APUSH 8.6, 8.10, 8.11 — APUSH Notes and Study Guides

In the last set of notes, we talked about American culture and society and now, we’re going to be talking about the Civil Rights Movement!

So at first, during the early Civil Rights Movement, Truman was one of the first modern presidents to challenge racial discrimination and he established the Committee on Civil Rights in 1946. He also strengthened the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, which helped black leaders to end segregation in schools. Iin 1948, he ordered for the end of racial discrimination in the federal government, including in the armed forces. He also tried to get Congress to create a Fair Employment Practice Commission to prevent employers from discriminating against African Americans, but this legislation was blocked by southern Democrats.

Montgomery Bus Boycott and Nonviolence Resistance

In the 1950s, buses were also segregated and African Americans had to sit in the back of the bus. In 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, a black woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the colored section for a white passenger. She was later arrested. This set off the massive Montgomery Bus Boycott, lasting over a year. Soon after, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK), the minister of a Baptist church in Montgomery, became a leader of the movement to end segregation.

Afterwards, a series of several more nonviolent protests and events occurred, and here are some of the most notable ones:

In 1957, MLK formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which organized ministers and churches in the South to help the Civil Rights Movement
In February of 1960, the Greensboro sit-ins started after college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, were refused service at a store.
In sit-ins, people would intentionally sit in restricted areas to demonstrate the injustice of segregated facilities.
In April of 1960, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was formed to organize sit-ins and mobilize black voters throughout the South.
After the Supreme Court ruled that segregation was unconstitutional, many more civil rights protests erupted all across America.

March on Washington and the Civil Rights Act of 1964

But this wasn’t enough and civil rights leaders continued advocating for changes. On August 4, 1963, more than 200,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington. This march culminated in MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech, in which he called for civil rights and an end to racism.

After JFK’s death, 36th President Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 which did many things:

Prohibited all racial discrimination in public places and employment
Created the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission to protect against job discrimination
Strengthened voting rights legislation
Allowed the U.S. Department of Justice to use lawsuits to desegregate public schools
In 1964, the 24th Amendment was also ratified, which abolished poll taxes, which were used to discourage poor people from voting.

Birmingham

Then, in 1963, in Birmingham, one of the most segregated cities in the South, MLK led a massive protest with marches to end segregation in Birmingham and open up jobs for black people. MLK was arrested as a result and from his cell, he wrote the famous Letter from Birmingham Jail. In this letter, he argued that people have a responsibility to fight unjust laws through nonviolent protest, and that people have to act in order for change to happen. In May of that year, over 5,000 children marched in the Children’s Crusade around Birmingham. Many of the children were arrested, beaten, and sprayed with fire-hoses. These events caused the federal government to intervene and end the violence, granting the protestors what they wanted and ending segregation in Birmingham.

Emmett Till

One of the most major cases of racial conflict during this period was the murder of Emmett Till in the summer of 1955. One night, when Emmett Till was visiting his uncle and cousin in Mississippi from Chicago, he was kidnapped, beaten, shot in the head, and shoved into a river. Three days later, his corpse was pulled out and shipped to Chicago where his mother had a five-day open-casket funeral to show the world what had happened. Thousands came to the Roberts Temple Church of God as a result to see what had happened to Emmett Till.

Despite all of the protests and new legislation and new court cases, black people still didn’t have equal rights to vote. This led to the Selma to Montgomery marches, in which MLK organized a series of marches from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery. Alabama state troopers blocked the marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and beat many of them, firing tear gas into the crowd. In response, the president sent the Alabama National Guard to protect the marchers. Later, in 1965, the Voting Rights Act was passed, banning literacy tests and discrimination at the voting booth. This led to the amount of African-American voters rising from 40% to 65% by 1970.

However, not all of the Civil Rights Movement was nonviolent. Malcolm X, a black Muslim leader and separatist, heavily criticized MLK for being too subservient. Unlike MLK, Malcolm X wanted to use violence to fight against discrimination. The Black Panthers was another example of a group that supported violence. They were a political organization that believed in armed self-defense, socialism, and were strongly against police brutality.

In April of 1968, MLK was assassinated, causing massive riots all over the United States, killing roughly 50 people. This led to a backlash against the Civil Rights Movement but regardless, the changes and the fights for civil rights continued.

Brown v. Board of Education

During this period, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) worked to end school segregation because they believed it was harmful to the mental health of black children. In the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, they argued that segregation violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of laws”. In May 1954 the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of the NAACP, overturning Plessy v. Fergusson and the idea of “separate but equal”. It ruled that school segregation was inherently unconstitutional. But despite this, many schools would take several years to begin desegregating.

In the South, there was a lot of opposition to the ruling. 101 members of Congress signed the “Southern Manifesto”, declaring the ruling an abuse of judicial power. Some states temporarily shut down public schools in response to the ruling, establishing new private schools where they could continue segregation. Many schools also found different excuses they could use to discriminate, such as making judgments based on students' scholastic aptitude, ability to adjust, or health to continue segregating them.

Supreme Court Cases

In the early 1960s, Chief Justice Earl Warren passed a series of landmark decisions that extended a lot of rights in the courts:

Brown v. Board of Education: Desegregated schools
Mapp v. Ohio: Ruled that illegally-acquired evidence could not be used in court
Gideon v. Wainwright: Gave every person the right to an attorney regardless of if they could afford one
Miranda v. Arizona: Ruled that everybody arrested needed to be read their rights
Baker v. Carr: Ruled that redistricting of state legislative districts is justiciable and can be judged in federal courts, forced states to redraw their districts to accurately represent populations
Engel v. Vitale: Banned forced school prayer
Griswold v. Connecticut: Ruled that states can’t prohibit the use of contraceptives due to the people’s right to privacy

Women’s Movement

During this time period, there was a strong movement advocating for women’s rights in America. For example, Betty Friedan published a book titled “The Feminine Mystique”, which argued that women weren’t satisfied with just being housewives and that societal expectations for women were degrading and harmful. In 1966, Friedan helped found the National Organization for Women (NOW), an organization that advocated for women’s rights and equality in jobs. In 1963, the Equal Pay Act was passed, requiring people with the same job and the same work to be given the same pay. In Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, gender discrimination in federally subsidized education programs was outlawed. This meant that for opportunities provided to men, colleges must offer similar opportunities to women. In 1986, the Supreme Court ruled in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson that sex discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace is a violation of the Civil Rights Act.

Gay Liberation Movement

There was also a movement for gay rights called the Gay Liberation Movement. Before the mid-20th century, the United States had been hostile toward homosexual people. States made homosexual acts illegal, and federal immigration laws prevented homosexuals from immigrating to the United States. Hollywood’s “Production Code” prohibited gay characters from being depicted in film. The American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as an illness. In the Lavender Scare in the 1950s, hundreds of homosexual people were fired from the U.S. government because people feared homosexual people were communists. In 1953, Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, banning homosexuals from working in the government. In 1969, police officers in New York City raided a gay nightclub, Stonewall Inn, setting off the Stonewall Riots in response. This event formally set off the Gay Liberation Movement. By the 1970s, the American Psychiatric Association stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder and by the end of the decade, homosexuality was no longer illegal in half of the states. In the 1980s, the Democratic party began advocating for gay rights as a whole.

American Indian Movement

As for Native American rights, the American Indian Movement also started getting traction during this period. In the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration had attempted to encourage natives to leave reservations and assimilate into urban society but this failed. In 1968, the American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded with the goal of achieving self-determination for natives. A year later, in 1969, AIM took over an abandoned prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco and then occupied Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1973. In 1975, the Indian Self-Determination Act was passed which gave reservations and tribal lands more autonomy, granting them greater control over internal programs, education, and law enforcement. Then, in 1978, the Tribally Controlled Community Colleges and Universities Assistance Act was passed which improved education on reservations and also built industries and casinos on reservations.

Affirmative Action

But then there was the controversial decision of affirmative action. Some people argued that because there are many groups that have been marginalized and gone through discrimination, the government needed to intervene and ensure that these groups now had increased employment or admission in jobs and institutions. This meant that they wanted to move beyond equal opportunity (everybody has the same chance) to equal results (different groups have the same percentage of success in getting jobs). In 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson signed Executive Order 11246, which required “affirmative action” in hiring to increase the number of minorities and women in the workplace. But this ended up giving preferential treatment to disadvantaged groups and many argued that the new numerical quotas that affirmative action required discriminated against actual qualified people. For example, at UC Davis, 16 of the spots in their medical program were reserved for disadvantaged groups. Allan Bakke, after being rejected from the program for two years in a row, sued UC Davis in Regents of the University of CA v. Bakke. He argued that the program was discriminatory because despite having scored in the 96th and 97th percentiles, he was rejected for being white while the affirmative action applications had mean scores in only the 46th and 35th percentiles. While the Supreme Court did rule that Bakke was discriminated against, they ruled that while affirmative action was constitutional, racial quotas were not.

To Unit 8

8.6, 8.10, & 8.11: The Civil Rights Movement