SSUSH 22: Civil Rights
Identify Jackie Robinson and the integration of baseball.
1947--Jackie Robinson was the first African American to play for a major league baseball team in the United States, the Brooklyn Dodgers. This led to the complete integration of baseball and other professional sports. Robinson was the National League's most valuable player in 1949 and the first African American in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Until this time, African Americans played professional baseball in the Negro League.
Explain the importance of President Truman's order to integrate the U.S. military and the federal government.
1948--President Harry Truman issued an executive order to integrate the U.S.armed forces and to end discrimination in the hiring of U.S. government employees. In turn, this led to the civil rights laws enacted in the 1960s.
Explain Brown v. Board of Education and efforts to resist the decision.
1954--In the Brown v. Board of Education case, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that state laws establishing "separate but equal" public schools denied African American students the equal education promised in the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court's decision reversed prior rulings dating back to the Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896. Many people were unhappy with this decision, and some even refused to follow it. The governor of Arkansas ordered the National Guard to keep nine African American students from attending Little Rock's Central High School; President Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock to force the high school to integrate.
Describe the significance of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from a Birmingham Jail and his I Have a Dream Speech.
1963--Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, while demonstrating against racial segregation. In jail he wrote his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" to address fears white religious leaders had that he was moving too fast toward desegregation. In his letter, King explained why victims of segregation, violent attacks, and murder found it difficult to wait for those injustices to end. Later the same year, King delivered his most famous speech, "I Have a Dream," to over 250,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. In this speech, King asked for peace and racial harmony.
Describe the causes and consequences of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
1964--The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson. This law prohibited discrimination based on race, religion, national origin, and gender. It allowed all citizens the right to enter any park, restroom, library, theater, and public building in the United States. One factor that prompted this law was the long struggle for civil rights undertaken by America's African American population. Another factor was King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech; its moving words helped create widespread support for this law. Other factors included previous presidential actions that combated civil rights violations, such as Truman's in 1948 and Eisenhower's in 1954, and Kennedy's sending federal troops to Mississippi (1962) and Alabama (1963) to force the integration of public universities there.
Describe the causes and consequences of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
1965--The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed the requirement for would-be voters in the United States to take literacy tests to register to vote, because this requirement was judged as unfair to minorities. The act provided money to pay for programs to register voters in areas with large numbers of unregistered minorities, and it gave the Department of Justice the right to oversee the voting laws in certain districts that had used tactics such as literacy tests or poll taxes to limit voting.
Explain how TV impacted the Civil Rights Movement.
The first regular television broadcasts began in 1949, providing just two hours a week of news and entertainment to a very small area on the East Coast. By 1956, over 500 stations were broadcasting all over America, bringing news and entertainment into the living rooms of most Americans. TV newscasts also changed the shape of American culture. Americans who might never have attended a civil rights demonstration saw and heard them on their TVs in the 1960s. In 1963, TV reports showed helmeted police officers from Birmingham, Alabama, using high-pressure fire hoses to spray African American children who had been walking in a protest march. The reports also showed the officers setting police dogs to attack them, and then clubbing them. TV news coverage of the civil rights movement helped many Americans turn their sympathies toward ending racial segregation and persuaded Kennedy that new laws were the only ways to end the racial violence and to give African Americans the civil rights they were demanding.
