The Quest for Civil Rights, 1917-80

• Segregation

  • Context - Jim Crow Laws - Laws that segregated all aspect of life
  • Examples - black and white people were to live separately. There were different buses, theatres, hospitals, schools, benches and toilets. Black teachers were paid less.
  • Event - Violence to enforce the system
  • Example - 2000 people were lynched in the last 2 decades of the 19th century → they were advertised in news papers and were seen as a normality. 
  • Context - Black people were free from slavery however they were still considered inferior and had different rights.
• Legal

  • 1870 - Black Americans were given; equal civil rights, right to vote, right to sit in juries and become judges, the right to get married and have children without fear. However, racial hatred still remained. Many state governments still chose to persecute black people.
• Freedmen's Bureau

  • Context - Set up to tackle problems freed slaves may face.
  • Examples - 4000 free schools which educated 250,000 black students. By 1870, 21% of black people in the South could read. In 1877, many black schools were forced to shut down due to white racists; some schools were burned and students got beaten up.
• Sharecropping

  • Black people work on farms for a share of crops. Free labour.
• Booker. T. Washington

  • Booker was a famous black American who advocated for accepting segregation. 
  • He had a significant following, especially from better off black people. He also had white support; they felt he saw how many Southern Whites feared black people gaining equality.
• Plessy vs Ferguson

  • The court had ruled that despite the 14th amendment, segregation was possible if provision was ‘separate but equal’. It was used to support many other cases on segregation.
  • President Wilson had no problem with segregation
  • President Hoover spoke out against lynching in favour of civil rights but both he and President Coolidge were committed to laisezz-faire (could express not enforce via legislation).
• Situation in 1917

  • Event - Still faced discrimination, segregation and violence (more extreme in the South - especially in the Deep South).
  • Evidence - They were expected to live, shop, and school in their own part (the worst part) of town.
  • Event - 1913 - President Wilson introduced segregation in government offices and the white house
  • Event - Violence 
  • Evidence - 1919, 25 anti-black race riots set off by police injustice, 100s were killed (known as ‘Red Summer Riots’ and was in Chicago not in the South).
• Ku Klux Klan

  • Context - Terrorist group set up by a secret society ensuring white supremacy via brutal violence, people were beaten, lynched, burned, drowned and shot.
  • Event - It was banned in 1872 but continued as it was still popular and judges and policemen were often members. 
  • Evidence - By 1925 they had 3-8 million members. This led to children being brought up as white supremacists.
• Lynching

  • Context - Didn’t need to provide a specific accusation. Often advertised beforehand (seen as a leisure activity).
  • Evidence - Between 1915 - 30 there were lynchings of 65 white men & 579 black men (mostly in the South). 14-year-old Emmet Till was wrongfully lynched in 1955 which attracted a lot of attention and caused shock (even in the South).
• Impact of immigration on South

  • The labour force shrank and the farming areas of the South, already having economic problems, struggled to get by. 
  • The poorest farmers suffered the most and most of them were black. 
  • Southerners tended to assume that those black Americans who remained in the South, accepted the Jim Crow laws.
• Impact of the New Deal

  • Event - Black voters voted for Democrats & Roosevelt appointed some black advisers.
  • Consequences - Executive order 8802, banning racial discrimination in the defence industry, in order to get people more involved with war work. Some measures helped e.g. ⅓ of low income housing built had black tenants. The NRA often ignored Black Americans.
  • Events - Lack of Social Security
  • Consequences - Often sacked (in 1000s) for white workers especially during agricultural reforms. 
• 5 million southern blacks migrated to the north and west for prosperity and demand for workers
• Truman on the outtake on Civil Rights

  • Event - In 1946, he set up the President’s Committee on Civil Right
  • Consequence - called for equal opportunities in work and housing; it also urged strong federal support for civil rights. Black Americans wanted to keep their wartime gains and push for greater equality, and Truman was on their side but his Cold War focus meant that he concentrated more on fighting communism. Earlier collaboration between blacks and communists meant that at least on black organisation, the National Negro Congress ended up on the government list of suspect organisations.
• The United Nations (UN) and Civil Rights

  • Event - Initially agreeing with racial theories of white supremacy was wrong but faced opposition (led by South Africa).
  • Consequence - NAACP continued protesting.
• Thrugood Marshall (1908-93)

  • Event - First black American to ever serve on the Supreme Court.
  • Consequence - Argued the Brown V Board of Education case Between 1940s and 50s - took 32 segregation cases to Supreme Court and won 29 of them Nominated to important legal positions by two presidents of the USA: Kennedy nominated him as marshall to the US Court of Appeals Second Circuit in 1961. Johnson appointed him solicitor general in 1965 and then to the Supreme Court in 1967.
• Black and white people working together

  1. Black people could do skilled work

  2. Black people could think

  3. Black people could be friends
• Black and white people working together

  Affected white people's reaction to post war civil rights efforts
• At the end of the war, a survey showed that white Americans were still racist supporting housing segregation and that jobs should go to whites before blacks
• Legal Challenges

  • Event - NAACP began by mounting a campaign against lynching, feeling many people didn’t understand the scale of it. 
  • Consequence - They published pamphlets, held demonstrations, marches and petitioned congress. 
  • Event - NAACP took cases of segregation to court and provided lawyers 
  • Evidence - Plessy vs Ferguson. 
  • Consequence - An early tactic was to argue that the separate provision was not equal, so it couldn’t be overruled by the 1896 Supreme Court ruling. 
• NAACP membership


  • 1917 - 9000
  • 1919 - 90,000
  • 1946 - 600,000
• UNIA


  An inspiration to Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam
• Success of Legal Challenges

  • Event  - NAACP won some cases in the 30s and 40s and every case it fought in the 50s. 
  • Consequences -  The Supreme Court didn’t enforce its rulings and weakened the force of the rulings by not setting time limits for desegregation. 
  • Evidence - 10 years after the ruling, 1 black child in every 100 in the South was in an integrated school.
  • Event - NAACP decided to target housing after, having helped to set up the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing in 1950.

  Consequence -  Integrated schools were less helpful if people lived in segregated communities.
• Martin Luther King Jr.

  • His Leadership - Prominent despite other leaders working hard due to his media savvy approach which gathered attention and he founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957.
  • Rules of Non-violent protest - Emphasised clarity aims to avoid portraying Black Americans as violent. Public arrests encouraged with techniques (e.g. going limp during sit-ins) with advocacy of integrated white participation.
• The Montgomery Bus Boycott
• Rosa Parks was arrested


  December 1
• Nonviolent protest


  Adherence to nonviolent protest principles during the 380-day boycott
• Media strategy


  Leaflets, meetings, and media outreach were utilised to publicise the boycott and its cause, garnering widespread attention
• Desegregation of buses


  December 21st
• It took several years for violence related to subside
• Persistence of racial tensions in the aftermath
• The Greensboro Sit-in


  1st February 1960
• 4 black students initiated a sit-in at a Greensboro department store
• The protest expanded rapidly, with around 30 students joining the next day and nearly all seats occupied by black students shortly after
• The sit-in


  Symbolised a broader demand for freedom and equality in the daily lives of black Americans
• The sit-in


  • Challenging segregation and discrimination in public spaces
  • Focus on daily lives of black Americans
• Speaker: 'Quote'
• Well-dressed black students


  Enduring harassment from white hecklers
• SNCC


  A racially integrated organisation of young people dedicated to nonviolent direct action
• Established in Raleigh, North Carolina


  1960
• SNCC aimed to empower black Americans politically