The Causes of the Civil Rights Movement
But like all major milestones in human history, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act were not produced in a vacuum. They emerged in the days of the Civil Rights Movement, when black Americans across the nation, but particularly in the south, applied pressure on the federal government in order to revive the progressive traditions of Thaddeus Stevens, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Ulysses S. Grant and protect their Constitutional rights. Tracing the timeline back even further, the Civil Rights Movement was the result of a collection of events and policies enacted between the 1930s and the early 1950s which inspired both optimism and righteous indignation within the hearts and souls of black Americans. The events I'll describe in this article filled one of two roles. There were bits of progress in the struggle of black Americans which operated as a gentle breeze brushing against the broken American heart, relieving terror and energizing hope. But there were also instances of obscene racial animosity and white supremacist despotism that created enough anger to catalyze a movement whose success became the success of the whole nation.
In 1933, the United States was facing a crisis of financial and economic origins: The Great Depression. A series of factors, stemming from overproduction in the farming sector to fulfill WW1 demands to panicked bank runs to a trade war caused by Herbert Hoover's increase in tariffs, had struck the booming market of the Roaring 20s, quickly eating away at its health and rendering it the rotting victim of the worst economic crisis in recorded history. Because Hoover was so incompetent in his handling of the depression, he was easily defeated in the 1932 election, replaced on March 4, 1933, by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Soon after, Roosevelt launched the New Deal, a campaign of economic reforms and stimulus projects meant to end the Great Depression in the short term and prevent repeats of it in the long term. One element of the former goal was to commission new public works projects and set up novel government agencies that would require additional workers, hence boosting employment.
Leaders of the black community and black government officials were intrigued by this idea and saw it as a useful means of acquiring new economic opportunities for their people. The result of this was that a collection of minor officials in a number of cabinet departments - the Department of State, the Department of the Treasury, the Department of Interior, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Labor, etc. - united to establish an informal advocacy group officially labeled "the Federal Council on Negro Affairs". To most, this group was simply dubbed "the Black Cabinet". The Black Cabinet worked to ensure that New Deal job programs included black applicants with all the appropriate merits. They used Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR's wife, as a conduit of sorts, alerting her of issues with the relationship between black Americans and the New Deal and having her communicate these topics to the president. The Black Cabinet was extremely successful and soon began pressuring FDR to address broader issues facing the black community. The Black Cabinet became incredibly admired by people of color and helped inspire what would become the Civil Rights Movement.
By 1939 and 1940, FDR was preparing to exit the presidency. He had served nearly 2 terms, at which point almost every president since George Washington willingly resigned. (The only exceptions to this rule were Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, but none of them had succeeded in securing new terms.) However, in September 1939, German forces invaded Poland, sparking World War 2. Roosevelt feared that a sudden shift in leadership would jeopardize stability amidst the conflict, so he reluctantly ran for a third term. In 1940, he defeated the Republican nominee Wendell Willkie, being inaugurated to begin his third term on January 20, 1941. Roosevelt, from the moment WW2 began, was a staunch supporter of the Allies against the Axis. Thus, he adjusted neutrality laws to make it easier to ship supplies to Allied nations and brokered a number of trade deals with nations fighting the Axis that allowed members of the Allies to access US goods for essentially free. Because of this, 1940 saw a sharp growth in the weapons manufacturing industry.
Employees in this newly-revived industry were gifted with amazing wages, rendering black Americans envious and desiring weaponry jobs of their own. So, in the spring and summer of 1941, black leaders threatened to protest on the lawn of the White House if President Roosevelt didn't help them secure these lucrative careers. In response, Roosevelt issued an executive order on June 25, 1941, that prohibited the federal government and weapons industry from denying employment to people on the basis of their race or ethnicity. 3 years after this, Roosevelt won a fourth term, defeating Republican Thomas Dewey in the 1944 election. He began his renewed tenure on January 20, 1945, but, exhausted from all his work guiding the US through the gloomy 30s and terrifying 40s, died just 2 and a half months later on April 12, 1945. His vice president, Harry S. Truman, then became president. Truman, a southerner from Missouri, originally opposed civil rights but, upon hearing about the lack of thanks given to black WW2 veterans, changed his opinion to support improved race relations.
Due to a combination of his new stance on civil rights and pressure from black leaders, Truman requested in 1948 that Congress draft a bill desegregating the military. He hoped that by signing such a piece of legislation, Truman could win the affection of black Americans and a second term in the process. The bill was shot down by racist Congressmen, so Truman resorted to the executive order. On July 26, 1948, President Truman issued an executive order demanding that black and white soldiers, alongside soldiers of any other race or ethnicity, serve together and that no additional systems of segregation be instated. Initially, no one took these demands seriously. It wasn't until the Korean War that this executive order was actually enforced, as regiments of white soldiers realized they could do more damage to North Korean and Chinese troops by combining their numbers with those of black brigades. Still, Truman's choice to desegregate the military, alongside Roosevelt's ban on race-based employment discrimination in the federal government and work with the Black Cabinet, revived calls for black-white equality and helped build the civil rights movement.
In 1951, Oliver Brown, a black man living near Topeka, Kansas, asked a public school that only admitted white students - Kansas practiced Jim Crow laws at the time - if his daughter could attend. Brown made this decision because the nearest all-black school was several miles from his home and since he had to go to work extremely early, he couldn't drive his daughter there. Because of this, she had to walk across busy roads and railways in order to attend school, putting her in great danger. Despite this hazard, Brown's application was still rejected. For this reason, he sued the school district, registering the case of Brown v. Board of Education. The case went to the Kansas Supreme Court, where Brown lost. Brown then appealed to the federal Supreme Court. At the same time that Brown was filing this suit and hiring a lawyer, many other black parents sued their school districts due to segregationist policies. For this reason, at the end of 1952 and the start of 1953, the Supreme Court merged all of these cases under one title: Brown v. Board of Education.
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. In the opinion, written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, the judicial branch cited a ruling they had made back in 1896 in a case called Plessy v. Ferguson. With the Plessy v. Ferguson case, the court claimed that Jim Crow laws didn't violate equal protection under the law - as instituted through the 14th Amendment - so long as the facilities offered to black and white people were equal in quality. Warren didn't repeal Plessy v. Ferguson with Brown v. Board of Education, but he did weaken it by saying that segregated public schools were inherently unequal to one another. As a result, the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education required all public schools operating in the United States to accept any student, regardless of their race. The public education system had been desegregated! The ancient wall of tyranny had been shattered, each brick blown apart and the barrier no longer present to damage America! Like the desegregation of government agencies and the military, the desegregation of public schools helped inspire the Civil Rights Movement.
But while black Americans and supporters of all races celebrated Brown v. Board of Education for the monumental achievement of American civilization that it was, for the shimmering successor to the egalitarianism of the Declaration of Independence that it represented, racist southerners were caught in a fit of unhinged rage. Violent threats, deranged bile, and insults hurled toward black students and their parents usurped the national dialogue, scaring sane Americans and alerting black people to the dire straits they were caught between. Just as the ecstasy following the successes of the Black Cabinet and Oliver Brown served as a basis for the Civil Rights Movement, so did the terror flooding the hearts of black Americans caused by the unhinged racism responding to this progress.
Just over a year after the enactment of Brown v. Board of Education, a teenager from Illinois named Emmett Till went to visit family in Money, Mississippi. During this visit, Till and some friends stood outside of a candy shop on August 24, 1955. Amidst their conversation, Till bragged that back in his Illinois hometown, he had a white girlfriend. Everyone else was skeptical, so to prove it, Till was dared to enter the candy shop and hit on the white clerk. Wanting to show his skill with flirting, Till walked into the store, bought a few pieces of candy, and exclaimed, "Hey baby!" to the clerk. He then swiftly left the building. 3 days after this incident, the clerk's husband, who was the owner of the candy shop and was out of town for a business meeting, returned on August 27, 1955. His wife produced a slew of bizarre lies about Till, claiming that he wolf-whistled at her, made gross remarks, and grabbed her crouch. The candy shop's owner was irate and, on the morning of August 28, 1955, went to the house Till was staying at, spoke with Till's uncle, and demanded to see the visitor.
Till was driven around for several hours before being brought to the bank of a nearby river on the outskirts of Money. There, he was severely maimed and had his eyes angrily gauged out. Till was then shot in the head, ending his life prematurely. His dismembered body was tied around a barrel with barbed wire and tossed into the river. Authorities only identified his body - which was covered in blood and torn pieces of Till's organs - by a ring he was wearing. Several photos were taken of the murdered Till, first by police investigating the incident and then by those attending his open-casket funeral. Many of these pictures were published in a magazine called Jet and were circulated across the black community throughout September 1955. The gruesome images of the brutalized body of Emmett Till acted like a bottle of gasoline. Black southerners, having spent the past 80 years bound to an irrational system of oppressive laws and deceptive loopholes, were appalled by what had happened to Till, and so the Jim Crow legacy was now drenched in the gasoline of liberty's righteous rage. Anything, either minor or major, could set this blot on US history ablaze, emancipating the south and its black residents.
It wouldn't take long for that final straw to manifest. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a minor official for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was leaving work in Montgomery, Alabama, as she boarded a local bus home. At another stop, a white man got on and couldn't find a seat that wasn't already occupied. He then demanded that Park cede her spot to him. Legally, Parks was required to do this. State law in Alabama mandated that if all the seats on a bus were taken and a black passenger was asked to leave their seat by a white person, then the black person in question was obligated to comply. However, Parks bravely refused to give up her seat. She had gotten there first after all. Unfortunately, the rest of the bus and the local government wouldn't tolerate this and had Parks arrested. News of the incident spread across Montgomery and rendered the city's black community furious. ED Nixon was especially upset. Nixon was a former car manufacturer who had initiated his activism career by creating a union for his co-workers. He had actually secured other victories for civil rights, once writing to Eleanor Roosevelt a letter that successfully convinced her to establish a brigade for black soldiers. Nixon spread word of the arrest across the south, energizing black anger to the point of spurring the creation of the Civil Rights Movement.
Later on December 1, 1955, Martin Luther King Jr., a prominent Baptist pastor working in Montgomery, established the Montgomery Improvement Association to help fight for improved race relations. Over the next few days, the MIA worked with another progressive political advocacy group - the Women's Political Council - to distribute flyers encouraging the city's residents to boycott its busing system in protest of Parks' arrest. The Montgomery Busing Boycott began on December 5, 1955, and successfully pressured the Supreme Court to rule in Browder v. Gayle that segregated public busing was obviously unconstitutional. On November 14, 1956, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Browder v. Gayle, saying that since segregated busing laws make unneeded distinctions between black and white people, they violate the 14th Amendment and so are invalid. A little over a month later, on December 20, 1956, the Montgomery Busing Boycott came to a close. The die were cast. The cards were drawn. The future was written. The Civil Rights Movement had begun and by the end of the next decade, it would successfully convince the federal government to unravel a relic of the southern Gilded Age.
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