unit 3: civil rights

president john f kennedy

used federal troops to support civil rights protestors

president dwight d eisenhower

ordered federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to support school integration

president harry s truman

ordered the US military to integrate its forces

president lyndon b johnson

pushed for and signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965

rosa parks

refused to give up a seat on the bus to a white man, sparking the Montgomery bus boycott

Rights of Disabled Citizens

A movement to support rights for Americans with disabilities also began in the 1960s. Supporters were encouraged by the examples of the African American civil rights and women's rights movements. In 1973, the Rehabilitation Act became law. It prohibited discrimination in any organization or program that receives federal funds. This act became the first civil rights law guaranteeing equal opportunity for people with disabilities. In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) provided sweeping protections for people with disabilities. Closely modeled after the Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act stands as the most effective disability rights legislation in US history. For example, the law mandated that employers make "reasonable accommodations" for workers with disabilities and that public buildings such as restaurants and stores make modifications to ensure access for people with disabilities. The act also mandated that public transportation, communication, and other public services be accessible to people with disabilities

Congressional Legislation

Beginning in the late 1950s, Congress became involved in the passage of civil rights legislation largely due to efforts by people like Dr. King. The Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 created the United States Civil Rights Commission and provided for federal voting referees. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 further protected voting rights by banning all discriminatory registration requirements. However, these laws often weren't able to put an end to individual discriminatory acts. Seeing the problems with the previous acts, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This law took a much tougher approach than its predecessors. It called on the attorney general to actively challenge unfair voting practices. The act required the federal government to preapprove, or preclear, any voting law changes in states where voting discrimination had been the most severe.

How did the Jim Crow laws fortify and perpetuate, or continue, racial discrimination in the United States?

Local and state governments passed Jim Crow laws to specifically discriminate against certain groups of people, particularly African Americans in some southern states. These laws created societies built on official racism and inequality.

"Separate but Equal"

Local and state governments, particularly in the South, used Jim Crow laws to discriminate against non-whites, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court effectively endorsed legal segregation in the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld a Louisiana law requiring separate rail cars for blacks and whites. In Plessy, the Supreme Court argued that segregation did not violate the equal protection clause because the separate facilities for blacks were equal to those of whites. This doctrine became known as "separate but equal." Plessy provided constitutional justification for segregation laws for the next 60 years. Just as the application of equality had divided the nation before the Civil War, the ideals of equality divided the nation for the first half of the twentieth century, particularly in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.

American Indian Movement

Other minority groups, including American Indians, have also sought to attain equal rights. The American Indian Movement (AIM) is one organization that formed in the wake of the civil rights movement. Activists established AIM in 1968 with the intention of creating a political advocacy group dedicated to preserving American Indian culture and addressing problems within American Indian communities. Issues of importance to AIM included poverty, violence perpetrated against tribes, and the relationship between tribes and the US government. In 1972, members of AIM marched on Washington, DC, to protest congressional involvement in a multitude of issues concerning American Indians. They named their protest the "Trail of Broken Treaties" to highlight the many agreements and policies related to American Indians that the US government had failed to uphold.

The Civil Rights Acts

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 became the flagship of legislation passed to outlaw discrimination during the 1960s. The act and its amendments prohibited the following: -discrimination in "public accommodations" on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin -employers and labor unions from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, or physical handicap -any program that received federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, or physical handicap The Civil Rights Act of 1968 also banned housing discrimination. Taken together, these civil rights acts produced a sweeping effect on the protections afforded to many groups of people. The acts prohibited racial and gender discrimination by the government and banned private discrimination in housing and employment.

Impact of the Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Acts prohibited not only racial discrimination but also most discrimination based on gender, religion, and physical handicap. For this reason, the 1960s civil rights movement gave new life and strength to other groups' movements for equality.

The Aftermath of the Civil War

The Civil War offered the United States the opportunity to abolish slavery and give blacks equal rights under the law. After the war, Congress passed three important civil rights amendments to the Constitution. However, all three branches of the government lacked the political will to protect the rights of blacks from rampant racism and discrimination. As a result, pseudoslavery developed in some states, where local and state governments enacted laws that discriminated against blacks. These systems of discrimination became a part of life in many former slave states of the South.

What did the Nineteenth Amendment accomplish?

The Nineteenth Amendment, passed in 1920, granted women suffrage, or the right to vote.

Jim Crow

The post−Civil War constitutional amendments sought to outlaw discrimination on the basis of race. Constitutional guarantees are useless, however, without a government that is willing to enforce them. After Congress passed the amendments, many states passed laws that established legal discrimination against blacks and other minorities. These laws are known as Jim Crow laws or the Jim Crow system. States and local governments used Jim Crow laws to enforce segregation, or the separation of different peoples. The laws mandated separate hotels, buses, schools, parks, bathrooms, and drinking fountains for blacks and whites. Local and state governments even banned interracial marriage. Although often associated exclusively with the South, Jim Crow laws existed in about half of all states. California, for instance, passed 17 such laws, most of which were aimed at Asian Americans.

Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights

Until recently, people in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) population had experienced little in the way of rights protection. In the late 1960s, inspired by black civil rights leaders such as Malcolm X and by the antiwar movement, some members of the LGBT movement embraced more-radical protests. A defining moment came in 1969 in New York City when LGBT patrons of the Stonewall Inn fought back against a nighttime police raid. This event empowered many gay rights activists to be more open and vocal. In the 1970s, the movement took on a new tone. LGBT supporters portrayed the homosexual community as a minority group and began using the language of civil rights in their arguments for equality. Rights for the LGBT community have increased slowly, but a trend toward more rights has emerged, though sometimes in fits and starts. In 1993, for example, President Bill Clinton tried to ban discrimination against homosexuals in the armed services but had to settle for the so-called Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. This policy stated that gays and lesbians would no longer be asked about their sexual preferences but would be barred from the service if they revealed their orientation. A federal judge ruled the law unconstitutional in 2010. Its repeal became final in 2011. Marriage equality has become one of the most hotly debated topics of the gay rights movement. In 1996, Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), allowing states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages granted under the laws of other states. In 1996, however, no states legally allowed same sex marriage. In 2004, Massachusetts became the first state to legally recognize gay and lesbian marriages. Since then, other states have followed, but the issue is far from settled. In 2013, section 3 of DOMA was ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court, which declared that same-sex couples who are legally married deserve equal rights to the benefits that go to all other married couples under federal law.

Foundations of Equality

Equality under the law stands as one of the founding principles of the United States. A famous sentence from the Declaration of Independence summarizes this ideal of equality: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Of course, the great irony of this sentence is that even as it proclaims equality, it limits it to men. This famous sentence thus exemplifies the contradictions between the idea of equality and its application in US society. Slavery is an important example of inequality in early US history. The words slave and slavery do not appear in the Constitution, but the document clearly allowed for slavery. For example, it originally stated that each state would be represented in the US House of Representatives according to its white population plus "three-fifths of all other persons," which benefited plantation owners in the South who owned slaves. The Constitution also mandated the return of fugitive slaves. Many of the Founding Fathers, including those who owned slaves, believed that slavery was wrong. George Washington, a slave owner, called slavery "repugnant." The slave-owning Thomas Jefferson also condemned it as a "hideous blot" on US society. The Supreme Court also helped sustain slavery. In the landmark Dred Scott case, the Court decided that blacks—both slave and free—"cannot be, nor ever were intended to be citizens." This finding carried particular importance because it meant that the plaintiff, a slave named Dred Scott, held no legal standing and therefore could not sue his master. In addition, because slaves were considered property, their owners maintained rights protected by the Fifth Amendment that the Supreme Court could not overturn. The Supreme Court went even further, however, and struck down an important law, the Missouri Compromise, that banned slavery in parts of the US territories. This was a response to Scott's claim that, because his master had taken him to a territory that did not allow slavery, Scott should have been considered a free man. Most northern states, which were largely industrial and had a workforce based on paid labor, had abolished slavery by 1800. The South, however, based its economy on agriculture, with most farms growing cash crops such as cotton and tobacco. These crops were labor intensive, and southern farm owners came to rely on slavery as a cheap source of labor. At the time, the price of a slave equaled 10 years' wages for a white man, which made owning a slave seem like a good investment. Slavery wasn't the only area in which inequality existed in the early United States. Separate roles for men and women were ingrained in society, and it was unthinkable to many to change this system. A movement for women's suffrage grew throughout the 1800s, however, and women were granted the right to vote in 1920. Still, the ideal of equality as stated in the Declaration of Independence took almost a century and a half before it was extended to all Americans.

Fourteenth Amendment: Equal Protection

After the Civil War, the United States approved the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. These amendments abolished slavery and guaranteed fundamental civil and political rights to blacks. The Fourteenth Amendment was the most far-reaching of the three and provided the basis for most civil rights protections in the years after the war. The Fourteenth Amendment contains the Constitution's clearest statement of equality: "No state shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction equal protection of the laws." This sentence, known as the equal protection clause, prohibits the government from discriminating on the basis of "unreasonable" classifications, such as race. In the late 1800s, however, the federal government did little to actually enforce the statutes of the Fourteenth amendment, and many states passed laws that restricted voting for African Americans. These laws included literacy tests and poll taxes intended to keep poor and illiterate blacks from voting. Restrictions on African Americans' voting rights lasted well into the twentieth century.

The Civil Rights Era

Between the 1890s and the 1950s, Congress passed no significant pieces of civil rights legislation. Without congressional action, the civil rights guarantees of the Constitution were unenforceable. A series of particularly brutal lynchings (mob murders) of blacks in the 1930s built support for an antilynching bill, but southern senators blocked the passage of all civil rights bills using filibusters and other obstructionist tactics. Progress did occur on another front. The Supreme Court, which had justified Jim Crow for so long with its philosophy of separate but equal, began to reverse its position on civil rights in the 1930s. In Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada in 1938, the court ruled that states must actually provide equal facilities to blacks and whites. In this instance, Lloyd Gaines, an African American man, had been denied admittance to the law school of the University of Missouri because of his race. The Supreme Court found that the university must either admit Gaines or build a law school for African Americans. Over the next few decades, particularly under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Supreme Court increasingly demanded that separate facilities for blacks be equal in fact, not just in theory. The historic turning point in the Supreme Court's thinking on segregation occurred in 1954 with the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, which involved segregated public schools in four states. In its unanimous opinion, the Court concluded that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal" and therefore violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court ordered the states to desegregate their public schools "with all deliberate speed." The Brown v. Board of Education decision was the culmination of a well-planned legal campaign on the part of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Activists founded the NAACP in 1909 to combat severe discrimination and violence against African Americans in the United States. Since then it has been the most influential civil rights organization in the country. The NAACP's legal strategy involved establishing that the principle of separate but equal was not lawful in certain contexts. The NAACP then used that opening to argue that the doctrine was invalid in all contexts. This strategy began in the 1930s and systematically weakened the idea of separate but equal, leading to the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned Plessy v. Ferguson. Despite the revolution in the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution in the 1950s, segregation did not end overnight. In the following years, the court struck down a number of other Jim Crow laws, but the states dragged their feet in implementing the changes. The Supreme Court lacked the power to enforce its own decisions and therefore had to rely on the other two branches of government to do so

Rights of Hispanic and Latino Americans

Hispanics and Latinos make up the largest and fastest growing minority group in the United States. A push for equal rights for Hispanics and Latinos grew in the 1960s. The Chicano movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s was an important part of this struggle. In addition to fighting for civil rights, the Chicano movement emphasized the heritage and cultural traditions of Mexican Americans and worked to instill stronger feelings of dignity and pride in that population. Another movement in the 1960s supported the rights of migrant workers. Because a majority of agricultural workers were Mexican Americans, the issues of immigration and Latino rights became closely associated. In 1966, the United Farm Workers organized migrant farm workers under the leadership of Cesar Chavez. He had founded the National Farm Workers Association four years earlier to fight for better conditions for agricultural workers. Congress enacted the Bilingual Education Act (1962) to provide schooling for children who were not native English speakers or had trouble with the English language. It was the first legislation enacted specifically to help foreign language speakers. Following close behind, the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 removed the quota system from immigration controls.

The Civil Rights Movement

The 1950s and 1960s witnessed a vast expansion of civil rights protections. These momentous changes occurred in large part because of a concerted campaign by the public, particularly in the African American community. This campaign, known as the civil rights movement, placed substantial pressure on all parts of the government to act against civil rights abuses. As the struggle for civil rights turned away from the courts and to the elected branches of government, political pressure became even more important. Although African Americans faced serious obstacles to suffrage, they still exercised significant political influence in certain areas. For instance, President Truman's desire to win the votes of blacks in northern cities strongly influenced his decision to desegregate the armed forces. In the 1950s and 1960s, African Americans and other opponents of discrimination began publicly demanding their rights. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a charismatic black minister from Montgomery, Alabama, spearheaded the movement. Dr. King came to prominence in 1955, when he led a boycott of the segregated Montgomery bus system. The boycott inspired a national movement for civil rights. Martin Luther King Jr. transcended the narrow legal focus of the NAACP and pursued a fundamental change in race relations in the United States. Influenced by the example of Mohandas Gandhi's movement for Indian independence, Dr. King advocated a strategy of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is a strategy for bringing about change by refusing to obey immoral laws. It usually involves some form of nonviolent public protest. Dr. King and other leaders of the civil rights movement understood that fundamental change would only occur if the American people supported their cause. They organized protests and acts of civil disobedience designed to draw public attention to the oppression of blacks, particularly in the South. The high point of this effort was the 1963 March on Washington, at which Dr. King delivered his moving "I Have a Dream" speech. In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by an opponent of civil rights for African Americans. Despite his premature death, Dr. King's accomplishments were many and long lasting.

Executive Authority

The president possesses some independent power to make policy, mostly derived from his authority over law enforcement and the armed forces. Several presidents used their authority to implement desegregation and protect civil rights: -In 1948, President Harry S. Truman issued an executive order desegregating the US military. -In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower decided to use federal troops to enforce integration at a school in Little Rock, Arkansas. -President John F. Kennedy sent federal marshals and troops to the South to keep order and protect civil rights protesters. Presidential power is finite, however, and ultimately these presidents could accomplish little without the support of the legislative branch, where southern opposition to civil rights remained strong.

Women's Rights

Women's struggle for equality is a good example of a movement strengthened by the civil rights movement. A key moment for women's rights came in 1920 with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women suffrage, or voting rights. Although winning suffrage was a great accomplishment, many women believed their struggle for equality was only beginning. Women have continued to advocate for gender equality in employment and education. In 1923, feminist groups proposed an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) prohibiting any discrimination on the basis of gender. Those in favor of the amendment argued that it was necessary to guarantee equal protection for women. Debate over the ERA continued, but the feminist movement lost momentum in the 1940s and 1950s. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, challenged contemporary views of women's roles in the United States and helped reinvigorate the feminist movement. A victory for women and other groups came with the inclusion of Title VII in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Title VII barred discrimination based on gender, race, national origin, and religion in the workplace. In 1966, Friedan and other women's rights advocates started the National Organization for Women (NOW), which became a leading group in the fight for women's equality in the United States and remains so today. The feminist movement of this period renewed the drive for the ERA, and public opinion forced Congress to consider the ERA once again. By 1980, the ERA had been approved by Congress and 35 states, three short of the 38 needed for ratification. Opponents of the ERA, however, waged a successful campaign to prevent its final approval. They argued that the amendment would outlaw sensible distinctions between the sexes. Public discussion on the ERA quickly devolved into an emotionally charged debate about gender confusion, unisex bathrooms, and daughters in combat. Unable to gain the full 38 states needed to ratify it, the ERA was canceled after a 1982 cutoff date came and went. Today, the debate over the ERA and women's rights continues.

martin luther king jr

led the Montgomery bus boycott and various national campaigns for civil rights