Transcript The Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Movement
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The Civil Rights Movement began after
Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a
bus to a white man.
An organized boycott of the bus system was
just the beginning as African Americans
demanded equal rights.
The Supreme Court ruled that segregation
was legal in Plessy v. Ferguson.
“Jim Crow” laws segregating African
Americans and whites were common in the
South after Plessy v. Ferguson.
The Civil Rights Movement
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In places without segregation laws, such as in the
North, there was de facto segregation - or
segregation by custom and tradition.
The National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) had supported court
cases trying to overturn segregation since 1909.
African Americans gained political power as they
migrated to the Northern cities where they could
vote.
In Chicago in 1942, the Congress of Racial Equality
(CORE) was founded. CORE used sit-ins as a form
of protest against segregation.
The Civil Rights Movement
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African American attorney and chief counsel
for the NAACP, Thurgood Marshall worked to
end segregation in public schools.
In 1954 several Supreme Court cases
regarding segregation – including the case
of Linda Brown – were combined in one
ruling.
Brown v. the Board of Education
convinced African Americans to challenge all
forms of segregation, but it also angered
many white Southerners who supported
segregation.
The Civil Rights Movement
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The Montgomery bus boycott and the
Montgomery Improvement Association was
led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., called for a
nonviolent passive resistant approach to
end segregation.
The boycott of the bus system continued for
over a year as African Americans walked or
participated in car pools.
In December 1956, the United States
Supreme Court declared Alabama’s laws
requiring segregation on buses to be
unconstitutional.
The Sit-In Movement
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Students like Jesse Jackson felt that the sitins gave them the power to change things.
SNCC – (the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee) Students were
encourage by Ella Baker, the executive
director of the SCLC, to form their own
organization.
SNCC organizer, Fannie Lou Hamer, was
arrested in Mississippi after encouraging
African Americans to vote. While in jail, she
was beaten by police.
New Civil Rights Legislation
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Civil Rights Act of 1957 was intended
to protect the right of African
Americans to vote.
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This brought the power of the federal
government into the movement.
It also created the United States
Commission on Civil Rights to investigate
allegations of denial of voting rights.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964
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After Governor George Wallace blocked the
way for two African Americans to register for
college, President Kennedy appeared on
national tv to announce his civil rights bill.
Martin Luther King Jr. wanted to pressure
Congress to get Kennedy’s legislation
through. On August 28, 1963, he led
200,000 demonstrators of all races to the
nation’s capital and staged a peaceful rally.
The act gave the federal government broad
power to stop racial discrimination.
New Civil Rights Legislation
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The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the most
comprehensive civil rights law Congress
had ever enacted.
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It gave the federal government broad power to
prevent racial discrimination in a number of
areas.
The law also made segregation illegal in most
public places, and it gave citizens of all races
and nationalities equal access to such facilities
as restaurants, parks, libraries, and theaters.
It also gave the attorney general more power to
bring lawsuits to force school desegregation,
and it required private employers to end
discrimination in the workplace.
New Civil Rights Legislation
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The Voting Rights Act of 1965
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It authorized the attorney general to send
federal examiners to register qualified
voters, bypassing local officials who often
refused to register African Americans.
The law also suspended the use of
discriminatory devices such as the
literacy tests in counties where less than
half of all adults had been allowed to
vote.