Section 1 - Introduction s5
Section 1 - Introduction
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Even before World War II came to an end, the Allies were preparing for peace. In April 1945, delegates from 50 nations met in San Francisco to establish a new organization called the United Nations (UN). The UN was founded to preserve world peace by promoting international cooperation.
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A generation earlier, the United States had refused to participate in the League of Nations after World War I. This time, America’s response was quite different. The United States not only joined the UN, but also gave it a home. Since 1952, the UN’s headquarters has been located in New York City.
Hopes for a more peaceful world, however, faded quickly as the United States and the Soviet Union emerged from World War II as bitter rivals. Tensions increased when the dictator of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, seized control of several Eastern European nations in 1945. The people in these nations were denied the freedom to choose their own governments, to travel, and even to speak freely.
Stalin’s takeover of these countries alarmed leaders in the United States and Western Europe. Former British prime minister Winston Churchill warned that “an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” In the view of Western democracies, that iron curtain divided the free world of the West from the Soviet-dominated world of the East.
This rivalry between Western democracies and the Soviet Union led to the Cold War, an intense competition for global power and influence that lasted more than 40 years. The conflict was called a “cold” war because the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in intense military competition without ever fighting each other directly.
In the 1950s, African Americans faced discrimination and prejudice throughout the United States. But discrimination was especially harsh in the South, where laws and customs enforced the segregation of blacks and whites.
In Mississippi, for example, a law banned people of different races from sharing taxicabs. Throughout the South, African Americans were forced to use separate entrances to buildings, separate elevators and stairways, separate drinking fountains, and separate restrooms. They also had to attend separate schools.
Public transportation was often where segregation was most obvious and humiliating. Blacks could not sit in the same train car with white people. On buses, they had to sit in the back. In some cities, blacks had to give up their bus seats to whites when asked.
Like most black children, Martin Luther King Jr. learned about discrimination early. One day when he went to a friend’s house to play, he was told not to come again because “they were white and [he] was colored.” Later, King described how he ran home in tears and asked his mother to explain:
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She told me about slavery and how it had ended with the Civil War. She tried to explain the divided system of the South—the segregated schools, restaurants, theaters, housing; the white and colored signs on drinking fountains, waiting rooms, lavatories—as a social condition rather than a natural order. Then she said the words that almost every Negro hears before he can yet understand the injustice that makes them necessary: ‘You are as good as anyone.’
Many hesitated to speak out against discrimination for fear of being fired from their jobs, harassed by police, beaten, or worse. There were few places where blacks felt safe, outside their homes and churches. It was there that black children learned how to survive in a confusing world. “She taught me that I should feel a sense of ‘somebodiness,’” recalled King. “On the other hand, I had to go out and face the system, which stared me in the face every day, saying, ‘You are less than. You are not equal to.’”
Section 3 - The Supreme Court Ends School Segregation
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The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees all American citizens “equal protection of the laws.” However, in 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation laws did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment as long as the facilities made available to both races were roughly equal.
Separate but Not Equal In reality, separate facilities for African Americans were seldom equal to those available to whites. School buildings for African Americans were often old and dingy. Classrooms were overcrowded. Students had few, if any, textbooks, maps, or library materials. In South Carolina’s Clarendon County, for example, every white student had a desk. Two of the African American schools in the county, on the other hand, had no desks at all.
Throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, southern universities and colleges routinely turned away African Americans. When black students did gain admission, they found themselves victims of rigid rules that segregated college campuses. For example, G. W. McLaurin, an African American who was preparing to be a teacher, was admitted to the University of Oklahoma. McLaurin was assigned a separate table in the library and in the cafeteria. He wasn’t allowed to sit in the same classroom as white students. Instead, he had to strain to hear his professors’ lectures from an empty classroom next door.
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Brown v. Board of Education In 1953, there were 21 states with segregated schools. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) led the legal fight against this practice.
The NAACP brought a number of cases to court that challenged school segregation laws. In Topeka, Kansas, Reverend Oliver Brown sued the state for the right to send his daughter to a white neighborhood school rather than a black school much farther away. In South Carolina, African American parents sued the Clarendon County school board for equal funding for white and black students. In Farmville, Virginia, black students at Moton High School went to court to protest the overcrowded conditions at their school.
These three cases, plus two more from Delaware and Washington, D.C., found their way to the U.S. Supreme Court. There they were joined together as one case under the name Brown vs Board of Education.
Lawyers from the NAACP argued the case before the Supreme Court. They were led by Thurgood Marshall, who would later become the nation’s first African American Supreme Court justice. Marshall had already won most of the cases he had taken to the Supreme Court for the NAACP. John W. Davis represented the states. Davis had argued more cases before the Supreme Court than any other lawyer at that time.
In his argument before the Supreme Court, Marshall said that segregated schools could never be “equal.” The simple act of separating people, he argued, suggested that one group was seen as better than the other.
Davis responded that education was a local issue. Each state, he said, should be allowed to decide for itself whether to segregate its schools. The Constitution did not prevent the separation of blacks and whites, as long as the states provided equal facilities for each group.
Meanwhile the federal government came into the case on the side of the black parents. Secretary of State Dean Acheson asked the Court to consider the impact of racial discrimination on the country’s efforts to lead the free world in the Cold War era:
The continuation of racial discrimination in the United States remains a source of constant embarrassment to this government in the day-to-day conduct of its foreign relations. . . . It jeopardizes [threatens] . . . our moral leadership of the free and democratic nations of the world.
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court announced its decision. “We conclude, unanimously,” the Court declared, “that in the field of public education . . . ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently [by nature] unequal.” The decision explicitly overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, and stated that courts should no longer follow its rules. A year later, the Court ordered an end to school segregation “with all deliberate speed.” These historic decisions brought an end to legal segregation in schools and inspired new campaigns against discrimination in other areas.
Section 4 - The Montgomery Bus Boycott
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On December 1, 1955, a 42-year-old woman named Rosa Parks got on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She was on her way home from work. Parks made her way to a seat in the first row of the black section of the bus. It was a law in Montgomery that the first ten rows of seats were reserved for white people. African Americans had to sit in the back, even if no one else was on the bus. If there were not enough seats for all, blacks had to give their seats to white riders and stand.
Rosa Parks worked as a seamstress in Montgomery. She was also involved in the African American struggle for equal rights, having served as the secretary for her local NAACP chapter for 12 years.
That day, as the bus traveled its route, more and more people got on. Eventually, all the seats in the first ten rows were full, and one white man was left standing. The bus driver ordered the African Americans sitting in the eleventh row to move so that the white man could sit down. Only one seat was needed, but all the African Americans in that row were told to move.
Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. She was fed up with being pushed around. The driver stopped the bus and called the police, who arrested Parks and took her to jail. Parks later recalled,
People always say that I didn’t give up my seat [that day] because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. . . . No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.
The next day, E. D. Nixon, a former president of Parks’s NAACP chapter, posted bail money to release Parks from jail. Her trial was set for the following Monday.
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“Stay off the Buses” Rosa Parks was a well-respected member of Montgomery’s black community. Word of her arrest spread like wildfire through black neighborhoods.
That night, a group of black women led by English professor Jo Ann Robinson met and put out a call for action. They stayed up all night printing flyers that called on African Americans to boycott the buses the following Monday. “Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out of her seat and give it to a white person,” they began. “The next time it may be you, or you, or you.” African American ministers promoted the bus boycott in their Sunday sermons.
On Monday, the buses that rolled through black neighborhoods were empty. Some 17,000 black riders had found some other way to get to work. That evening, a meeting was held in an African American church. The crowd decided to continue the boycott until the city agreed to seat bus riders on a “first come, first served basis” and to hire black bus drivers.
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Martin Luther King Jr. That night, a young minister named Martin Luther King Jr. was chosen to lead the bus boycott. King knew that the boycott would be a struggle for most black workers, who relied on buses to get to work. Some formed carpools. Those who couldn’t find rides walked each day to their jobs. No matter how far the distance or how tired their feet, they stayed off the buses for more than a year. “I’m not walking for myself,” said one elderly woman. “I’m walking for my children and my grandchildren.”
While studying to be a minister, King had come to believe in the power of nonviolent protest to end injustice. King trusted that nonviolent resistance would draw public attention to the righteousness of his cause. He thought that violence, on the other hand, could only undermine the civil rights struggle and turn public opinion against the movement. “The only weapon that we have,” he said as the boycott began, “is the weapon of protest.” His commitment to nonviolence was tested when he was arrested and hauled to jail, and again when his house was bombed. Still, King continued to urge his followers to follow the path of peace:
This is not a war between the white and the Negro but a conflict between justice and injustice. If we are arrested every day, if we are exploited every day, if we are trampled over every day, don’t ever let anyone pull you so low as to hate them. We must use the weapon of love.
More than a year after Rosa Parks’s arrest, the Supreme Court ruled that Alabama’s state and local laws requiring segregated buses violated the Constitution. The bus boycott was finally over. Looking back on the year, King reflected on the success of “a new and powerful weapon—non-violent resistance.” Soon, this powerful weapon would be put to use across the South.
Section 5 - Nonviolent Protests
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