USH H - Civil Rights Movement

A. Philip Randolph

A black labor leader who called for a March on Washington. His demands included access to defense employment, an end to segregation, and a national antilynching law.

Rosa Parks

A black tailor's assistant who had just completed her day's work in a Montgomery, Alabama, department store, and refused to surrender her seat on a city bus to a white rider, as required by local law. Her arrest sparked a yearlong Montgomery bus boycott. Became a symbol of ordinary blacks' determination to resist the daily injustices and indignities of the Jim Crow South. Served as a secretary to the local leader of the NAACP and succeeded in becoming one of the few blacks in Montgomery to cast a ballot.

Malcolm X

A fiery orator who insisted that blacks must control the political and economic resources of their communities and rely on their own efforts rather than working with whites. His changing of his last name symbolized blacks' separation from their African ancestry. He became a spokesman for the Nation of Islam, or Black Muslims, and a sharp critic of the ideas of integraation and nonviolence. Was assassinated by member of the Nation of Islam in 1965 after he formed his own organization that was less radical. His call for blacks to rely on their own resources struck a chord among the urban poor and younger civil rights activists.

Plessy v. Ferguson

A landmark Supreme Court decision in 1896 in which the Court gave its approval to state laws requiring separate facilities for blacks and whites. The Court claimed that segregated facilities did not discriminate so long as they were "separate but equal."

Universal Negro Improvement Association

A movement led by Marcus Garvey for African independence and self-reliance. The massive following this movement achieved testified to the sense of betrayal that had been kindled in black communities during and after the war.

"Double-V" campaign

A phrase coined by the Pittsburgh Courier in 1942 that came to symbolize black attitudes during the war. Victory over Germany and Japan, it insisted, must be accompanied by victory over segregation at home.

Pap Singleton

A promoter of the Kansas Exodus. A former fugitive slave and organizer of a real estate company who distributed flyers and lithographs picturing Kansas as an idyllic land of rural plenty.

The "New Negro"

A term associated in politics with pan-Africanism and the militanacy of the Garvey movement, and in art meant the rejection of established stereotypes and a search for black values to put in their place.

Ida B. Wells

Activist who opposed lynching. Her essay condeming the lynching of three black men in Memphis led a mob to destroy her newspaper, the Memphis Free Press, while she was out of the city. She moved to the North, where she became the nation's leading antilynching crusader.

Thurgood Marshall

Attorney for the NAACP who pressed legal challenges to the "separate but equal" doctrine. Launched a full frontal assault on segregation and fought extremely hard in the Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas case. Became the Supreme Court's first African American Justice in 1967.

Riots

Battles between angry blacks and the predominantly white police taking place from 1964 to 1967. First was in Harlem. Others were the Watts uprising of 1965, and uprisings in Newark and Detroit that highlighted the issues that the dismantling of legal segregation left intact.

Lynching

Being murdered by a violent mob. In every year between 1883 and 1905, more than fifty persons, the vast majority of them black men, had this happen to them in the South.

Disenfranchisement

Between 1890 and 1906, every southern state enacted laws or constitutional provisions meant to eliminate the black vote. Southern legislatures drafted laws that on paper appeared color-blind but that were actually designed to end black voting. The most popular devices were the poll tax (a fee that each citizen had to pay in order to retain the right to vote), literacy tests, and the requirement that a prospective voter demonstrate to election officials an "understanding" of the state constitution. Six southern states also adopted a grandfather clause exempting from the new requirements descendants of persons eligible to vote before the Civil War. Led directly to the rise of a generation of southern demagogues, who mobilized white voters by extreme appeals to racism.

Booker T. Washington

Born a slave in 1856, he studied at Hampton Institute, Virginia. He adopted the outlook of Hampton's founder, General Samuel Armstrong, who emphasized that obtaining farms or skilled jobs was far more important to African-Americans emerging from slavery than the rights of citizenship. Delivered a famous speech, entitled The Atlanta Compromise, at the Atlanta Cotton Exposition. Urged blacks to not combat segregation and ascended due to northern whites and Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which he became the head of. He also gained support in the black community because of a widespread sense that in the world of the late nineteenth century, frontal assaults on white power were impossible and blacks should concentrate on building up their segregated community.

W.E.B. DuBois

Born in 1868, and educated at Fisk and Harvard universities, he lived to his ninety-fifth year. The unifying theme of his career was his effort to reconcile the contradiction between what he called "American freedom for whites and the continuing subjection of Negroes." Wrote a book entitled The Souls of Black Folk in 1903 which issued a clarion call for blacks dissatisfied with the accommodationist policies of Booker T. Washington. Believed that educated African Americans like himself - the "talented tenth" of the black community - must use their education and training to challenge inequality. Organized the Niagara Movement in 1905 and joined with a group of mostly white reformers to create the NAACP.

Stokely Carmichael

Brought the slogan of "Black power" to national attention in 1966 used it during a civil rights march in Mississippi. Leader of the SNCC.

1941 March on Washington

Called for by A. Phillip Randolph due to an anger over the almost complete exclusion of African-Americans from jobs in the rapidly expanding war industries. To persuade Randolph to call of the march, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which banned discrimination in defense jobs and established the FEPC to monitor compliance.

Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC)

Came as part of Executive Order 8802. The first federal agency since Reconstruction to campaign for equal opportunity for black Americans and played an important role in obtaining jobs for black workers in industrial plants and shipyards. By 1944, more than 1 million blacks, 300,000 of them women, held manufacturing jobs.

Grandfather Clause

Exempted from the new voting requirements descendants of persons eligible to vote before the Civil War. The racial intent of this was so clear that the Supreme Court invalidated such laws for violating the Fifteenth Amendment.

Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas

Five cases regarding unfair school policies reached the Supreme Court in 1952. When cases are united, they are listed alphabetically and the first case gives the entire decision its name. The first case occurred because Oliver Brown's third grade daughter was forced to walk across dangerous railroad tracks each morning rather than be allowed to attend a nearby school restricted to whites. Thurgood Marshall pleaded to the Court that segregation was inherently unequal because it stigmatized one group of citizens as unfit to associate with others. Earl Warren and the Court ruled that this type of segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment and the doctrine of "separate but equal" had no place in the field of education.

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)

Founded by an interracial group of pacifists in 1942. Held sit-ins in northern cities to integrate restaurants and theatres.

Black Panthers

Founded in Oakland, California, in 1966, it became notorious for advocating armed self-defense in response to police brutality. The party's youthful members alarmed whites by wearing military garb, although they also ran health clinics, schools, and children's breakfast programs. But internal disputes and a campaign against them by police and the FBI, which left several leaders dead in shootouts, destroyed the organization.

Marcus Garvey

Immigrated from Jamaica to the US. Launched the Universal Negro Improvement Association, a movement for African Independence and black-self reliance. Thought freedom meant self-determination and insisted blacks should enjoy the same internationally recognized identity enjoyed by other peoples in the aftermath of the war. Deported after a conviction of mail fraud, but the massive following his movement achieved testified to the sense of betrayal that had been kindled in black communities during and after the war.

The Niagara Movement

In 1905, Du Bois gathered a group of black leaders at Niagara Falls and organized this, which sought to reinvigorate the abolitionist tradition. "We claim for ourselves," Du Bois wrote in the group's manifesto, "every single right that belongs to a freeborn American."

NAACP

In 1909, Du Bois joined with a group of mostly white reformers, shocked by a lynching in Springfield, to create this organization, launching a long struggle for the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The organization won some victories in the Progressive Era, but overall, its early years were marked by virtually no progress towards racial justice.

Bailey v. Alabama

In 1911, the Supreme Court overturned southern "peonage" laws that made it a crime for sharecroppers to break their labor contracts. Represents one of the few legal victories for the NAACP in the Progressive Era.

Smith v. Allwright

In 1944, The Supreme Court outlawed all-white primaries, one of the mechanisms by which southern states deprived blacks of political rights.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)

In 1956, King took the lead in founding this coalition of black ministers and civil rights activists to press for desegregation. But despite the movement's success in popular mobilization, the fact that Montgomery's city fathers agreed to the boycott's demands only after a Supreme Court ruling indicated that without national backing, local action might not be enough to overturn Jim Crow.

Little Rock Central High

In 1957, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas used the National Guard to prevent the court-ordered integration of this school, forcing Eisenhower to dispatch federal troops to the city. In the face of a howling mob, soldiers escorted nine black children into the school. Events in Little Rock showed that in the last instance, the federal government would not allow the flagrant violation of court orders.

Freedom Rides

In 1961, CORE launched these. Integrated groups traveled by bus into the Deep South to test compliance with court orders banning segregation on interstate busses and trains and in terminal facilities. Violent mobs assaulted them. Near Anniston, Alabama, a firebomb was thrown into the vehicle and the passengers were beaten as they escaped. In Birmingham, Klansmen attacked riders with bats and chains while police refused to intervene. But the ICC ordered buses and terminals desegregated.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

In 1964, Congress passed this, which prohibited racial discrimination in employment, institutions like hospitals and schools, and privatley owned public accommodations such as resturaunts, hotels, and theatres. It also banned discrimination of the grounds of sex - a provision added by the opponents of civil rights in an effort to derail the entire bill and embraced by liberal and female members of congress as a way to broaden its scope.

Affirmative action

In 1964, King called for a "Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged" to mobilize the nation's resources to abolish economic deprivation. His proposal was directed against poverty in general, but King also insisted that after "doing something special against the Negro for hundreds of years," the United States had an obligation to "do something special for him now".

Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

In April 1960, Ella Baker, a longtime civil rights organizer, called a meeting of young activists in Raleigh, North Carolina. Out of the gathering came this, dedicated to replacing the culture of segregation with a "beloved community" of racial justice and to empowering ordinary blacks to take control of the decisions that affected their lives.

Selma

In January 1965, King launched a voting rights campaign in this city, one where only 355 of 15,000 black residents had been allowed to register to vote. In March, defying a ban by Governor Wallace, King attempted to lead a march from here to the state capital, Montgomery. When the marchers reached the bridge leading out of the city, state police assaulted them with cattle prods, whips, and tear gas. Once again, violence against nonviolent demonstrators flashed across television screens throughout the world. LBJ then asked Congress to enact a law securing the right to vote. They then passed not only the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but also the twenty-fourth amendment, outlawing the poll tax.

Medgar Evers

In June 1963, a sniper killed this field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi.

The Birmingham Protests

In May of 1963, King made the bold decision to send black school children into the street of this city to further these trends in the movement. Police chief Eugene "Bull" Connor unleashed his forces against the thousands of young marchers. The images, broadcast on television, of children being assaulted with nightsticks, high-pressure fire hoses, and attack dogs produced a wave of revulsion throughout the world. It led President Kennedy to endorse the movement's goals. Leading businessmen, fearing that the city was becoming an international symbol of brutality, brokered an end to the demonstrations that desegregated downtown stores and restaurants and promised that black salespeople would be hired.

James Meredith

In September 1962, a court ordered the University of Mississippi to admit this black student. The state police stood aside as a mob, encouraged by Governor Ross Barnett, rampaged through the streets of Oxford, where the university is located. President Kennedy was forced to dispatch the army to restore order.

Birmingham Church Bombing

In September, a bomb exploded in this place of worship in this city, killing four young girls. (Not until 2002 was the last of those who committed this act of domestic terrorism tried and convicted.)

Legal or de Facto Segregation

In northern communities in the fifties, housing patterns and school district lines created this - separation in fact if not in law. Few white Americans felt any urgency about confronting racial inequality.

"Letter from Birmingham Jail"

King wrote this during a nine-day term in prison for violating a ban on demonstrations. It is considered one of his most eloquent pleas for racial justice, and related the litany of abuses faced by black southerners, from police brutality to daily humiliation of having to explain to their children why they could not enter amusement parks or public swimming pools. The "white moderate," King declared, must put aside fear of disorder and commit himself to racial justice.

"Black power"

Malcolm X was the intellectual father of this slogan that came to national attention in 1966 when SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael used it during a civil rights march in Mississippi. A highly imprecise idea, it suggested everything from the election of more black officials to the belief that black Americans were a colonized people whose freedom could be won only through revolutionary struggle and self-determination. It inspired the establishment of black operated local schools that combined traditional learning with an emphasis on pride in African-American history and identity. Also inspired "Black is Beautiful."

Convict Labor

New laws authorized the arrest of virtually any person without employment and greatly increased the penalties for petty crimes. As the South's prison population rose, the renting out of prisoners became a profitable business. Every southern state placed at least a portion of its convicted criminals, the majority of them blacks imprisoned for minor offenses, in the hands of private businessmen. The system was riddled with inhumane conditions and the motto given to the system by its architects was "One dies, get another."

March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

On August 28, 1963, 250,000 black and white Americans converged on the nation's capital. This is often considered the high point of the nonviolent civil rights movement. Calls for the passage of a civil rights bill pending before Congress took center stage. But the event's goals also included a public-works program to reduce unemployment, an increase in the minimum wage, and a law barring discrimination in employment. These demands revealed how the black movement had, for the moment, forged an alliance with white liberal groups. Through many powerful speeches, including Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, the civil rights activists also resurrected the Civil War-era vision of national authority as the custodian of American freedom.

The Great Migration

On the eve of World War I, 90 percent of the African-American population still lived in the South. But between 1910 and 1920, half a million blacks left the South. Many motives sustained this movement - higher wages in northern factories than were available in the South (even if blacks remained confined to menial and unskilled positions), opportunities for educating their children, escape from the threat of lynching, and the prospect of exercising the right to vote. The new black presence in the North, coupled with demands for change inspired by the war, created a racial tinderbox that needed only an incident to trigger an explosion.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)

Part of LBJ's Great Society. Was an agency that greatly expanded the power of the federal government and enforced civil rights laws against workplace discrimination.

Voting Rights Act of 1965

Passed by LBJ as a direct result of Dr. King's Selma march. Allowed federal officials to register voters.

"Bull" Connor

Police chief who unleashed his forces against the thousands of children marching in May of 1963 in Birmingham.

New South

Promoted by Atlanta editor Henry Grady. It was a promise of an era of prosperity based on industrial expansion and agricultural diversification. In reality, while planters, merchants, and industrialists prospered, the region as a whole sank deeper and deeper into poverty. Overall, the region remained dependent on the North for capital and manufactured goods.

Executive Order 8802

Roosevelt issued this in 1941 to persuade A. Phillip Randolph from launching his "March on Washington". It banned discrimination in defense jobs and established the FEPC to monitor compliance.

The Atlanta Compromise

Speech delivered by Booker T. Washington urging blacks to adjust to segregation and abandon agitation for civil and political rights. Repudiated the abolitionist tradition, which stressed ceaseless agitation for full equality. Sent the message to blacks that they should aim to thrive in the system of segregation rather than combat the system itself.

Freedom Summer

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not address a major concern of the civil rights movement - the right to vote in the South. A movement started when the weather got warm in which a coalition of civil rights groups launched a voter registration drive in Mississippi. Hundreds of white college students from the North traveled to the state to take part in this movement. An outpouring of violence greeted the campaign, including thirty-five bombings and numerous beatings of civil rights workers. In June, three young activists - Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, white students from the North, and James Chaney, a local black youth - were kidnapped by a group headed by a deputy sheriff and murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Although many black lives had been lost in the movement, the deaths of the two white students now focused unprecedented attention on Mississippi and on the apparent inability of the federal government to protect citizens seeking to exercise their constitutional rights. Led to the campaign of the MFDP.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Montgomery Boycott marked the emergence of this leader, who had recently arrived there to become pastor of a Baptist church, as the movement's national symbol. He was able to present the case for black rights in a vocabulary that merged the black experience with that of a nation. Appealed to white America by stressing the protestors' love of country and devotion to national values. Formed SCLC. Had his biggest year in 1963, organizing the children's march in Birmingham and the March on Washington. Organized the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. Assassinated in 1968.

Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party

The political group that took the momentum of the Freedom Summer to launch a campaign to take the seats of the state's all-white official party at the 1964 Democratic national convention in NJ. It was open to all residents of the state. At televised hearings before the credentials committee, Fannie Lou Hamer of the group held a national audience spellbound with her account of growing up in poverty in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta and of the savage beatings she had endured at the hands of police.

Harlem Renaissance

This movement started in a New York town that gained an international reputation as the "capital" of black America, a mecca for migrants from the South and immigrants from West Indies. Although it was a community of widespread poverty, it was also home to a vibrant black cultural community that established links with New York's artistic mainstream. White intellectuals and presses sponsored these talented black artists and helped them rise to new levels in the artistic world. The movement got to the roots of the black experience - Africa, the rural South's folk traditions, and the life of the urban ghetto, while also containing a strong element of protest.

Kansas Exodus

Trapped at the bottom of a stagnant economy, some blacks sought a way out through emigration from the South. In 1879 and 1880, an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 African-Americans migrated to Kansas, seeking political equality, freedom from violence, access to education, and economic opportunity. Lacking the capital to take up farming, however, most black migrants ended up as unskilled laborers in towns and cities. Still, few returned to the South, claiming "We had ruther suffer and be free."

Second Great Migration

WWII spurred a movement of black population from the rural South to the cities of the North and West that dwarfed the Great Migration of WWI and the 1920s. About 700,000 black migrants poured out of the South on what they called "liberty trains," seeking jobs in the industrial heartland. They encountered sometimes violent hostility.

Brown vs. Board of Education II-"With all deliberate speed"

When the Supreme Court finally issued its implementation ruling in 1955, the justices declared that desegregation should proceed with a vague formulation that unintentionally encouraged a campaign of "massive resistance" that paralyzed civil rights progress in much of the South.

Montgomery Bus Boycott

Yearlong protest triggered by the arrest of Rosa Parks. For 381 days, despite legal harassment and occasional violence, black maids, janitors, teachers, and students walked to their destinations or rode an informal network of taxis. Finally in November of 1956, the Supreme Court ruled segregation in public transportation unconstitutional.

Poll Tax

a fee that each citizen had to pay in order to retain the right to vote

Scottsboro Boys

nine African American teenagers, ages 13 to 20, falsely accused in Alabama of raping two white women on a train in 1931. The landmark set of legal cases from this incident dealt with racism and the right to a fair trial. The cases included a lynch mob before the suspects had been indicted, all-white juries, rushed trials, and disruptive mobs. It is commonly cited as an example of a miscarriage of justice in the United States legal system.

Jim Crow

state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. All were enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by white Democratic-dominated state legislatures after the Reconstruction period. The laws were enforced until 1965.

Redeemers

the coalition of merchants, planters, and business entrepreneurs who dominated the South's politics after 1877, anad moved to undo as much as possible of Reconstruction.

"100% Americanism"

the idea that forigen beliefs and cultures had no place in the country. Freedom should be limited on religious and ethinic grounds. (White and Protestant) Led to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.

Emmett Till

was a 14-year-old African American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery store. The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. He posthumously became an icon of the civil rights movement.