Segregation in America

Civil War-1950s

What Does America Mean?• “…the land of the free, and the home of the

brave”?

• “…one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”?

• “…all men are created equal…they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”?

The American Dream

• What every American strives to achieve

• Each individual creates his own American dream

• Political, social, economic equality

• Minority groups have struggled to achieve this equality

Citizenship: The Vote…• 1789: Only white, adult, property-owning, non-

Catholic/Jewish males can vote

• Early 1800s: white, property-owning adult males

• 1850s: all white males

• Civil War Ends (1865): African Americans gain rights…

-13th Amendment: Abolished slavery

-14th Amendment: Equal protection under law

-15th Amendment: The right to vote

Social Discrimination: Jim Crow Laws

• State laws designed to…

1) separate the races in society

2) prevent African-Americans (“Jim Crow”) from gaining power

• Still legal until 1964-65

Vaudeville comedian in “Blackface”.

Actual “Jim Crow” Laws:• Mississippi: Separate free schools shall be established…

unlawful for any colored child to attend any white school, or any white child to attend a colored school.

• Alabama: …unlawful for a negro and white person to play together or in company with each other at any game of pool or billiards.

• Georgia: [Restaurants] shall serve either white people exclusively or colored people exclusively and shall not sell to the two races within the same room…

• Georgia: …unlawful for any amateur white baseball team to play…within two blocks of a playground devoted to the Negro race, …unlawful for any amateur colored baseball team to play baseball within two blocks of any playground devoted to the white race.

• Mississippi: Any person guilty of printing, publishing or circulating matter [in favor of] social equality or of intermarriage between whites and negroes, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.

• Virginia: Any public hall, theatre, opera house, motion picture show, or place of public entertainment which is attended by both white and colored persons shall separate the white race and the colored race.

• Mississippi: The prison warden shall see that the white convicts shall have separate apartments for both eating and sleeping from the negro convicts.

• Florida: All marriages between a white person and a negro, or between a white person and a person of negro descent to the fourth generation inclusive, are hereby forever prohibited.

SEGREGATION

• “separation” in public of different types of people

• Jim Crow Laws kept blacks and whites segregated

Supreme Court Case:Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896)

• Question: Are separate public facilities for blacks and whites Constitutional?

• Decision: “Separate but Equal”—If separate public facilities are equal for both races, it’s Consitutional

• This set a precedent (standard)—all court cases that challenged segregation had to follow “Separate but Equal” doctrine

Homer Plessy

Effects of Plessy Decision:

• Southern states separated all facilities: “Whites Only” or “Colored”

• “Whites-only” received more state funding

• “Colored” schools, hospitals, restaurants= poor, run-down

“COLORED”

“WHITES ONLY”

Economic Discrimination:Sharecroppers

• Post-Civil War: “Freedmen” (former slaves) had no land, no job, no education—only knew farm work

• “Sharecropping”: Most rural blacks rented land from whites, who charged them for:

-rent -tools -seed -mules -house -clothes• Whites purposely charged more rent $$$ than

freedmen could afford• Economic discrimination: Blacks forced to farm

for landlord to pay off debt they owed

Political Discrimination: Voting Restrictions

• Disfranchisement: After 1890, Southern states passed laws to deny African-Americans the “franchise” (ability to vote).

1) Poll Tax: whites could afford to pay, but not African-American sharecroppers

2) Literacy Test: Voters had to read part of the state constitution to prove they could read

• Blacks got long, complicated sections

• Not banned by Congress until 1975.

Supreme Court Decision:Brown vs. Board of Education (1955)

• Question: Are separate public schools equal?

• Decision: "We conclude that the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place.

Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

Effects of the Brown Decision

• S. Court ordered all public schools to integrate (admit all races) “with all deliberate speed” or else lose gov’t funding

• Ku Klux Klan membership rose, White Citizens’ Councils created to oppose integration

• S. states passed laws making integrated schools illegal in their state

Central High School, Little Rock, AK (1957)

• 9 African-American students selected to attend class

• Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus sent Ark. National Guard to deny entry

• Pres. Eisenhower federalized Ark. Nat’l Guard sent Army to admit and to protect the students (“Little Rock Nine”)

CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

• 1950s-1960s• START: Brown vs. Board of Education (1954, ’55)• END: Civil Rights Act (‘64), Voting Rights Act (‘65)

INTEGRATION!Professional Sports

-1867: Major League baseball players

voted not to integrate teams

-Negro Leagues: several leagues for African Americans. Faced discrimination & low pay. In interracial exhibition games, Negro League teams won over 60% of the time.

• 1947: Jackie Robinson plays his first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers

• By 1959, all Major League clubs integrated

INTEGRATION!Armed Forces

• President Harry Truman the first to integrate U.S. armed forces (1948 Executive Order 9981)

• Created a committee to investigate cases of unequal treatment based on race

• Caused Democratic Party to split• 1948 Democratic National Convention:

Southern Democrats walked out, formed Dixiecrat Party

Nonviolent Resistance

• Definition: Peacefully resisting unfair laws in order to protest them

• Dr. Martin L. King, Jr. learned from Gandhi

• Became standard for protesting segregation in USA

Civil Rights Movement:KEY ORGANIZATIONS

1) SCLC: Southern Christian Leadership Conference (Martin L. King, Jr.)

• Strategy: Negotiation before direct protest

• Workshops on nonviolent resistance: how to quietly endure physical violence

1955-56: Bus Boycott• Rosa Parks arrested for civil

disobedience (Dec. 1955)• Boycott of the Montgomery bus

system organized by Dr. King/SCLC, lasted 381 days

• Economic protest: 90% of bus company’s riders were African American

• Forced company to integrate 1956• 1956 Supreme Court declared

segregation on buses unconstitutional

Birmingham Children’s March, 1963

• Birmingham, AL: aka “Bombingham,” most violently anti-integration city in US

• SCLC organized protest march planning to get arrested

• Overwhelmed city police, filled the jails

• City of Birmingham agreed to desegregate

2) SNCC: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (Stokely Carmichael)

• Strategy: direct activism (visible protests, sit-ins, “jail not bail”)

• Grassroots Movement: starts with the people

• Involved youth, poor, & women in civil rights movement

• Voter Education Project: volunteers traveled to Southern towns to register Afr.Ams. to vote

“Sit-Ins” Greensboro, NC (1960)

• 4 college students sat at lunch counter and refused to leave until they were served

• Movement spread to 9 other states

• One by one, Southern restaurants chose to end segregation in their stores

3) CORE: Congress of Racial Equality (James L. Farmer)

•Strategy: Interracial cooperation

•Freedom Rides:1960 Supreme Court ruled against segregation on interstate buses and stationsvolunteers rode buses to test it out

•Freedom Summer 1964: college students volunteered to ride buses and register voters

•3 students, 2 white and from the North, brutally murdered by KKK in Philadelphia, Mississippi

Beyond the Civil Rights Movement

Equality (?)• JFK assassinated 1963: had been pushing

Congress to pass a law guaranteeing civil rights to all Americans

• Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ): succeeded JFK, influential in Congress, urged passing of law in JFK’s memory

• Civil Rights Act 1964: segregation and racial discrimination illegal in all public businesses

• Voting Rights Act 1965: discrimination prohibited in voting processes

Frustration

• 1964 Democratic National Convention: Party refused to seat Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, offered them 2 seats as “delegates”

• 1965-67 Race riots occurred in Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, and other cities

• Kerner Report, 1968: LBJ appointed a federal committee to study causes of riots

• “the nation is rapidly moving toward two increasingly separate Americas.”

A New Strategy

• Stokely Carmichael (leader of SNCC): “We been saying freedom for 6 years and we ain’t got nothin’. What we gotta start saying now is Black Power.”

Black Power Movement• Carmichael: blacks need to

focus on black nationalism and self-reliance

• Black Pride: African and African-American culture separate from American culture

• Objected to term “negro,” preferred “black” or “African-American”

• Black Panther Party formed in Oakland, CA 1965 (“B.P. Party for Self-Defense”)

-wanted black control of all institutions in black community

-accepted violence as a reality for self-defense

• Malcolm X: spoke of need for blacks to exist separate from the white community, even form a new nation that protects their rights (“Black Separatism”)

• New strategy: You don’t need to work with the white community, you need to focus on protecting your own community