Civil Rights

From the 1940s through the 1960s, African Americans struggled for equal treatment and opportunity, particularly in the South. In 1942, the Congress of Racial Equality was founded to end segregation of blacks from whites.

Jesse Owens was the grandson of a slave who accomplished perhaps the greatest athletic feat ever in 1935. While working his way through college, Owens competed at the Big Ten Championships in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In a time span of only about 45 minutes, Owens set three world records and tied a fourth in track and field events (running and the long jump). The following year, 1936, Owens stunned Hitler's theory of racial superiority by winning four gold medals in the most competitive events at the Olympics in Berlin.^[8]

But professional baseball had only white players for another decade. It was not until 1947 that Jackie Robinson became the first black player in the Major Leagues and thereby broke the "color barrier" by playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers. While Robinson endured much derision during his first season, he persisted and became a tremendous player who was later elected to the baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. His accomplishments foreshadowed the civil rights movement.

In 1954, in a case brought by the National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and argued by its attorney and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (the first black appointed to the Court in 1967), the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that segregation of blacks and whites in public schools is unconstitutional. This decision, named Brown v. Board of Education (1954), overturned the "separate but equal" decision of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

In 1955, African American woman Rosa Parks refused to walk to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and instead sat at the front. It was customary in the South at the time for blacks to sit at the back of the bus, leaving the seats at the front of the bus for whites. Rosa Park defied this rule. When authorities removed her from the bus, this sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott that lasted over a year from 1955 into 1956, until the Supreme Court ended this segregation on buses.

In 1957, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and began to emerge as a leader in what became known as the Civil Rights Movement. Rev. King advocated nonviolent resistance by African Americans, culminating in a speech to a massive crowd of 250,000 that marched on Washington for civil rights in 1963. Rev. King's speech, known as "I Have a Dream," was delivered from the base of the Lincoln Memorial and relied on passages in the Bible to urge an end to discrimination based on race. Rev. King was tragically assassinated in Memphis in 1968.

The early Civil Rights Movement drew much of its strength and inspiration from Christian values; many of the members were evangelical Christians, and the movement relied heavily on churches to provide the organization and manpower to achieve their foals. Historians have characterized the early Civil Rights Movement as a fundamentally Christian, conservative movement that could not have come about in the more liberal north.^[9]

The Civil Rights Movement grew in size and intensity throughout the 1960s. In 1960, there were organized protests called "sit-ins" conducted against restaurants that would not serve African Americans in the South. Large groups of people would enter the restaurants that refused to serve blacks and simply "sit in" without moving, ordering, paying, or leaving, thereby causing the business to lose money. These "sit ins" began in North Carolina and soon spread. Also in 1960, the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee formed to organize more sit-ins. This was a more radical group that scorned integration and interracial cooperation. By 1966, it was demanding "black power."

In May 1961, a campaign to end segregation on public transportation started, known as the "Freedom Rides." It consisted of blacks and whites riding buses and trains from D.C. to points in the South, such as New Orleans, in order to challenge local laws requiring segregation. It was met with violence in the "deep South" (e.g., Mississippi and Alabama) and some future congressmen, such as the African American congressman John Lewis, were beaten.^[10]

In 1962, James Meredith became the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi, after the Supreme Court ordered his admission. The Mississippi Governor opposed allowing African Americans into the state college, and riots occurred to try to prevent his attendance. President Kennedy sent in U.S. Marshals (the police force for the federal courts) and also federal troops; dozens of the troops were injured and one foreign journalist was killed. Meredith graduated a year later, majoring in political science. During a march in 1966, he was shot at by an unemployed Ku Klux Klan member but suffered only superficial wounds. But Meredith did not support the broader civil rights movement that sought special treatment based on race. Instead, Meredith wanted individual rights regardless of race, rather than collective benefits based on race. He later worked for conservative Senator Jesse Helms. "Nothing could be more insulting to me than the concept of civil rights," Meredith once said. "It means perpetual second-class citizenship for me and my kind."^[11]

Congress responded to the Civil Rights Movement by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination based on race, color, religion, or gender in employment facilities. It also passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which guaranteed everyone the right to vote in federal elections. This was designed in particular to ensure the right to vote by southern blacks.

Some civil rights activists became militant and violent. From 1966 through the early 1970s, the Black Panthers collected weapons to resist police and promoted a violent approach to establishing civil rights. Many of them were arrested and went to jail. This shift from a productive movement to a destructive one was marked by the abandonment of Christian values and a pronounced move to the left; key members of the Black Panthers, such as Angela Davis, were also Communists.