In the aftermath of World War II, African \nAmericans began to mount organized resistance to racially discriminatory\n policies in force throughout much of the United States. In the South, \nthey used a combination of legal challenges and grassroots activism to \nbegin dismantling the racial segregation that had stood for nearly a \ncentury following the end of Reconstruction. Community activists and \ncivil rights leaders targeted racially discriminatory housing practices,\n segregated transportation, and legal requirements that African \nAmericans and whites be educated separately. While many of these \nchallenges were successful, life did not necessarily improve for African\n Americans. Hostile whites fought these changes in any way they could, \nincluding by resorting to violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
EARLY VICTORIES<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
During World War II, many African Americans had \nsupported the \u201cDouble V Campaign,\u201d which called on them to defeat \nforeign enemies while simultaneously fighting against segregation and \ndiscrimination at home. After World War II ended, many returned home to \ndiscover that, despite their sacrifices, the United States was not \nwilling to extend them any greater rights than they had enjoyed before \nthe war. Particularly rankling was the fact that although African \nAmerican veterans were legally entitled to draw benefits under the GI \nBill, discriminatory practices prevented them from doing so. For \nexample, many banks would not give them mortgages if they wished to buy \nhomes in predominantly African American neighborhoods, which banks often\n considered too risky an investment. However, African Americans who \nattempted to purchase homes in white neighborhoods often found \nthemselves unable to do so because of real estate covenants that \nprevented owners from selling their property to blacks. Indeed, when a \nblack family purchased a Levittown house in 1957, they were subjected to\n harassment and threats of violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Click and Explore<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
For a look at the experiences of an African American family<\/a> that tried to move to a white suburban community, view the 1957 documentary Crisis in Levittown<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The postwar era, however, saw African Americans \nmake greater use of the courts to defend their rights. In 1944, an \nAfrican American woman, Irene Morgan, was arrested in Virginia for \nrefusing to give up her seat on an interstate bus and sued to have her \nconviction overturned. In Morgan v. the Commonwealth of Virginia<\/em>\n in 1946, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the conviction should be \noverturned because it violated the interstate commerce clause of the \nConstitution. This victory emboldened some civil rights activists to \nlaunch the Journey of Reconciliation, a bus trip taken by eight African \nAmerican men and eight white men through the states of the Upper South \nto test the South\u2019s enforcement of the Morgan<\/em> decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other victories followed. In 1948, in Shelley v. Kraemer<\/em>,\n the U.S. Supreme Court held that courts could not enforce real estate \ncovenants that restricted the purchase or sale of property based on \nrace. In 1950, the NAACP brought a case before the U.S. Supreme Court \nthat they hoped would help to undermine the concept of \u201cseparate but \nequal\u201d as espoused in the 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson<\/em>, which gave legal sanction to segregated school systems. Sweatt v. Painter<\/em>\n was a case brought by Herman Marion Sweatt, who sued the University of \nTexas for denying him admission to its law school because state law \nprohibited integrated education. Texas attempted to form a separate law \nschool for African Americans only, but in its decision on the case, the \nU.S. Supreme Court rejected this solution, holding that the separate \nschool provided neither equal facilities nor \u201cintangibles,\u201d such as the \nability to form relationships with other future lawyers, that a \nprofessional school should provide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not all efforts to enact desegregation required the use of the courts, however. On April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson\n started for the Brooklyn Dodgers, playing first base. He was the first \nAfrican American to play baseball in the National League, breaking the \ncolor barrier. Although African Americans had their own baseball teams \nin the Negro Leagues, Robinson opened the gates for them to play in \ndirect competition with white players in the major leagues. Other \nAfrican American athletes also began to challenge the segregation of \nAmerican sports. At the 1948 Summer Olympics, Alice Coachman, an African\n American, was the only American woman to take a gold medal in the games\n (Figure 28.17<\/a>). These changes, while symbolically significant, were mere cracks in the wall of segregation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Figure 28.17 Baseball\n legend Jackie Robinson (a) was active in the civil rights movement. He \nserved on the NAACP\u2019s board of directors and helped to found an African \nAmerican-owned bank. Alice Coachman (b), who competed in track and field\n at Tuskegee University, was the first black woman to win an Olympic \ngold medal.\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n Until 1954, racial segregation in education was \nnot only legal but was required in seventeen states and permissible in \nseveral others (Figure 28.18<\/a>).\n Utilizing evidence provided in sociological studies conducted by \nKenneth Clark and Gunnar Myrdal, however, Thurgood Marshall, then chief \ncounsel for the NAACP, successfully argued the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas<\/em>\n before the U.S. Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren. \nMarshall showed that the practice of segregation in public schools made \nAfrican American students feel inferior. Even if the facilities provided\n were equal in nature, the Court noted in its decision, the very fact \nthat some students were separated from others on the basis of their race\n made segregation unconstitutional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Figure 28.18 This map shows those states in which racial segregation in public education was required by law before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education<\/em>\n decision. In 1960, four years later, fewer than 10 percent of southern \nAfrican American students attended the same schools as white students.\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a law student in 1933, Thurgood Marshall (Figure 28.19<\/a>)\n was recruited by his mentor Charles Hamilton Houston to assist in \ngathering information for the defense of a black man in Virginia accused\n of killing two white women. His continued close association with \nHouston led Marshall to aggressively defend blacks in the court system \nand to use the courts as the weapon by which equal rights might be \nextracted from the U.S. Constitution and a white racist system. Houston \nalso suggested that it would be important to establish legal precedents \nregarding the Plessy v. Ferguson<\/em> ruling of separate but equal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Figure 28.19 In\n 1956, NAACP leaders (from left to right) Henry L. Moon, Roy Wilkins, \nHerbert Hill, and Thurgood Marshall present a new poster in the campaign\n against southern white racism. Marshall successfully argued the \nlandmark case Brown v. Board of Education<\/em> (1954) before the U.S. Supreme Court and later became the court\u2019s first African American justice.\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n By 1938, Marshall had become \u201cMr. Civil Rights\u201d \nand formally organized the NAACP\u2019s Legal Defense and Education Fund in \n1940 to garner the resources to take on cases to break the racist \njustice system of America. A direct result of Marshall\u2019s energies and \ncommitment was his 1940 victory in a Supreme Court case, Chambers v. Florida<\/em>,\n which held that confessions obtained by violence and torture were \ninadmissible in a court of law. His most well-known case was Brown v. Board of Education<\/em> in 1954, which held that state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students were unconstitutional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Later in life, Marshall reflected on his career fighting racism in a speech at Howard Law School in 1978:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Be aware of that myth, that everything is going to be all right. Don\u2019t give in. I add that, because it seems to me, that what we need to do today is to refocus. Back in the 30s and 40s, we could go no place but to court. We knew then, the court was not the final solution. Many of us knew the final solution would have to be politics, if for no other reason, politics is cheaper than lawsuits. So now we have both. We have our legal arm, and we have our political arm. Let\u2019s use them both. And don\u2019t listen to this myth that it can be solved by either or that it has already been solved. Take it from me, it has not been solved.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n When Marshall says that the problems of racism have not been solved, to what was he referring?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Plessy v. Fergusson<\/em>\n had been overturned. The challenge now was to integrate schools. A year\n later, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered southern school systems to begin desegregation\n \u201cwith all deliberate speed.\u201d Some school districts voluntarily \nintegrated their schools. For many other districts, however, \u201cdeliberate\n speed\u201d was very, very slow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It soon became clear that enforcing Brown v. the Board of Education<\/em> would require presidential intervention. Eisenhower did not agree with the U.S. Supreme Court\u2019s decision and did not wish to force southern states to integrate their schools. However, as president, he was responsible for doing so. In 1957, Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, was forced to accept its first nine African American students, who became known as the Little Rock Nine. In response, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus called out the state National Guard to prevent the students from attending classes, removing the troops only after Eisenhower told him to do so. A subsequent attempt by the nine students to attend school resulted in mob violence. Eisenhower then placed the Arkansas National Guard under federal control and sent the U.S. Army\u2019s 101st airborne unit to escort the students to and from school as well as from class to class (Figure 28.20<\/a>). This was the first time since the end of Reconstruction that federal troops once more protected the rights of African Americans in the South.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Figure 28.20 In\n 1957, U.S. soldiers from the 101st Airborne were called in to escort \nthe Little Rock Nine into and around formerly all-white Central High \nSchool in Little Rock, Arkansas.\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n Throughout the course of the school year, the \nLittle Rock Nine were insulted, harassed, and physically assaulted; \nnevertheless, they returned to school each day. At the end of the school\n year, the first African American student graduated from Central High. \nAt the beginning of the 1958\u20131959 school year, Orval Faubus ordered all \nLittle Rock\u2019s public schools closed. In the opinion of white \nsegregationists, keeping all students out of school was preferable to \nhaving them attend integrated schools. In 1959, the U.S. Supreme Court \nruled that the school had to be reopened and that the process of \ndesegregation had to proceed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Efforts to desegregate public schools led to a backlash among most southern whites. Many greeted the Brown<\/em>\n decision with horror; some World War II veterans questioned how the \ngovernment they had fought for could betray them in such a fashion. Some\n white parents promptly withdrew their children from public schools and \nenrolled them in all-white private academies, many newly created for the\n sole purpose of keeping white children from attending integrated \nschools. Often, these \u201cacademies\u201d held classes in neighbors\u2019 basements \nor living rooms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other white southerners turned to state \nlegislatures or courts to solve the problem of school integration. \nOrders to integrate school districts were routinely challenged in court.\n When the lawsuits proved unsuccessful, many southern school districts \nresponded by closing all public schools, as Orval Faubus had done after \nCentral High School was integrated. One county in Virginia closed its \npublic schools for five years rather than see them integrated. Besides \nsuing school districts, many southern segregationists filed lawsuits \nagainst the NAACP, trying to bankrupt the organization. Many national \npoliticians supported the segregationist efforts. In 1956, ninety-six \nmembers of Congress signed \u201cThe Southern Manifesto,\u201d in which they \naccused the U.S. Supreme Court of misusing its power and violating the \nprinciple of states\u2019 rights, which maintained that states had rights equal to those of the federal government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unfortunately, many white southern racists, \nfrightened by challenges to the social order, responded with violence. \nWhen Little Rock\u2019s Central High School desegregated, an irate Ku Klux \nKlansman from a neighboring community sent a letter to the members of \nthe city\u2019s school board in which he denounced them as Communists and \nthreatened to kill them. White rage sometimes erupted into murder. In \nAugust 1955, both white and black Americans were shocked by the \nbrutality of the murder of Emmett Till. Till, a fourteen-year-old boy \nfrom Chicago, had been vacationing with relatives in Mississippi. While \nvisiting a white-owned store, he had made a remark to the white woman \nbehind the counter. A few days later, the husband and brother-in-law of \nthe woman came to the home of Till\u2019s relatives in the middle of the \nnight and abducted the boy. Till\u2019s beaten and mutilated body was found \nin a nearby river three days later. Till\u2019s mother insisted on an \nopen-casket funeral; she wished to use her son\u2019s body to reveal the \nbrutality of southern racism. The murder of a child who had been guilty \nof no more than a casual remark captured the nation\u2019s attention, as did \nthe acquittal of the two men who admitted killing him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of those inspired by Till\u2019s death was Rosa \nParks, an NAACP member from Montgomery, Alabama, who became the face of \nthe 1955\u20131956 Montgomery Bus Boycott. City ordinances in Montgomery \nsegregated the city\u2019s buses, forcing African American passengers to ride\n in the back section. They had to enter through the rear of the bus, \ncould not share seats with white passengers, and, if the front of the \nbus was full and a white passenger requested an African American\u2019s seat,\n had to relinquish their place to the white rider. The bus company also \nrefused to hire African American drivers even though most of the people \nwho rode the buses were black.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give her seat to a white man, and the Montgomery police arrested her. After being bailed out of jail, she decided to fight the laws requiring segregation in court. To support her, the Women\u2019s Political Council, a group of African American female activists, organized a boycott of Montgomery\u2019s buses. News of the boycott spread through newspaper notices and by word of mouth; ministers rallied their congregations to support the Women\u2019s Political Council. Their efforts were successful, and forty thousand African American riders did not take the bus on December 5, the first day of the boycott.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other African American leaders within the city \nembraced the boycott and maintained it beyond December 5, Rosa Parks\u2019 \ncourt date. Among them was a young minister named Martin Luther King, \nJr. For the next year, black Montgomery residents avoided the city\u2019s \nbuses. Some organized carpools. Others paid for rides in African \nAmerican-owned taxis, whose drivers reduced their fees. Most walked to \nand from school, work, and church for 381 days, the duration of the \nboycott. In June 1956, an Alabama federal court found the segregation \nordinance unconstitutional. The city appealed, but the U.S. Supreme \nCourt upheld the decision. The city\u2019s buses were desegregated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: Explain how Presidents Truman and Eisenhower addressed civil rights issues Discuss efforts by African Americans to end discrimination and segregation Describe southern whites\u2019 response to the civil rights movement In the aftermath of World War II, African Americans began to mount organized […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/myedme.com\/login\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/myedme.com\/login\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/myedme.com\/login\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myedme.com\/login\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myedme.com\/login\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33659"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/myedme.com\/login\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33665,"href":"https:\/\/myedme.com\/login\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33659\/revisions\/33665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/myedme.com\/login\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myedme.com\/login\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myedme.com\/login\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
DESEGREGATION AND INTEGRATION<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
Defining American<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Thurgood Marshall on Fighting Racism<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
WHITE RESPONSES<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
THE MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT<\/h3>\n\n\n\n