Difference between revisions of "Civil Rights Movement"

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===Little Rock Nine===
 
===Little Rock Nine===
In 1957, Governor [[Orval Faubus]] of Arkansas mobilized the state National Guard to prevent a court ordered desegregation of Little Rock public schools. When the federal court issued an injunction Eisenhower intervened decisively, taking control of the National Guard and send in Army combat troops. He enforced the desegregation of schools. In the late 1960s several southern states expressed forceful opposition to what was considered Federal tyranny; some redesigned their state flags to include the old Confederate banner. In 1962, the prospect of a black student being admitted to the [[University of Mississippi]] resulted in campus riots suppressed by Federal troops and a national guard now brought under Federal control.
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In 1957, Governor [[Orval Faubus]] of Arkansas mobilized the state National Guard to prevent a court ordered desegregation of Little Rock public schools. When the federal court issued an injunction Eisenhower intervened decisively, taking control of the National Guard and send in Army combat troops. He enforced the desegregation of schools.  
  
 
====1957 Civil Rights Act====
 
====1957 Civil Rights Act====

Revision as of 09:25, February 15, 2019

Martin Luther King Jr from the Lincoln Memorial on the Mall in Washington DC.

The civil rights movement was a movement towards racial equality and an end to segregation of African Americans that occurred in the United States from about 1953 to 1968, as courts and Congress made segregation illegal and imposed strict laws attempting to ensure that blacks could be able to vote.

GOP role in Civil Rights

The GOP always voted in higher percentages for civil rights bills from the 1860s when Republican Abraham Lincoln overturned slavery to the 1960s when the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act were passed.[1]

  • 1863: Emancipation Proclamation, Executive Order by Republican President Abraham Lincoln freeing all slaves held within the rebellious states.
  • 1865: 13th Amendment banning slavery passed by Republican President Abraham Lincoln with unanimous Republican support and most Democrats opposed.
  • 1866: 14th Amendment giving due process and equal protection to all races passes with 100% of Democrats voting no in House and Senate.
  • 1870: 15th Amendment giving all the right to vote regardless of race passes house with 98% Republican support and 97% Democrat opposition.
  • 1875: Civil Rights Act of 1875 passed by Republican president U.S. Grant with 92% Republican support and 100% Democrat opposition.
  • 1919: 22nd Amendment Republican House passes the amendment giving women the right to vote, 85% of Republicans vote yes to 54% of Democrats and 80% of Republicans in Senate vote yes but nearly half of Democrats vote no.
  • 1922 Anti-Lynching Law passed first time by Republican House; filibustered by Democrats in the Senate.
  • 1924: Republican President Calvin Coolidge signs the law passed by Republican Congress giving Native Americans the right to vote.
  • 1954: Brown v. Board of Education, Republican Chief Justice appointed by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower writes Supreme Court decision overturning previous Democrat Supreme Court "separate by equal" doctrine, outlawing school segregation.
  • 1957: Republican President Dwight Eisenhower signs the Republican Party sponsored 1957 Civil Rights Act creating the Civil Rights Commission.
  • 1957: Republican President Dwight Eisenhower order federal troops to take over Arkansas National Guard which Democrat Gov. Orval Faubus used to prevent black children to attend public school. Eisenhower ordered the 101st Airborne Division to escort the children passed protesters.
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  • 1964: Civil Rights Act ending segregation and voter restrictions is passed with 80% of Republicans in the House and 82% in the Senate voting yes, but only 63% of Democrats voting yes in the House and 69% in the Senate. Democrats filibustered for 83 days. After passing the Civil Rights Act, Democratic party president Lyndon B. Johnson brags "I'll have those n****** voting Democratic for the next 200 years."[2]
  • 1965: Voting Rights Act passed to remove racial voter discriminations against blacks and Hispanics with 82% of Republicans voting yes to 78% of Democrats in the House, and 94% of Republicans in the Senate to 73% of Democrats in the Senate.
  • 1973: Only 2 of the 112 Democrats who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 actually switched to the Republican Party, John Jarman and Strom Thurmond. All the racist Democrats who had opposed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s were the same ones who in the 1970s supported Roe v. Wade. They went straight from supporting segregation to supporting abortion.

Reconstruction

During Reconstruction, Radical Republicans tried to guarantee equal rights for emancipated slaves after the American Civil War. They succeeded in passing the Fourteenth Amendment and Fifteenth Amendment, which in theory required equal protection of the laws and an equal right to vote.

Democrat reaction

The Republican coalition in the South fell apart in the 1870s, and conservative white Redeemers took control. The Redeemers were paternalistic toward blacks but they confronted a Populist element in the 1890s that demanded strict segregation, called Jim Crow.

The Supreme Court allowed segregation in 1896, and black leaders such as Booker T. Washington worked to build an alliance of black businessmen and farmers with benevolent whites, using education as the tool to eventually achieve equality. Militant blacks led by W.E.B. DuBois and the NAACP demanded immediate redress. For a brief while around 1920 militant black separatists gained strength. While blacks slowly improved their economic status in the South in the 20th century, despite lynchings, they remained second class citizens with very little political power. Blacks began moving in large numbers to the North to meet the labor shortages during World War I and World War II. By the 1950s they had a political base in Harlem (New York City) and Chicago, but still very little power. Jim Crow remained as strong as ever in the South, where white Democrats had near-total control.

1954-1968 movement

Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy to a lesser degree, and Lyndon Johnson to a major degree became proactive in the Civil Rights movement.

Brown v. Board of Education

The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, a liberal Republican, issued Brown vs. Board of education in 1954, declaring legal segregation to be unconstitutional. It marked the culmination of a judicial movement that had been underway for a decade. It had the short-term effect of ending segregated schools in border states, and the long-term effect of ending legalized segregation in schools.

Montgomery Bus boycott

On Dec. 31, 1955, MArtin Luther King, Jr. led the nonviolent boycott of city buses of Montgomery, Alabama, after he sent Rosa Parks to be arrested for not moving to the back of the bus.[3]

Little Rock Nine

In 1957, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas mobilized the state National Guard to prevent a court ordered desegregation of Little Rock public schools. When the federal court issued an injunction Eisenhower intervened decisively, taking control of the National Guard and send in Army combat troops. He enforced the desegregation of schools.

1957 Civil Rights Act

Dr. King's meeting with Vice President Nixon marked national recognition of King as leader of the civil rights movement.

Republican Attorney General Herbert Brownell originally proposed the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Vice President Richard Nixon invited Dr. King to the White House for a meeting on 13 June 1957. This meeting, described by Bayard Rustin as a “summit conference,” marked national recognition of King’s role in the civil rights movement (Rustin, 13 June 1957). Seeking support for a voter registration initiative in the South, King appealed to Nixon to urge Republicans in Congress to pass the 1957 Civil Rights Act and to visit the South to express support for civil rights. Optimistic about Nixon’s commitment to improving race relations in the United States, King told Nixon, “How deeply grateful all people of goodwill are to you for your assiduous labor and dauntless courage in seeking to make the civil rights bill a reality.”

Democrat Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson had Judiciary chairman Sen. James Eastland drastically water-down the House version, removing stringent voting protection clauses.[4][5] The bill passed 285-126 in the House with Republicans providing the majority of votes 167–19 and Democrats 118–107.[6] It then passed 72-18 in the Senate, with Republicans again supplying the majority of votes, 43–0 and Democrats voting 29–18. John Kennedy voted against it.[7] It was the first federal civil rights legislation passed by the United States Congress since the Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Johnson told Sen. Richard Russell,
"These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don't move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there'll be no way of stopping them, we'll lose the filibuster and there'll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It'll be Reconstruction all over again."[8]

Sit-ins

The Civil Rights Movement received an infusion of energy when students in Greensboro, North Carolina; Nashville, Tennessee; and Atlanta, Georgia, began to "sit-in" at the lunch counters of a few of their local stores, to protest those establishments' refusal to desegregate. These protesters were encouraged to dress professionally, to sit quietly, and to occupy every other stool so that potential white sympathizers could join in. Many of these sit-ins provoked local authority figures to use brute force in physically escorting the demonstrators from the lunch facilities.

The "sit-in" technique was not new - the Congress of Racial Equality had used it to protest segregation in the Midwest in the 1940s - but it brought national attention to the movement in 1960. The success of the Greensboro sit-in led to a rash of student campaigns throughout the South. Probably the best organized, most highly disciplined, the most immediately effective of these was in Nashville, Tennessee. By the end of 1960, the sit-ins had spread to every Southern and border state and even to Nevada, Illinois, and Ohio. Demonstrators focused not only on lunch counters but also on parks, beaches, libraries, theaters, museums, and other public places. Upon being arrested, student demonstrators made "jail-no-bail" pledges, to call attention to their cause and to reverse the cost of protest, thereby saddling their jailers with the financial burden of prison space and food.

Great Society

Johnson in built a coalition that included white churches, Jews, and labor unions, as well as many Republicans such as Everett Dirksen, to build a majority of the northern leadership in favor of action. The Democratic South filibustered but failed stop passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended Jim Crow, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which guaranteed federal oversight of voting rights.

1964 Civil Rights Act

Selma

1965 Voting Rights Act

Affirmative Action

Leaders

Black leaders claimed that their own efforts were more important in causing change, emphasizing activities like bus boycotts, lunch-counter sit-ins. A black Baptist minister from Atlanta Martin Luther King led the new movement. Painstaking work by labor unions, civil rights groups, and mainstream churches, aided by popular outrage at the violent techniques used by police in some southern cities fueled a national consensus that segregated and second class status had to end. Some of the organizations that spearheaded the movement were the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, or 'Snick'), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the older National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). All were committed to non-violence and Gandhian Civil Disobedience in the early years, a tactic that was politically essential in order to win public support and to avoid alienating northern voters.

Black Leaders

Anita Bryant, Muhammad Ali, Rosa Parks and Donald Trump receive the 1986 Ellis Island Medal of Honor.

Non-black supporters

Black Power

Nation of Islam

Meanwhile, a growing black radical movement, led by Muslims like Malcolm X, and inner city gangs, pulled the black community toward separatism. By 1966 the tensions inside the black community were ripping apart the civil rights coalition, as the radicals called for the ousting of all whites in leadership positions. King lost much of his influence, and was unable to stop the wave of rioting that broke out in every major American city with a black population. The riots soured white America on the civil rights movement because it brought violence and turmoil, and led to calls for Law and order.

Black Panthers

Co-opted by feminists and gays

Other groups started to mobilize for rights, especially feminists and homosexuals.

See also

Further reading

  • Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (1988)
  • Graham, Hugh Davis. Civil Rights in the United States (1994)
  • Graham, Hugh Davis. The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy, 1960-1972 (1990)
  • Horton, James Oliver and Horton, Lois E. Hard Road to Freedom: The Story of African America. (2001). 405 pp. by leading black historians
  • Patterson, James T. Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and its Troubled Legacy. (2001). 285 pp.
  • Riches, William T. Martin. The Civil Rights Movement: Struggle and Resistance. (1997). 196 pp.
  • Thernstrom, Stephan and Thernstrom, Abigail. America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible. (1997). 704 pp. by leading conservative scholars
  • Verney, Kevern. Black Civil Rights in America. (2000). 135 pp.

Primary sources

  • Birnbaum, Jonathan and Taylor, Clarence, eds. Civil Rights since 1787: A Reader on the Black Struggle. (2000). 935 pp.
  • D'Angelo, Raymond, ed. The American Civil Rights Movement: Readings and Interpretations. (2001). 592 pp.

References

  1. Parks, B. The Democrat Race Lie. BlackAndRight.com.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:United_States_federal_civil_rights_legislation
  2. The Relentless Conservative (2011, August 24). The Democratic Party's Two-Facedness of Race Relations. The Huffington Post.
  3. http://www.thekingcenter.org/mlk/chronology.html
  4. https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1951-2000/The-Civil-Rights-Act-of-1957/
  5. Caro, Robert, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Chapter 39
  6. HR 6127. CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1957. PASSED. YEA SUPPORTS PRESIDENT'S POSITION. http://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/85-1957/h42
  7. HR. 6127. CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1957. PASSED. http://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/85-1957/s75
  8. Said to Senator Richard Russell, Jr. (D-GA) regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1957. As quoted in Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (1977), by Doris Kearns Goodwin, New York: New American Library, p. 155.