Civil Rights Movement

African Americans became increasingly restive in the postwar years. During the war they had challenged discrimination in the military services and in the work force, and they had made limited gains. Millions of blacks left their Southern farms for Northern cities just to find themselves in urban slums.

Jackie Robinson (Jack Roosevelt Robinson) began to play in the major baseball league in 1947. This Brooklyn Dodgers player eased the way for other players from the Negro leagues.

In 1946 lynchings and other forms of violence were still practiced in the South and President Truman sent a 10-point civil rights program to Congress. But all federal measures were in vain and blacks took matters into their own hands. In 1954 the Supreme Court declared that “separate facilities are inherently unequal”. Eisenhower ordered the desegregation of Washington, D.C., schools to serve as a model for the rest of the country.

A major crisis happened in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, when nine black students accepted to an all-white high school, faced the threats. Eisenhower placed the National Guardsmen under the Federal command and desegregation began with soldiers standing in classrooms to ensure the rule of law.

The bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, discovered a power leader in Martin Luther King, Jr. In Montgomery Rose Park, a 42-year-old black, sat down in the front of a bus in a section reserved by law and custom for whites and was arrested. The black leaders began the boycott and cut gross bus revenue by 65%.

The struggle of black Americans for equality reached its peak in the mid 1960s. SCLC (the Southern Christian Leadership Conference), made up of black clergy, sought reform through peaceful confrontation. Black college students sat down at a segregated lunch counters and refused to leave; blacks and whites boarded buses heading South toward segregated terminals; in 1964 the “March on Washington” took place. More than 200,000 people gathered in the nation’s capital to demonstrate their commitment to equality for all. The high point of the day was the address of Martin Luther King. Each time he used the refrain “I have a dream”, the crowd roared.

President Kennedy, like President Eisenhower, sent troops to uphold the law and sent Congress a new civil rights bills but with poor results. President Johnson was more successful: Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination in all public accommodations. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and legislation of 1968 banning discrimination in housing changes the situation.

But some blacks became impatient with the pace of progress. Violence accompanied militant calls for reform. Riots broke out in a several big cities in 1966 and 1967. In the spring of 1968, Martin Luther King fell before an assassin’s bullet. Several months later Senator Robert Kennedy, an opponent of the Vietnam War, met the same fate. To many these assassinations marked the end of an era of innocence and idealism in both civil rights and the anti-war movements.