The Struggle for Civil Rights

Where it started

After the Civil War, African Americans faced discrimination everywhere. Winning their civil rights, the rights of full citizenship and equality under the law, took more than 100 years.

Segregation, keeping people apart by race, was common, especially in the South. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) the Supreme Court said segregation was constitutional as long as the separate facilities were “equal.” They almost never were.

Building a movement

The NAACP fought segregation in court, challenging laws that denied African Americans their rights. The National Urban League worked to open up jobs and opportunities in cities. Groups like these built the civil rights movement.

In 1948 President Harry Truman ordered an end to segregation in the armed forces.

In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), NAACP lawyers convinced the Supreme Court that segregated public schools were unconstitutional because they violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. That overturned Plessy for public schools.

Strategies

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a main leader of the movement. He believed in nonviolent resistance and helped organize marches and boycotts. His “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington described his hope for racial equality.

Students staged sit-ins at whites-only lunch counters. Black and white Freedom Riders rode buses together across the South to protest segregation. Many protesters were met with violence.

What it won

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin in public places, schools, and voter registration. In jobs, it also banned discrimination based on sex.

The Twenty-fourth Amendment (1964) outlawed poll taxes in federal elections. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 knocked down other barriers that kept minorities from voting.

Ongoing challenges

Affirmative action programs tried to make up for past discrimination by encouraging the hiring and promotion of minorities and women and the admission of more minority students to college. Critics argued these programs were themselves unfair. In 2023 the Supreme Court ended race-conscious admissions at colleges.

The struggle continues. Some Americans still face racial profiling, being treated as suspects because of how they look, and some are victims of hate crimes.

In 1951, R.R. Moton High School in Prince Edward County, Virginia, was the county’s high school for Black students. It was built for about 180 students and held about 450. It had no cafeteria, no gym, and no science labs, and the overflow students were taught in tar-paper shacks heated by wood stoves. The white high school had none of these problems. Parents had asked the school board for a new building and been turned down.

Barbara Johns, a 16-year-old junior, decided students would act. She spent months planning in secret with other student leaders. On April 23, 1951, she got the principal out of the building with a fake phone call, called an assembly, and led the whole student body out on strike.

The students wrote to the NAACP. Its lawyers agreed to help, but only if the students would ask for full integration instead of a better segregated school. The students agreed. Their lawsuit, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, named 117 student plaintiffs. It became one of the five cases the Supreme Court heard together as Brown v. Board of Education, and the only one started by students.

Johns received threats and her family sent her to finish school in Alabama. Prince Edward County fought integration so hard that it closed its public schools from 1959 to 1964 rather than integrate them. In 2020, Virginia chose Barbara Johns to replace its statue of Robert E. Lee in the U.S. Capitol.

The question: How did the civil rights movement both make the Constitution’s existing promises real for African Americans and extend those promises to other marginalized groups?

Use at least one specific example: a case, a law, an amendment, or an event. “The movement helped everyone” is not an example.