ENTRY # 51
It is late 1945, and the war is over. John Smith is a
Tuskegee airman heading home to Biloxi,
Mississippi. He flew multiple missions during the
war, escorting bombers on missions and earning
commendations and medals in the process. What
will he face in terms of discrimination and
segregation (you may use your book…be specific)
when he gets home? How has he changed as a
result of his WWII experiences, and what will
that mean in the way he deals with
discrimination & segregation? Will he try to
change things? If so, how?
What if his home was Pennsylvania instead of
Mississippi? How would things be different?
(First watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlkSMzXf4hc&feature=youtube_gdata_player)
Gains in the 40s
Brown vs. Board of Education
The Rise of the SCLC and Nonviolent
Civil Disobedience
 Segregation
and Civil Rights quickly became important
national topics after WWII.
 Truman had desegregated the armed forces in 1948 by
Executive Order 9981…why here first?
 Would have liked to have done more but there was
massive resistance to integration at the time.
 However, racial segregation in
America seemed hypocritical after
a war against extreme racism
(Nazis) and during a cold war of
our “freedom and democracy”
against Soviet communism
Robinson broke the baseball color
barrier when the Brooklyn Dodgers
started him at first base on April 15,
1947.
 As the first major league team to
play a black man since the 1880s,
the Dodgers ended racial segregation
that had relegated black players to
the “Negro Leagues” for six decades.
The example of Robinson's character
and unquestionable talent
challenged the traditional basis of
segregation, which, at the time,
marked many other aspects of
American life, and contributed
significantly to Civil Rights Mvmt.

 By
1950s the National
Association For the
Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) was the
largest civil rights
organization in the US.
 They decided to
challenge Segregation and
Plessy v. Ferguson
through the court system.
 Their first target: public
education
A
team of NAACP lawyers, led by Thurgood Marshall
(later the first African American Supreme Court
Justice) argued that Plessy v. Fergson’s “Separate but
Equal” was not actually equal at all, especially in the
area of public education, and that segregation went
agains the 14th Amendment of equal protection under
the law”
 Court ruled that all
schools must be
desegregated
“with all deliberate
speed.”, overturning
Plessy.
 100
southern members of
Congress (including
Samuel and W. Kerr Scott
of D-North Carolina) and
signed an agreement
(Southern Manifesto),
opposing the integration
of schools.
 Some states temporarily
closed public schools,
rather than integrate.

Emmett Till example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8QXNyCvDP4
Ruby Bridges, escorted to
and from school by US
Marshalls in 1960 New
Orleans
 Little
Rock Central High School, Little Rock,
AK.
 9 black students registered to attend the
white school
 As ordered by the Arkansas Governor the
Arkansas National Guard blocked the
students from entering the school way.
 Having taken the Presidential Oath “to
protect and defend the Constitution,”
Eisenhower sent federal troops to protect
the black students as they walked to school
in 1956
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D
2XHob_nVbw
ENTRY # 52, Part A
Based on the film you saw yesterday
(Emmett Till) and the film you just
saw…Could you be this girl? Would
you be brave enough to endure what
she is enduring? Why or why not?

READ THIS: Civil disobedience is defined by Wikipedia as “the active,
professed refusal to obey certain laws, demands, and commands of a
government, or of an occupying international power. Civil disobedience
is commonly, though not always, defined as being nonviolent resistance.
There have been debates as to whether civil disobedience must
necessarily be non-violent. Black's Law Dictionary includes nonviolence
in its definition of civil disobedience. Christian Bay's encyclopedia
article states that civil disobedience requires "carefully chosen and
legitimate means," but holds that they do not have to be nonviolent. It
has been argued that, while both civil disobedience and civil rebellion
are justified by appeal to constitutional defects, rebellion is much more
destructive; therefore, the defects justifying rebellion must be much
more serious than those justifying disobedience, and if one cannot
justify civil rebellion, then one cannot justify a civil disobedients' use
of force and violence and refusal to submit to arrest. Civil disobedients'
refraining from violence is also said to help preserve society's tolerance
of civil disobedience. But McCloskey argues that ‘if violent,
intimidatory, coercive disobedience is more effective, it is, other things
being equal, more justified than less effective, nonviolent
disobedience.’"

THEN:ENTRY # 52, PART B: Read the documents(A-D) on page 817 of your
textbook and answer the questions (1-4) at the bottom of the page.
 Rosa
Parks ("the first lady of civil rights“) was asked
to move from her bus seat on December 1, 1955, in
Montgomery, Alabama.
 When Parks refused to obey the bus driver’s order to
give up her seat in the colored section to a white
passenger, after the white section was filled, she was
arrested.
 An active member of the NAACP, Parks’ arrest touched
off the Montgomery Bus
Boycott, which lasted from
12/1/55 to 12/20/56, and
which resulted in a federal
civil rights victory and the
legal
desegregation of public buses.
 In
a 1992 interview with National Public
Radio's Lynn Neary, Parks recalled:
I did not want to be mistreated, I did not want to be
deprived of a seat that I had paid for. It was just time...
there was opportunity for me to take a stand to express
the way I felt about being treated in that manner. I had
not planned to get arrested. I had plenty to do without
having to end up in jail. But when I had to face that
decision, I didn't hesitate to do so because I felt that
we had endured that too long. The more we gave in,
the more we complied with that kind of treatment, the
more oppressive it became.






Baptist minister and black community leader in
Montgomery, Alabama
Led the Montgomery Bus Boycott, making a
national name for himself as a result of the
boycott and became the nationally recognized
leader of the Civil Rights Movement, who remained
committed to the non-violent protest.
Founded SCLC in 1957 (next slide)
April,1963 “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”- will
Kennedy support a tougher civil rights bill before
his death in late 1963?
August, 1963 March on Washington for
Jobs and Freedom: in
support of this civil rights
bill.“I Have a Dream” speech.

MLK helped establish (in 1957) this group of ministers who worked to nonviolently end segregation.

Included Ralph Abernathy, a close associate of King’s, who will take up the leadership after King’s
death

During its early years, SCLC struggled to gain footholds in black churches and communities across
the South. Social activism in favor of racial equality faced fierce repression from police, White
Citizens' Council and the Ku Klux Klan. Only a few churches had the courage to defy the whitedominated status-quo by affiliating with SCLC, and those that did risked economic retaliation
against pastors and other church leaders, arson, and bombings.

SCLC's advocacy of boycotts and other forms of nonviolent protest was controversial among both
whites and blacks. Many black community leaders believed that segregation should be challenged in
the courts and that direct action excited white resistance, hostility, and violence. Traditionally,
leadership in black communities came from the educated elite—ministers, professionals, teachers,
etc.—who spoke for and on behalf of the laborers, maids, farm-hands, and working poor who made
up the bulk of the black population. Many of these traditional leaders were uneasy at involving
ordinary blacks in mass activity such as boycotts and marches.
Early 1960s
Civil Rights Act 1964
Later Militancy
Among young African Americans,
there was a swell of popular
support for civil rights, partly
rising out of frustration for the
slow movement of change
 Sit-ins (wade-ins, read-ins) all
over the south
 SNCC (Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee) formed
in Spring, 1960 at Shaw University.
 In 1964, the SNCC Freedom
Summer project to register
African American voters in
Mississippi resulted in the murder
of 3 civil rights workers

February 1, 1960
Woolworth’s Counter
Sit-in in Greensboro, NC
Meant to force the Federal
Government to enforce their
decision to desegregate
interstate commerce.
 Two buses full of people
traveled around the south
defying segregation laws.
 One bus was firebombed; the
other attacked by a white
mob in Birmingham, Alabama
 Summer of 1961

JFK vocally supported
civil rights, especially
in his later 1963
speeches (after
Birmingham, Al. & MLK
arrest).
 His brother, Robert,
pushed for civil rights
legislation in his
position as Attorney
General
and when
he ran for
President
in 1968.

Birmingham, Alabama
Johnson
used Kennedy’s death to push
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through
Congress.
 Outlawed segregation in public places
and discrimination in employment on
the basis of race, sex, color or national
origin. –-- prosecute-able by Federal
Justice Department
 Selma
Alabama March was met with massive
violence against non-violent protesters.
Televised news reports shocked the nation on
March 7,1965. President Johnson made a
televised speech calling for strong federal
(rather than states’) voting rights laws.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3W4-rz1ZHc
 Voting

Outlawed literacy tests and
allowed the federal government
to oversee voter registration
 24th

Rights Act of 1965
Amendment (ratified 1964)
No poll taxes for voting
 1965-67
–huge riots rocked
large American cities.
 Los Angeles (Watts),
Detroit, Newark,, etc.
 How different did daily life
actually look for most
Black Americans?
FRUSTRATION over
continued black poverty
and discrimination
 Violence beginning to
replace non-violence in the
civil rights movement…
Malcolm X (Born Malcolm Little) in 1925 in Omaha,
Nebraska) had a difficult early
life, including drugs and crime,
but turned away from all that,
after converting to Islam.
 Would become an important,
though controversial civil
rights leader, criticizing King’s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4PqLKWuwyUb
nonviolence and advocating
black violence in self-defense to counter white
violence: “We declare our right on this earth to be a
man, to be a human being, to be respected as a
human being, to be given the rights of a human
being in this society, on this earth, in this day,
which we intend to bring into existence by any
means necessary.” - Malcolm X, 1965 (the year he was assassinated)

 Political
party
 Would arrange armed
patrols of black
neighborhoods.
 Led to violent
confrontations with the
police in many cities.
 Became the vocal
advocate of “Black
Power” (Stokely
Carmichael’s term),
Stokely Carmichael
rather than integration.
Huey P. Newton
Bobby Seale
By 1968, American
attention was
moving on to other
issues, such as
women’s rights, and
most particularly
the Vietnam War…
Excerpt from MLK’s last speech (”I have been to the
Mountain Top”):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oehry1JC9Rk
Moments after being shot
by James Earl Ray