In the North, while legislation combated segregation, African Americans were still kept separate and apart from whites. In contrast with the South, in the late s and early s, Indiana, Nebraska, Ohio, Michigan, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and New York all adopted laws that prohibited racial discrimination in public facilities. Yet blacks encountered segregation in the North as well. Rather than through de jure segregation, most northern whites and blacks lived in separate neighborhoods and attended separate schools largely through de facto segregation.
This kind of segregation resulted from the fact that African Americans resided in distinct neighborhoods, stemming from insufficient income as well as a desire to live among their own people, as many ethnic groups did. However, blacks separated themselves not merely as a matter of choice or custom.
Instead, realtors and landlords steered blacks away from white neighborhoods and municipal ordinances and judicially enforced racial covenants signed by homeowners kept blacks out of white areas. In , the federal government sanctioned racial segregation, fashioning the constitutional rationale for keeping the races legally apart. In the case of Plessy v. Ferguson was based upon a belief in white supremacy.
In its decision the majority of the court concluded that civil rights laws could not change racial destiny. Local and state authorities never funded black education equally nor did African Americans have equal access to public accommodations. To make matters worse, In the South segregation prevailed unabated from the s to the s.
For the next fifty years racial segregation prevailed, reinforced by disfranchisement, official coercion, and vigilante terror. In addition, starting in with the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, who had close ties to the South, the federal government imposed racial segregation in government offices in Washington, D.
Roosevelt in the s. The struggle against Nazi racism in Europe called attention to racism in America. The war had exposed the horrors of Nazi racism; non-white nations in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia struggled to end colonial rule ; and scientists no longer accepted the notion of superior and inferior races. In , President Harry S. Truman issued an executive order desegregating the armed forces, thus reversing a longstanding practice.
In , the Supreme Court justices in Brown v. Nevertheless, the Brown ruling signaled only a first step, and it took another decade and a mass movement for civil rights for African Americans to tear down the racist edifices of segregation in the South. The challenge is to explain to students the reasons for and the legacy of segregation. Explaining segregation to students is a lot more difficult because of the progress made since the Civil Rights Movement. Now that an African American has been elected president of the United States, segregation seems as outmoded and distant a practice as watching black and white television.
Thus, the major challenge is to explain to students the reasons for and the legacy of segregation. This requires a series of questions. The first question to ask is when did racial segregation begin? The importance of this question helps in gauging the potency and endurance of racism as a feature of American history.
If segregation began Students should understand that segregation is embedded deeply in America's past. The evidence points in this direction. Before the Civil War, free Negroes in the North encountered segregation in schools, public accommodations, and the military.
In , the Supreme Court of Massachusetts in Roberts v. City of Boston held that the state could require separate and equal schools for Negroes without violating the right of equality in the Massachusetts Constitution.
Segregation continued to exist after the Civil War and spread to the South once slaves were emancipated. Although the president urged the freedom riders to stop, they refused.
Regularly met by mob violence and police brutality, hundreds of freedom riders were beaten and jailed. Although the Freedom Ride never reached its planned destination, New Orleans, it achieved its purpose.
At the prodding of the Kennedy administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission ordered the integration of all interstate bus, train, and air terminals. In defiance of Supreme Court orders, Birmingham had closed its public parks, swimming pools, and golf courses rather than integrate them. Its restaurants and lunch counters remained segregated. Day after day, more demonstrators, including King, were thrown in jail. After a month, African-American youth, aged 6 to 18, started demonstrating.
They too were jailed, and when the jails filled, they were held in school buses and vans. As demonstrations continued, Connor had no place left to house prisoners. Americans watched the evening news in horror as Connor used police dogs, billy clubs, and high-pressure fire hoses to get the children demonstrators off the streets.
As tension mounted, city and business leaders gave in. They agreed to desegregate public facilities, hire black employees, and release all the people in jail. The violence in Birmingham and elsewhere in the South prompted the Kennedy administration to act. It proposed a civil rights bill outlawing segregation in public facilities and discrimination in employment. The bill faced solid opposition from Southern members of Congress.
In response, civil rights leaders organized a massive march on Washington, D. The peaceful march culminated in a rally where civil rights leaders demanded equal opportunity for jobs and the full implementation of constitutional rights for racial minorities.
It inspired thousands of people to increase their efforts and thousands of others to join the civil rights movement for the first time. Full press and television coverage brought the March on Washington to international attention.
Much of the civil rights movement focused on voting rights. Since Reconstruction, Southern states had systematically denied African Americans the right to vote.
Perhaps the worst example was Mississippi, the poorest state in the nation. Many Mississippi counties had no registered black voters. Medgar Evers, a major civil rights leader in Mississippi, was murdered outside his home in In June, only days after arriving in Mississippi, three Freedom Summer workers disappeared.
They had been arrested for speeding and then released. On August 4, their bodies were found buried on a farm. A major dispute over the Mississippi delegation was brewing. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party had elected delegates to attend the convention. They demanded to be seated in place of the segregationist Mississippi Democrats. Ultimately, a compromise was struck, but the power struggle at the convention raised the issue of voting rights before the entire nation.
Although black people outnumbered white people in Selma, few were registered to vote. For almost two months, Martin Luther King led marches to the courthouse to register voters. African-Americans were willing to pay more to purchase homes than whites were for identical homes, so when African-Americans moved into a white neighborhood, property values generally rose. Only after an organized effort by the real estate industry to create all-black suburbs and overcrowd them and turn them into slums did property values decline.
But that was the rationale and it persisted for at least three decades, perhaps more. President Harry Truman proposed the act because of an enormous civilian housing shortage. At the end of World War II, veterans returned home, they formed families; they needed places to live. The federal government had restricted the use of building materials for defense purposes only, so there was no private housing industry operating at that time.
Conservatives in Congress in were opposed to any public housing, not for racial reasons, because most housing was for whites. It said from now on that public housing could not discriminate, understanding that if northern liberals joined conservatives in passing that amendment, southern Democrats would abandon the public housing program and along with conservative Republicans, defeat the bill entirely.
So liberals in Congress fought against the integration amendment led by civil rights opponents [resulting in a] housing program that permitted segregation.
When the civilian housing industry picked up in the s, the federal government subsidized mass production builders to create suburbs on conditions that those homes in the suburbs be sold only to whites. No African-Americans were permitted to buy them and the FHA often added an additional condition requiring that every deed in a home in those subdivisions prohibit resale to African —Americans.
Eventually, we had a situation everywhere in the country where there were large numbers of vacancies in the white projects and long waiting lists for the black projects.
The situation became so conspicuous that the government and local housing agencies had to open up all projects to African-Americans. How did the Supreme Court decision in Buchanan v. Warley set the U. In the early 20th century, a number of cities, particularly border cities like Baltimore, St. Louis, and Louisville, Kentucky, passed zoning ordinances that prohibited African-Americans from moving onto a block that was majority white.
In , the Supreme Court found in Buchanan v. Warley that such ordinances were unconstitutional, but not for racial reasons. The Court found it unconstitutional because such ordinances interfered with the rights of property owners.
As a result, planners around the country who were attempting to segregate their metropolitan areas had to come up with another device to do so. The Montgomery Bus Boycott , nps. Global Nonviolent Action Database. Who Were the Freedom Riders? Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee SNCC was founded in in the wake of student-led sit-ins at segregated lunch counters across the South and became the major channel of student participation in the civil rights movement.
Members of SNCC included prominent future Stokely Carmichael was a U. Freedom Riders were groups of white and African American civil rights activists who participated in Freedom Rides, bus trips through the American South in to protest segregated bus terminals.
The civil rights movement was a struggle for social justice that took place mainly during the s and s for Black Americans to gain equal rights under the law in the United States. The sit-in movement soon spread Rosa Parks — helped initiate the civil rights movement in the United States when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in
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