be a part of a legal case against bus segregation.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott was organized by a local group of Black women formed to address racial inequalities called the Women’s Political Council. Parks’ arrest set in motion the WPC’s plan to boycott buses. The WPC used Parks’ arrest as a rallying cry to encourage every Black person to stay off the buses the Monday after Parks was arrested, distributing 50,000 leaflets across town:
“Another Negro woman has been arrested…If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue…We are therefore asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial.” [5]
That Monday, nearly every Black person in Montgomery stayed off the bus. That evening, 15,000 people gathered for a mass meeting and formed a new organization, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), deciding to continue the boycott indefinitely. The MIA chose Martin Luther King Jr., who had just moved to town, to serve as their president.
The boycott lasted 381 days and was sustained by mostly Black women who walked or used an elaborate car pool system to avoid taking the bus. The community participated in mass meetings held every night in local churches. In 1956, the Supreme Court ordered an end to Montgomery’s bus segregation in the Gayle v. Browder decision. The bus company lost 65% of its business due to the boycott.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a true grassroots movement, involving a large number of people who had not been politically active before. It also launched Martin Luther King, Jr.’s career, with a year-long platform where he proved his worth as a leader.
Poll #2:
Of the three major events we’ve examined, which should be considered the beginning of the modern civil rights movement? Brown v. Board of Education? Emmett Till's murder? Or the Montgomery Bus Boycott? (Think broadly, not just in terms of chronology, as all of these events occurred in the same short time span.) Answer the embedded poll below, of access it here.
Part II: Progress and Resistance
African American Organizing Traditions
Many black activists throughout the South organized under traditional conceptions of leadership—one charismatic (usually male) authority figure who would lead a large group. (A main example of this kind of organizing would be churches.) However, within 1950s organizing, there was also a different leadership style—the philosophy of collective leadership.
Collective leadership was democratic, meaning that everyone was included, including poor people. Those who focused on collective leadership focused on local problems, considered the social structures and cultures of local communities, and encouraging a sense of self-efficacy and power in peoples’ lives. One particular example are the Citizenship Schools started by Septima Clark.
Collective Leadership
Clark had attended the Highlander Folk School, which was founded in the Depression as a school for the poor of Appalachia. In the 1950s it was a meeting place and training center for civil rights leaders at all levels. Highlander’s philosophy was interracial, and guided by the belief that the oppressed themselves, collectively, already had much of the knowledge needed to produce change.
Workshops at Highlander were designed to get local leaders to share techniques and then return home to develop the leadership potential of others. Many prominent civil rights leaders, like Rosa Parks, attended its workshops.
Septima Clark took what she had learned at Highlander and started a series of Citizenship Schools in South Carolina. Adults who attended classes were taught how to fill out voter registration forms, basic literacy, and discussed big ideas about citizenship, democracy, and the power of elected officials. The aim of the school was to create involved citizens, not just voters. [6]
Clark argued that the Citizenship Schools were about discovering local community leaders, and gave students a lot of autonomy in the classroom. These schools were a relatively non-threatening way to get people involved in the broader movement. Once you bring people together to talk about literacy, you can get them to talk about lots of other things.
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
Following the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was formed under the leadership of Martin Luther King in 1956. The SCLC was a federation of civil rights organizations that provided an institutional base for continuing the struggle. King traveled the country to build support for this new organization and to raise money. SCLC members trained other Black activists, especially college students, in the tactics of nonviolent protest.
King’s philosophy of non-violence was based on the teachings and philosophies of Mahatma Gandhi. Practicing nonviolence does not mean being passive. Nonviolence can be confrontational and aggressive, putting oneself in the face of oppression and tyranny. Both Gandhi and King believed that the aftermath of violence could cause damage to the soul—hard feelings, anger, and bitterness could cause hate. When justice was reached through non-violence, it resulted in a change of hearts and minds. It was based on the idea of “loving” your enemies, abiding by a social gospel, and honoring one’s obligations to one another.
Although we sometimes think of non-violence as the “softer” side of the civil rights movement, I challenge you to really think about what it means. Would you be able to put yourself in harm’s way, anticipate and experience physical harm and then not retaliate? It takes a special kind of strength and determination to do this!
Student Activism
The “soldiers” of the civil rights movement were students, both white and Black. We’ll examine three specific areas where students were the main players.
In the 1950s, the emphasis on family on conformity (discussed in Module 21) led to strains of anxiety and dissent, especially among white youth. Some felt alienated and excluded from prevailing culture. They did not look forward to making money at an unfulfilling job or did not want to become housewives living in the suburbs.
Many disaffected white youth rebelled by joining subcultures like the Beats or bohemians. Others found a place to rebel in their participation in the civil rights movement.
Sit-Ins
On February 1, 1960, four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, a Black college in Greensboro, NC, sat down at a lunch counter in a Woolworth’s department store, typically reserved for whites. They remained at the counter even after they were told they wouldn’t be served, and continued to sit-in for five months, until Woolworth’s agreed to serve Black customers.
Sit-ins like this were conducted throughout the South at parks, pools, restaurants, bowling alleys, libraries, and other facilities. By the end of 1960, 70,000 people had participated, 36,000 had been arrested in over 150 cities. The reaction to the sit-ins exposed how deeply entrenched racism was in the fabric of Southern society.
Anne Moody recalled her experiences sitting-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter while in college (she is in the center of the photograph above):
“We were called a little bit of everything. The rest of the seats except the three we were occupying had been roped off to prevent others from sitting down. A couple of the boys took one end of the rope and made it into a hangman’s noose. Several attempts were made to put it around our necks. The crowds grew as more students and adults came in for lunch.” [7]
This is what I was thinking when I asked if you'd be able to do this and not retaliate! It must have taken incredible strength to sit there and endure that.
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
In 1960, Ella Baker called a meeting of young activists which formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced "Snick"), capitalizing on the spirit of the sit-ins. Baker did not like the King-centered, male leadership model of the SCLC. She advocated a more decentralized, group-centered leadership and participatory democracy, as opposed to one charismatic male leader. SNCC was nonviolent, and remained autonomous from other civil rights organizations.
SNCC initiated the mass-based, disruptive political style we associate with the sixties, and provided philosophical and organizational models and hands-on training for people who would become leaders in the student movement, the anti-war movement, and the feminist movement. It promoted the idea of young people “dropping out” for a year or two and working for social change, forcing the civil rights movement to enter the most dangerous areas of the South. The development of SNCC made the SCLC seem more centrist and acceptable. When faced with a choice of who to deal with on civil rights issues, business and political leaders were more likely to support SCLC, whose leadership was made up of ministers, over the students of SNCC.
Freedom Rides
1960-1961 also saw the Freedom Rides, organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). This organization sent integrated groups to travel by bus into the Deep South to test compliance with court orders banning segregation on interstate buses and trains and in terminal facilities. Violent mobs assaulted them, firebombs were thrown into buses, and Klansmen attacked riders with bats and chains. Local police often refused to intervene.
Poll #3:
Which of the following was the most effective method/tactic of civil right organizers in the early 1960s? A collective, democratic leadership style? Or the fact that many of the demonstrations were integrated? Answer the embedded poll below, or access it here.
Birmingham
In the spring of 1963, demonstrations took place in towns and cities across the South. In one week in June, there were more than 15,000 arrests in 186 cities. The dramatic culmination occurred in Birmingham, Alabama. It was here that Martin Luther King composed his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in April 1963, serving time for violating a ban on demonstrations.
Responding to local clergymen who counseled patience, King responded:
“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was ‘well timed’ in the view of those who have not suffered from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”
In Birmingham, King made the decision to bring children into the demonstrations. Police chief Eugene “Bull” Connor unleashed his forces against thousands of young marchers. Images, broadcast on television, of children being assaulted with nightsticks, high-pressure fire hoses, and attack dogs produced a wave of revulsion throughout the world.
These images prompted President Kennedy to endorse the goals of the civil rights movement, going on national television to call for the passage of a law banning discrimination in all places of public accommodation. He did not live to see the passage of this bill—he was assassinated in November, 1963, and his vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, became president.
In September of 1963, a bomb exploded at a Black Baptist church in Birmingham, killing four young girls.
Cold War Civil Rights
During President John F. Kennedy’s first two years in office, he was reluctant to take a stand on civil rights. He was more concerned with foreign policy crises, especially pertaining to the Cold War. In April 1961, Kennedy allowed the CIA to launch an invasion in Cuba at a site known as the Bay of Pigs, to cut off ties between Cuba and the Soviet Union that had been developing. The assault was a failure.
The relationship between the US and the Soviet Union deteriorated even further just a year later. In October 1962, American spy planes discovered that the Soviet Union was installing missiles in Cuba capable of reaching the US with nuclear weapons. After the US imposed a blockade on the island and negotiated with the Soviets behind the scenes, the missiles were withdrawn.
Although this may seem tangential to our exploration of civil rights, it isn’t. The Cold War place international attention on American race relations that ultimately impacted the ways in which presidents intervened in racial problems in the South. [8]
Images of the mobs that faced the nine Black students who integrated Little Rock Central High School sparked criticisms of the US’ rhetoric of freedom, inspiring fears that these incidents would be used as communist propaganda. These fears played a large part in why Eisenhower decided to send federal troops into Arkansas to make sure desegregation was carried out.
President Kennedy faced the same kind of criticisms with the coverage of the racist and violent reaction to the Freedom Rides. After the events in Birmingham, Kennedy asserted that the nation was facing a moral crisis:
“We preach freedom around the world…but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other, that this is a land of the free except for Negroes?”
The government cared about how communists would use the incidents, but also about how the incidents could be perceived in Asian and African countries, which the US was trying to “win over” as democracies rather than become affiliated with communism. [9]
The Cold War also impacted civil rights in a different way. Civil rights activists who challenged the status quo had an increasingly narrow space for criticism, because they risked being called “disloyal” or accused of communism.
March on Washington
On August 28, 1963, two weeks before the Birmingham church bombing, 250,000 black and white Americans converged on the nation’s capital for the March on Washington. The marchers called for “Jobs and Freedom,” demanding the passage of a civil rights bill pending in Congress, as well as a public-works program to reduce unemployment, an increase in the minimum wage, and a law barring discrimination in employment.
It was here that King delivered his most famous speech, the “I have a dream” speech. (You can listen to audio of the speech at the link.)
Poll #4:
In your opinion, which aspect of the civil rights movement is most remembered today? (Let me know why in the annotations/comments.)
Influential individuals like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks?
Mass demonstrations?
Key court cases and legislation?
Answer in the embedded poll below, or access it here.
Freedom Summer
In the summer of 1964, a coalition of civil rights organizers, including SNCC, invited about 1,000 white northern college students to help register Black voters in Mississippi. The campaign was greeted with violence, and early after the project began, three volunteers went missing and were found dead, killed by the Klan (a Black Mississippian, and two white students from New York). The deaths of the two white students focused a lot of attention on Mississippi, and the inability of the federal government to protect citizens seeking to exercise their constitutional rights.
During the summer, 30 homes and 37 churches were bombed, 35 civil rights workers were shot at, 80 people were beaten, six were murdered, and more than 1000 were arrested. Mississippi was viewed as a place of some of the most violent and strong resistance to integration. The reign of terror undermined some of the commitment to nonviolence—people started to believe that they could not overcome the resistance to integration through nonviolence.
Freedom Summer led to another dramatic confrontation in the political arena. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a group of Black activists, formed a party to challenge Mississippi’s regular Democratic delegation at the Democratic convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. About 80,000 citizens signed the MFDP register, and 64 delegates were elected to travel to Atlantic City and gain official recognition at the convention. They failed to gain recognition, as President Johnson, not wanting to alienate white southerners, recognized the traditional Mississippi delegation and gave two seats to MFDP members. MFDP rejected the compromise.
This exclusion was widely viewed as the “straw that broke the camel’s back”—activists started to argue that the traditional political system would never accept them, and they should stop trying to reform it.
In future modules, we’ll examine how activists in the mid-to-late 1960s and 1970s changed tactics and envisioned alternative political scenarios.
Conclusion:
Civil rights activists used a variety of techniques to articulate their demands for full citizenship including legal battles, nonviolent protests, boycotts, marches, and political engagement. In response, they were greeted with hostility and violence. However, significant gains were made in terms of law and legislation.
We tend to remember the civil rights movement for its influential individuals, but we should also take into account the impact of movement techniques and strategies including collective leadership and local, grassroots organizing.
Although we look back at significant court cases and laws passed as a result of civil rights agitation, the hostile response to those gains reveals that the “movement” did not end with these pieces of legislation.
Citations:
[1] Charles M. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), xiii-xiv.
[2] Cheryl Harris, "Whiteness as Property," Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993), 1755.
[3] Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi: The Classic Autobiography of Growing Up Poor and Black in the Rural South (New York: Bantam Dell, 1968), 132.
[4] For more on Rosa Parks' activism, see Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).
[5] McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 91.
[6] Payne, Light of Freedom, 75.
[7] Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi.
[8] See Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000) for more.
[9] Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 204.
In your opinion, which aspect of the civil rights movement is most remembered today?
I chose influential individuals like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. I believe their events have impacted society today And it holds major significance. Both MLK and Rosa Parks held big positions when standing up for rights and it was well known to many people. Their stories have always carried on.
When it comes to figuring out how to take on a big task. A collective group thinking on the matter is a good approach. Hearing and sharing each person's experiences and what they picked up on in dealing with such situations gives different perspectives. Each collective group could approach organizing civil rights demonstrations in the most effective way for their local area. It encourages everyone to take part and be part of the organization for it benefits them as a whole.
In your opinion, which of the following was the most effective method/tactic of civil right organizers in the early 1960s?
I chose integrated demonstrations. I believe this was the most effective method/tactic of civil right organizers in the early 1960s because it caused the most attention. With such large demonstrations it was impossible to overlook the civil right issues the country was facing. It forced the people in power to actually pay attention rather than try to sweep such injustice under the rug as they had been doing for decades.
In your opinion, which aspect of the civil rights movement is most remembered today?
I definitely think that the answer is "influential individuals like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks." Because they were the symbol of bravery, they weren't scared to refuse discrimination and boycott. They strongly stood up and represent for all the black people, they were like a leader that could give people the strength to fight for their justice.
In your opinion, which aspect of the civil rights movement is most remembered today?
I feel that key individuals like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks were the majority key figure learned and remember for they were always used for this case.