The Civil Rights

Movement

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Segregation and the Court Cases that Defined It

It was not until the Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v.Ferguson that the separate but equal doctrine was officially written into law. The case was based upon the refusal of Homer Adolf Plessy to use the segregated train car assigned to African Americans, and as a result, was imprisoned for the violation of a Louisiana statute. His case thereafter went to the nation’s highest court, the Supreme Court, and the judges considered the issue of “separate but equal” in relation to the 14th Amendment. In the Plessy case, the Supreme Court ruled that separate facilities for blacks and whites were constitutional as long as they were equal. Plessy v. Ferguson stood as the case by which separation of the races was legalized in the United States and denied African Americans access to many of the white facilities that had been racially integrated after the Civil War.

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During the first half of the 20th century educational facilities for African Americans remained in need of repair. Although facilities were separate, they were oftentimes not equal.

Schools attended by African-American children generally were over-crowded, under-funded, with materials and facilities being old and in disrepair. The injustices suffered by African-American schoolchildren eventually led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to fight against unequal school facilities. Five separate cases contesting inequalities in public education were considered under Oliver Brown et. al. v. the Board of Education of Topeka (Brown v. Board) in 1954.

Brown v. Board ultimately overturned the decision made in Plessy v. Ferguson. The “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson made the practice of placing children in schools according to race legal. In the early 1950s, the following 17 states required racial segregation in public schools:

Alabama Arkansas Delaware Florida Georgia Kentucky Louisiana Maryland Mississippi Missouri Tennessee Oklahoma South CarolinaNorth Carolina Texas Virginia West Virginia.

Four others--Arizona, Kansas, New Mexico, and Wyoming--permitted segregation in public schools if local communities wanted it.

By the fall of 1952, the Supreme Court had agreed to hear arguments in five separate cases that focused on the constitutionality of maintaining segregated public schools. The Court decided to group the cases together under the title Brown v. Board of Education and hear arguments collectively. Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark remarked: “We consolidated them and made Brown the first so that the whole question would not smack of being a purely Southern one.”

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Auditorium at Robert Russa Moton High School, Farmville , Virginia

Auditorium at Farmville High School, Farmville, Virginia

Was this “Separate But Equal”?

The five school desegregation cases that the Supreme Court agreed to hear in the fall of 1952 included:

Brown v. Board of Education (Kansas)Briggs v. Elliot (South Carolina)Davis v. Prince Edward County School Board (Virginia)Belton v. Gebhart (Delaware)Bolling v. Sharpe (District of Columbia)

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The Court heard the cases under Oliver Brown et al. v. the Board of Education of Topeka and convened to hear arguments on December 9, 1952. The defendants in the cases claimed that operating segregated schools was consistent with custom and law and should be maintained. While the plaintiffs insisted on immediate integration, the defendants held that ensuring that black and white schools were equal was an acceptable compromise.

This act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on July 2, 1964, prohibited discrimination in public places, provided for the integration of schools and other public facilities, and made employment discrimination illegal. This document was the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

President Johnson signing the bill into lawhttp://www.hud.gov/offices/fheo/images/LBJ-CivilRightsAct.jpg www.ourdocuments.com

This act was signed into law on August 6, 1965, by President Lyndon Johnson. It outlawed the discriminatory voting practices adopted in many southern states after the Civil War, including literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting.

Voting Rights Act of 1965

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Time for an activity…..

Use your recording sheet to complete the activity at this stop.

#1

Taking A

Stand

December 1, 1955, was the day on which Rosa Parks took her famous bus ride. Below you will read some of the rules bus riders followed at that time:•White people boarded the bus through the front door. They dropped their coins into the fare box next to the driver. Then they sat in one of the long seats at the front of the bus or in one of the first three rows of seats.

•Black people boarded the bus through the front door. They dropped their coins into the fare box. Then they had to get off the bus and get back on through the door in the back of the bus. They took a seat in one of the last five rows or they stood in a "standing only” area at the back of the bus.

•If a white person got on the bus and there were no more seats in the white section, a black person who was sitting in the front rows of seats set aside for black people had to give up his or her seat

Time for an activity…..

Use your recording sheet and follow the directions to complete the activity at this stop.

#2

Rosa Parks has finally had enough of being treated as a second-class citizen. As an African American, she has put up with terrible treatment on city buses, as well as in stores, restaurants, movie theaters, and other places for years. She is tired of it. In fact, she remembers that twelve years earlier this very same bus driver made her get off the bus and enter through the rear door. When the driver continues shouting at her to move, Rosa Parks decides that she is not going to take it anymore. She simply says no, and refuses to get up from her seat.

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The angry bus driver puts on the emergency brake, gets out of his seat and marches over to Mrs. Parks. He demands that she move to the back of the bus. When she doesn't, he leaves the bus and returns with a policeman. Mrs. Parks is promptly arrested for violating segregation laws.Upon hearing of Rosa Parks's arrest, Mr. E.D. Nixon, a friend and longtime civil rights leader, posts her bail. Nixon believes that the Montgomery African-American community must respond. Although Rosa Parks is not the first African American to be treated unfairly, he is determined to try and make her the last.

http://teacher.scholastic.com/rosa/arrested.htm

Time for an activity…..

Create a wordle using adjectives that you would use to describe Rosa Parks and how she was feeling on the day she took a stand and refused to give up her seat on the bus.

Click on the bus above to go to the wordle site. Type in the words you have chosen and then hit go and then Print.

#3

The next day, Friday, December 2, E.D. Nixon calls a meeting of black leaders to discuss how to fight bus segregation. Knowing that the city bus system depends heavily on the African-American community, the black leaders agree to call a boycott of all city buses on Monday, December 5. A new and popular minister in Montgomery by the name of Martin Luther King, Jr. is chosen to lead the boycott. By Friday evening the news of the upcoming boycott has spread throughout the city.

http://teacher.scholastic.com/rosa/arrested.htm

On Monday morning, December 5, King and the other leaders wait nervously at a bus stop to see whether their plan will work. To their relief and surprise, bus after bus rolls by with no African Americans aboard. United in protest, boycotters choose instead to walk, take carpools, pedal bicycles, and even ride mules to get to work instead of board the buses. That same day Rosa Parks goes to court with her lawyer. The judge finds her guilty of breaking a city segregation law and fines her $14. Declaring that the law is unjust, Rosa Parks's lawyer says he will appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court

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People carpooled or walked to work instead of riding the bus during the boycott.

Harassment grows worse as the boycott continues. Protesters receive threatening phone calls and tickets for trivial violations; their homes are vandalized. The violence reaches new heights when one day, while Dr. King is at a church meeting, a bomb explodes at his home. His wife, Coretta Scott King, their two-month-old baby, Yolanda, and a friend are inside. Dr. King rushes home as soon as he hears the news. Upon arriving he learns that no one has been hurt. But supporters are crowding around his house. They are furious and ready to fight. King tells them not to fight. "We cannot solve this problem with retaliatory violence," King tells the crowd calmly. "We must meet violence with nonviolence."

Organized Protests

& Passive

Resistance

Sit -InsIn sit-ins, protesters usually seat themselves at some strategic location (inside a restaurant, in a street to block it, in a government or corporate office, and so on). They remain until they are evicted, usually by force, or arrested, or until their requests have been met. Sit-ins have historically been a highly successful form of protest because they cause disruption that draws attention to the protest and by proxy the protesters' cause. They are a non violent way to effectually shut down an area or business. The forced removal of protesters, and sometimes the use of violence against them, often arouses sympathy from the public, increasing the chances of the demonstrators reaching their audience.Sit-ins were an integral part of the nonviolent strategy of civil disobedience and mass protests that eventually led to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which ended legally-sanctioned racial segregation in the United States and also passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that struck down many racially-motivated barriers used to deny voting rights to non-whites.

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Sit -Ins

MarchesThe Selma to Montgomery marches, also known as Bloody Sunday and the two marches that followed, were marches and protests held in 1965, that marked the political and emotional peak of the American civil rights movement. All three marches were attempts to march from Selma to Montgomery where the Alabama capitol is located. They grew out of the voting rights movement in Selma, launched by local African-Americans who formed the Dallas County Voters League (DCVL). In 1963, the DCVL and organizers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) began voter-registration work. When white resistance to black voter registration proved intractable, the DCVL requested the assistance of Martin Luther King Jr and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who brought many prominent civil rights and civic leaders to support voting rights.

Martin Luther King, Jr., center, and his wife, Coretta Scott King, arm in arm, lead a civil rights march in Alabama on March 21, 1965. Thousands of protesters marched with the Kings from Selma to the State Capitol in Montgomery to draw attention to African Americans’ lack of voting rights.

© Robert Abbott Sengstacke, Getty Images

MarchesPresident Kennedy proposed a new civil rights bill. To show that the bill had widespread support, civil rights groups united to organize a March on Washington. Organizers hoped to draw a crowd of 100,000, but instead over 250,000 people from around the nation, arriving in more than thirty special trains and 2,000 chartered buses, descended on Washington, DC on August 28, 1963. There, they heard speeches and songs from numerous activists, artists, and civil rights leaders. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered the closing address, his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.The day was an overwhelming success. There was no violence and the event received extensive media coverage. Although it did not have an immediate impact on Congress -- Kennedy's civil rights bill was not passed for nearly a year -- it affected in some way just about everyone who participated or watched.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/.a/6a00d8341c630a53ef012876e0bcdc970c-600wi

Time for an activity…..

#4Use your recording sheet for questions and activities at this bus stop.

Freedom RidersIn 1961, the Freedom Riders, a dedicated group of men and women, black and white, young and old (many from university and college campuses) across the country boarded buses, trains and planes bound for the deep South to challenge that region‘s outdated Jim Crow laws and the non-compliance with a US Supreme Court decision already three years old that prohibited segregation in all interstate public transportation facilities.

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Freedom RidersThe next morning the Freedom Rides boarded the buses and took their places, blacks and whites seated together on the bus, an act already considered a crime in most segregated states. At stops along the way, the Freedom Riders entered “whites” and “colored” areas contrary to where they were supposed to go and ate together at segregated lunch counters. They met little resistance along the way until Rockville, S.C. where an angry mob beat the Freedom Riders as they pulled into the station. This was the first of many such beatings the Freedom Riders were to receive at the hands of angry mobs.

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Freedom RidersUndaunted by the beatings. the Freedom Riders continued on their journey until Mother’s Day, May, 14th, 1961 when they were met by an angry mob (dressed in their Sunday finest as if they’d just come from church) in Anniston, Alabama. Due to the ferocity of the mob, the bus decided not to stop at the station and it quickly left, already wounded by the mob who had slashed the bus’s tires at the station.

A few miles outside of Anniston the tires began to deflate and the bus was forced to pull over. As the bus driver fled in glee, a mob of men who had been following the bus got out of their cars and surrounded the stricken bus. From somewhere in the crowd a firebomb was thrown inside the bus and exploded.

Freedom Riders

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As the Freedom Riders tried to escape the smoke and flames they found they could not as the exit doors were blocked by the surging mob. Just then one of the gas tanks exploded on the bus and the mob rushed back allowing the Freedom Riders to push the doors open and escape. As they exited the burning bus, the Freedom Riders rushed outside still choking from the thick smoke and were beaten by the waiting vigilantes. As lead pipes and baseball bats were swung, only an onboard undercover agent prevented the Freedom Riders from being lynched that day as he fired his gun into the air. Later that same day the Freedom Riders were beaten a second time as they arrived in Birmingham, Alabama.

Freedom Riders

Alarmed by the violence, President Kennedy dispatched his brother, then Attorney General Robert Kennedy to strike a deal with the state officials from Mississippi to ensure that the Freedom Riders would have safe passage to Jackson. In exchange for their safe passage (the National Guard would escort the Freedom Riders into the state), the Freedom Riders would be arrested on their arrival in Jackson. Mass ArrestsSoon, the local jails in Jackson were filled to capacity. Over 350 of the Freedom Riders were placed behind bars and given a six-month sentence for “breach of peace” violations. Rather than posting bail immediately however, the Freedom Riders chose to remain in jail for forty days, the maximum amount of time one could remain in jail before losing their right of appeal.

Five months after the first Freedom Rides left on their historic ride the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) in conjunction with the US Attorney General Robert Kennedy issued a tough new Federal order banning segregation at all interstate public facilities based on “race, color or creed.” The law became effective on November 1st, 1961.

Click on the picture above to trace the route of the Freedom Riders.

Time for an activity…..

#5Click on the bus above to read about some of the riders on the original Freedom Ride. Use your recording sheet to take notes on one of person of your choice. Then click on the picture below to proceed to another site where you will create a bio-cube on one of the Freedom Riders. Be sure to print out and construct your bio-cube.