history quiz

Brown v. Board of Education

1954 - The Supreme Court overruled Plessy v. Ferguson, declared that racially segregated facilities are inherently unequal and ordered all public schools desegregated.

U.S. v. Cruikshank

A decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that voting rights remained a state matter unless the state itself violated those rights. If former slaves' rights were violated by individuals or private groups, that lay beyond federal jurisdiction. Like the Slaughter-House Cases, the ruling undercut the power of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect African American rights.

Democratic supporter of Massive Resistance Lindsay Almond

A new governor, the Democratic supporter of Massive Resistance Lindsay Almond, took office in January 1958. Norfolk, Charlottesville, and Warren County were ordered by federal courts to integrate, but Governor Almond closed the schools, locking out 13,000 students. (Many white students began to attend private schools. New private schools opened as well. The only recourse that Black parents had was to send their children to relatives up north to receive an education).

Slaughterhouse Cases

A series of post-Civil War Supreme Court cases containing the first judicial pronouncements on the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. The Court held that these amendments had been adopted solely to protect the rights of freed blacks, and could not be extended to guarantee the civil rights of other citizens against deprivations of due process by state governments. These rulings were disapproved by later decisions.

Thurgood Marshall

American civil rights lawyer, first black justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. Marshall was a tireless advocate for the rights of minorities and the poor.

Emmet Till

Boy 14 years old, went to a candy Store and says "Bye, baby," to the girl at the counter, was murdered by 2 brothers, who confess to the crime. In 1955, African American teenager Emmitt Till was lynched simply for saying a few words to a white woman

Southern Manifesto

In 1956, 96 southern legislators (19 US senators and 77 congressmen) signed the Southern Manifesto, pledging not to allow desegregated public schools.

Lynching

Lynching became common place from 1888 to 1923. A common accusation was sexual assault, or even flirtation of an African American man with a white woman.

Murray v. Maryland (1936)

Murray applied for admission to the University of Maryland School of Law (Thurgood Marshall had been denied acceptance to the same law school earlier) Murray's application was rejected and he was told to apply to the Princess Anne Academy in Maryland. Princess Anne Academy was only a junior college. He was given another choice to apply to an out-of-state law school and he could apply for possible tuition assistance. June 1935 the case went to court with Charles Hamilton Houston assisted by Thurgood Marshall. (Remember both of these men!) The judge decided in favor of Murray, ordering the law school to admit him. The decision was appealed but the state Supreme Court affirmed the decision. At this time in the United States, for a decision to apply to the entire country it had to reach the US Supreme Court.

Daisy Bates

NAACP president of Little Rock chapter and key leader and community organizer in Little Rock Nine desegregation in 1957. Arkansas President of the NAACP. Supported integration in Central High school

Sweatt v. Painter (1950)

Segregated law school in Texas was held to be an illegal violation of civil rights, leading to open enrollment.

repercussions of US v Cruikshank

Soon after the ratification of the 15th Amendment and the Enforcement Act of 1870, African Americans were threatened and sometimes assaulted when going to the polls. Federal enforcement of the right to vote was basically nullified in US v Cruikshank. Still, African Americans continued to go to the polls.

penal system

Southern states also used the penal system to set up and run a system of slavery. Black men were arrested for crimes such as vagrancy, drunkenness, or other minor violations, and were quickly convicted. Imprisonment resulted in forced labor, where convicts were rented out by the prison system to private enterprises in agriculture or industry; the prison officials were monetarily compensated and the businesses gained labor at a rate well below going wages, while working conditions were often deplorable

KKK

Stands for Ku Klux Klan and started right after the Civil War in 1866. The Southern establishment took charge by passing discriminatory laws known as the black codes. Gives whites almost unlimited power. They masked themselves and burned black churches, schools, and terrorized black people. They are anti-black and anti-Semitic anti-Catholic

Superman v the Klan

Superman smashes the Klan is a three-part graphic novel about a young Superman battling racists, helping an immigrant family, and wrestling with his own status as an alien outsider. It's extremely charming. Although Superman had been fighting crime in print since 1938, the weekly audio episodes fleshed out his storyline even further. It was on the radio that Superman first faced kryptonite, met Daily Planet reporter Jimmy Olsen, and became associated with "truth, justice, and the American way

Birth of a Nation

The 1915 film Birth of a Nation (research online briefly) was screened in the White House for President Woodrow Wilson. Based on the novel The Clansman (1905) by Thomas Dixon, the two-part epic traces the impact of the Civil War on two families: the Stonemans of the North and the Camerons of the South, each on separate sides of the conflict. The Birth of a Nation is three hours of racist propaganda — starting with the Civil War and ending with the Ku Klux Klan riding in to save the South from black rule during the Reconstruction era.

Blossom Plan

The Blossom Plan was a GRADUALIST plan that permitted the superintendent the right to choose the African American students who would be integrated. The purpose of the Blossom Plan was to comply with Brown on a minimal basis, with tokenism (important term) that would effectively limit enrollment of African Americans in white schools to a handful.

Charles Hamilton Houston

The NAACP's legal arm was under the strong leadership of Charles Hamilton Houston, known as the "man who killed Jim Crow".

13th Amendment to the Constitution

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime. 14th amendment = granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the

Margold Report.

The foundation for the NAACP's strategy came from the Margold Report. (Report suggested attacking segregation through the courts) Rather than ask the courts to order the mixing of races, the NAACP would try to get the courts to allocate as much per pupil for African American students as was spent on white Americans. Studies showed that per-pupil spending was two to five times more on white children. African American teachers were paid less, the school year was shorter and facilities were inferior (example: no playground equipment, textbooks were usually older editions handed down from white schools) The NAACP's thinking was that, in the end, making separate facilities equal would be cost-prohibitive and the practical result would be the end of segregated schools.

Where did the majority of the black community live?

The majority of African Americans lived in southern states, even after the first Great Migration of 1910-1930

TN Coal, Iron and Railroad Compan

The number of convicts employed increased after U.S. Steel acquired TCI in 1907, as did the brutality of the conditions in which they labored. In 1908, the first full year of U. S. Steel's ownership of TCI, almost 60 prison workers died from workplace-related accidents.

Gaines v. Missouri (1938)

The state refused to let African Americans attend the state university's law school. Missouri provided a remedy in that it agreed to pay any additional tuition. The Missouri Supreme Court decided against Gaines, allowing an appeal to the US Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ordered Missouri to admit Gaines Essentially, separate facilities had to be equal within a state, but the Supreme Court did not comment on segregated facilities. This was Houston's last case for the NAACP.

Tulsa, OK 1921

The worst race riot in US History occurred in Tulsa, OK in 1921. According to the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, the Tulsa Race Riot is the "single worst incident of racial violence in American history". Occurring over 18 hours, the white mob violence was responsible for the deaths of 50-300 African Americans (reflect on why official records are described as inaccurate). More than 1,000 homes and businesses were destroyed in Greenwood, the African American neighborhood in Tulsa. The violence was apparently started when an African American man, a shoe shiner called Dick Rowland, accidentally stepped on the foot of a white woman, Sarah Page, in an elevator. The incident was reported in the newspapers as attempted rape and a mob gathered the next evening, amid calls to lynch Rowland. African Americans fought against thousands of armed white Americans and were overwhelmed: the entire African American neighborhood in Tulsa was burned to the ground.

Red Summer of 1919

Used to describe the bloody race riots that occurred during the summer and autumn of 1919. Race riots erupted in several cities in both the North and South of the United States. The three with the highest number of fatalities happened in Chicago, Washington, D.C. and Elaine, Arkansas.

Mass resistance

Virginia led the new tactic called Massive Resistance. VA Governor Thomas Stanley appointed 32 state lawmakers to create the Gray Commission. The plan met with opposition for being too compliant with Brown. When Arlington County announced a plan to desegregate its schools, the state legislature sprang to action, prohibiting elected school boards.

tokenism

When a single member of a minority group is present in an office, workplace, or classroom and is seen as a representative of that minority group rather than as an individual

Little Rock Arkansas 1957

federal troops ensured the safety of black students from angry white mobs. Soon after the Brown ruling, the Little Rock School Board stated that they would comply with the Supreme Court ruling. The Arkansas branch of the NAACP, led by its president, Daisy Bates, petitioned for immediate integration of the city schools. (Daisy Bates IMPORTANT to remember) The Blossom Plan was a GRADUALIST plan that permitted the superintendent the right to choose the African American students who would be integrated. The purpose of the Blossom Plan was to comply with Brown on a minimal basis, with tokenism (important term) that would effectively limit enrollment of African Americans in white schools to a handful. The NAACP sued for immediate integration, but the federal court ruled that the Blossom Plan met Constitutional requirements and this decision was upheld by the US Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. The district's gradualism was assisted by the segregated housing patterns of Little Rock. Central High School was mostly white, although the school community did include 200 African Americans of high school age. Opposition to any integration grew with the Citizen's Council (BIG organization to remember because chapters will grow throughout the South to oppose integration). The Citizen's Council organized rallies and brought in guest speakers to promote white supremacy. The Mother's League (also IMPORTANT to know) formed under the Citizen's Council to provide a "feminine" slant to the effort. Only 20% of its members were mothers of Central High School students. The school board chose nine black students to attend for the 1957-58 school year. Governor Orval Faubus (IMPORTANT name to remember) requested assistance from the federal government to maintain order in advance of the school opening but was refused on the grounds that public safety was a local and state responsibility. The crisis had reached a peak of FEDERAL v. STATE AUTHORITY. (Think Civil War) Governor Faubus initiated action and ordered the Arkansas National Guard to Central High School to prevent violence, not by ensuring the entry of African American students to the school, but instead by surrounding the school to prevent their entry. Governor Faubus chose INTERPOSITION in the context of public order. The nine African American students attempted to attend Central High School in September 1957 despite the governor's actions. They were met by an angry crowd of white Americans, including both students and adults. A vivid scene was captured by the news photographers as Elizabeth Eckford arrived separately by mistake and, after being turned away, was hounded off the campus by a yelling crowd. (Make sure to add to these notes after you have watched this segment from Eyes on the Prize)

14th Amendment

granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States—including formerly enslaved people—and guaranteed all citizens "equal protection of the laws." The Due Process Clause declared that states may not deny any person "life, liberty or property, without due process of law."

15th amendment

prohibits the federal government and each state from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

The "pupil placement" strategy was designed to

put the burden of transferring to an all-white school on the nonwhite children and their parents, making it almost impossible for a court order to help with integration. To ensure no African Americans were placed in white schools, applications for PUPIL PLACEMENT (must know this term going forward as a tool for Massive Resistance) were removed from the local authority and the power to approve or deny became the responsibility of the state.

Great Migration of 1910-1930

the movement of about 1.6 million African Americans , who left mostly rural areas to migrate to northern and Midwestern industrial cities. the economic motivations for migration were a combination of the desire to escape oppressive economic conditions in the south and the promise of greater prosperity in the north. Since their emancipation from slavery, southern rural blacks had suffered in a plantation economy that offered little chance of advancement