**The modern era of the civil rights movement began, in effect, with Harry Truman.  Despite his personal prejudices, he was horrified to learn of black servicemen being beaten and even lynched—sometimes by policemen—upon their return to the South after World War II.  Even at the risk of splitting his own party and losing the 1948 nomination or the election, Truman began to use the government to attack Jim Crow laws and the legal discrimination then wide-spread in America, especially the South.

*When Truman became president, the South, in addition to being, in many ways, a different country from the North, was itself two very separate worlds.  Jim Crow laws created innumerable legal distinctions between white and black people, and social pressures and traditions enforced and enhanced these rules, keeping whites and black separated and insulated from one another, except in certain approved areas, such as at work—and even there, the races knew their places.

*In every public building in the south, there were three or four bathrooms—one for men, one for women, and one (or perhaps two) for coloured people.  White and coloured people drank from separate water fountains and sat in separate parts of restaurants, theatres, busses, trains, and even churches.  In Alabama, hotels could not legally house black people, and even in states where such laws did not exist, many hotels would not cater to coloured people for social (and therefore business) reasons.

*Throughout the south, an average of 20% of blacks who should have been eligible to vote were actually registered.  In some states, notably Mississippi and Alabama, about 5% of potential black voters were registered.  For one thing, many Southern States required a literacy test for voters, but applied a different standard to whites and black (or, in some cases, also used it to keep poor or undesirable whites from voting).  Other states required a poll tax, keeping the very poor (again, mostly black) out of the election process.

*When Jim Crow laws were not enough, public opinion, often backed by force, completed the work of segregation and oppression.  Black who offended against the unwritten code of the South could be beaten or even killed, and frequently were, with no repercussions for their attackers.  Lynch mobs could even attain a carnival atmosphere.
*The racial situation was embarrassing to Americans internationally.  In 1944, Gunnar Myrdal, an economist at the University of Stockholm in Sweden had written An American Dilemma, pointing out the strange contradiction of legal and social discrimination in the country whose founding document asserted that it was ‘self-evident, that all men are created equal.’  An America Dilemma explored the poverty of blacks, the disparity in wages, legal treatment, and social and economic opportunity between blacks and whites, and the underlying, sometimes even unconscious, feeling “that the overwhelming majority of white Americans desire that there be as few Negroes as possible in America. If the Negroes could be eliminated from America or greatly decreased in numbers, this would meet the whites' approval -- provided that it could be accomplished by means which are also approved. Correspondingly, an increase of the proportion of Negroes in the American population is commonly looked upon as undesirable.” Myrdal further remarked that these ideas are "not necessarily hostile" in all situations. He comments that the very same opinion was ‘shared even by enlightened white Americans who do not hold the common belief that Negroes are inferior as a race. Usually it is pointed out that Negroes fare better and meet less prejudice when they are few in number.’  This is, of course, the dilemma that had dogged America ever since the 17th century.  Although Myrdal remained optimistic that things might improve, his book was nonetheless a strong criticism of America as it stood in the 1940s, and it was not going to change quickly, despite a few steps forward here and there.
*In 1946, the National League Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jack Roosevelt (Jackie) Robinson away from the Negro League Kansas City Monarchs.  He played for a year in the Dodgers’ minor league team in Montreal, and in 1947 became the first black baseball player to play on a major-league team since the 1880s.  In that year, he was named Rookie of the Year, and in 1949, MVP.  Baseball and other professional sports began to integrate, although this also led to the disappearance of the Negro Leagues, some of the most valuable businesses owned and managed by Black Americans at the time.  The rest of the country would be slow to follow baseball’s lead, however.

*The Republican-dominated Congress refused to pass many of Truman’s proposed civil rights laws, but Truman did begin the process.  In 1948, he ended segregation in the federal civil service and ordered equality of treatment and opportunity in the military.  The Navy had already begun to desegregate, although it would take a while to accomplish this.  The Air Force was slower to begin desegregation (and at one point even tried to institute a policy of completely excluding Negroes), but was the first to complete it.  The Army was the slowest to begin integration and took the longest to complete it, officially ending segregation in 1954, in part due to manpower shortages during the Korean War, although in practise discrimination continued longer.

*When Eisenhower was elected, it did not seem likely that Civil Rights would advance any further in the near future.  Part of the problem was that the preceding decades, especially the 1940s, had seen a vast population shift, often called the Great Migration or the Great Black Migration or the Great African-American Migration, as poor blacks moved North to take advantage of jobs in the factories and other war industries.  Although this might seem like a positive change, it also exposed northern whites to blacks in large numbers—often to the extent that it seemed to threaten local cultures, traditions, and, after the end of the War, local job markets.  It also hurt the Republicans’ old northern power base, as Truman and Roosevelt’s policies turned many blacks to the Democratic party, and more and more of these Democrats moved to the big cities of the North.   This major change in population concentrations led to increased discrimination and bigotry in the North.

*The 1896 case of Plessey v. Ferguson was still the law of the land, permitting segregation that was ‘separate but equal.’  Subsequent cases had confirmed the precedent.  Ike’s appointees to the Supreme Court did not seem like the kind of men who would challenge that.

*America was in for a surprise.  Earl Warren, a former governor of California who had been very active in interning Japanese during WWII and Dewey’s running mate in 1948, was appointed by Eisenhower to the Supreme Court in 1953.  He turned out to be very active in promoting social issues, to the dismay of traditionalists everywhere.  As his court made controversial decisions that seemed to change existing laws, many accused him of usurping the power of Congress through ‘judicial legislation.’  His defenders said he was only making laws that needed to be made.  The debate, in broad form, continues to this day.

*In 1954, the Warren court was forced to make a difficult decision.  In 1951, the parents of Linda Brown, a black third-grader in Topeka, Kansas, complained because Linda had to walk more than a mile to school, even though there was a white school only seven blocks away.  The Brown family took the issue to the school board, and was rebuffed.  Soon the NAACP came to their aid and the issue went to trial.  In 1954, the NAACP’s chief counsel, Thurgood Marshall, argued the case before the Supreme Court.  Marshall had already argued, in 1950, that professional colleges for Blacks were offering inferior courses than the supposedly equivalent white colleges, and had won before the Supreme Court—largely because, by focussing on law schools, Marshall touched a nerve with the judges on the court, who knew the value of a prestigious law degree.

*Overturning almost sixty years of legal precedent and even more decades of tradition, the Supreme Court determined in 1954 that ‘separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.’  In a subsequent ruling in 1955, the Court ordered the states' compliance with the first Brown decision "with all deliberate speed."  These rulings did not end segregation of schools immediately, and they did not require that other facilities be integrated.  White and coloured people still used separate bathrooms, separate water fountains, and even separate sections of restaurants and movie theatres.  Furthermore, many schools in the South exhibited extreme deliberation when moving with all deliberate speed.

*Some of the Border States desegregated relatively quickly, or at least made a real effort.  For the most part, however, southerners resisted integration.  Many formed citizens’ councils, which used both legalistic means and coercion to fight a change in their peculiar institutions.  This was not yet the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan—but it was a step towards it.

*One tool used by the citizens’ councils was the creation of ‘private schools,’ typically funded in large part by the states or by local school boards, but, being officially called private schools, they were harder for the government to regulate.  The same movement, sometimes called ‘white flight,’ took advantage of existing private schools as well.  On the whole, these ‘private schools,’ with the exception of the already existing ones, tended to be fairly poor in quality.  Even by the mid-1960s, fewer than 2% of the eligible blacks in the Deep South were in integrated classrooms.

*Although the rulings on Brown v Board did not apply outside the classroom, some Black activists began to work through other means to achieve the same ends.  Among the first and most famous began in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955.  Montgomery’s bus system allowed blacks and whites to use the same busses, but required blacks to sit in the rear, and to give up their seats if the front of the bus became too crowded for the white passengers.

*Rosa Parks, a trained activist employed by the NAACP, sat in the middle of the bus, within the realm acceptable for black riders, but close enough to the front that she might be asked to move.  On 1 December 1955, the bus she was riding was so crowded that the driver asked her to give up her seat to a white man.  She refused.  She was arrested, tried, and convicted for disorderly conduct.  The NAACP and local activist groups immediately took up the cause.  They elected as their leader a prominent young preacher from a local Baptist church, Martin Luther King, junior.

*For the rest of 1955 and most of 1956, the Black population of Montgomery boycotted the bus system, walking, hitch-hiking, or carpooling.  The Montgomery bus system began to go broke.  Many blacks were arrested, including King (which just brought national attention to the boycott), but the NAACP’s appeals to the Supreme Court were answered on 13 November 1956.  The Court upheld a lower court ruling that Alabama and Montgomery’s laws segregating busses were illegal, and Montgomery was forced to publish new ordinances that allowed black to sit almost anywhere.

*In 1955, Blacks faced things even worse than being evicted from their seats on the bus.  In August of that year, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year old black boy from Chicago, went to visit relatives in Mississippi.  Although there was segregation and discrimination in Chicago, it was still a different world compared to the Deep South.  Till was something of a trouble-maker, and bragged about having a white girl-friend back North.  Then, he went too far, according to the standards of the time and place.  In a small country store, he either whistled at or made suggestive comments to the young wife of the store owner.  Blacks simply did not treat white women that way in 1955 in Mississippi.  Till was kidnapped from his uncle’s home two days later, brutally beaten and shot, and then dumped in a river, with a fan from a cotton gin tied to his neck with barbed wire.  He was only recognisable from a ring he wore that had his initials on it.

*At first, almost everyone in the area was shocked at the brutality of the murder.  Soon, however, as national attention focused on the town of Money, Missisippi, and the crime was blamed on Southern barbarity, local whites grew increasingly defensive, especially when blacks were allowed to testify in court against the two men who were known to have driven off with Till before his murder (the two were the husband and brother of the offended woman).  Bitter at the attention and supposed pressure from outsiders, local whites closed ranks. Defense attorney John C. Whitten told the jurors in his closing statement, "Your fathers will turn over in their graves if [Milam and Bryant are found guilty] and I'm sure that every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men in the face of that [outside] pressure." The jurors listened to him. They deliberated for just over an hour, then returned a "not guilty" verdict on September 23rd 1955, after only a 4-day trial.

*Eisenhower, who had not approved of Truman’s move to desegregate the military, did not want to get involved in the controversy over civil rights.  Although his fame and prestige could have possibly swayed many people’s opinions, involvement in something so controversial might have also hurt his popularity.  He felt that Truman’s Fair Employment Practises Commission and the decision in Brown v Board had upset ‘the customs and convictions of at least two generations of Americans,’ and ‘that prejudices, even palpably unjustifiable prejudices, will succumb to compulsion.’

* In the summer of 1957, the city of Little Rock, Arkansas, made plans to desegregate its public schools. Within a week of the 1954 landmark Supreme Court decision striking down racial segregation in public schools, Arkansas was one of two Southern states to announce it would begin immediately to take steps to comply with the new "law of the land." Arkansas' law school had been integrated since 1949. By 1957, seven of its eight state universities had desegregated. Blacks had been appointed to state boards and elected to local offices.

*Little Rock felt it could break down the barriers of segregation in its schools with a carefully developed program. It had already desegregated its public buses, as well as its zoo, library and parks system. Its school board had voted unanimously for a plan, starting with desegregation in the high school in 1957, followed by junior high schools the next year and elementary schools following.

*Nine black students, chosen for the academic excellence, were enrolled in Little Rock Central High School.  However, on the day they were to attend, Governor Orval Eugene Faubus (who, although raised as a Socialist—as his middle name suggests, had become more and more right-wing as he grew up) called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the students entering the school.

*A federal judge granted an injunction against the Governor's use of National Guard troops to prevent integration and they were withdrawn on September 20.

*When school resumed on Monday, September 23, Central High was surrounded by Little Rock policemen. About 1,000 people gathered in front of the school. The police escorted the nine black students to a side door where they quietly entered the building as classes were to begin. When the mob learned the blacks were inside, they began to challenge the police and surge toward the school with shouts and threats. Fearful the police would be unable to control the crowd, the school administration moved the black students out a side door before noon.

*Arkansas Representative Brooks Hays and Little Rock Mayor Woodrow Mann asked the federal government for help, first in the form of U.S. marshals. Finally, on September 24, Mann sent a telegram to President Eisenhower requesting troops. They were dispatched that day and the President also federalized the entire Arkansas National Guard, taking it away from the Governor.  On September 25, 1957, the nine black students entered the school under the protection of 1,000 members of the 101st Airborne Division of the United States Army.

*Faubus called the nationalisation of the Guard an invasion and an occupation force, but the federal troops left at the end of November and the first black student graduated from Central High School in May 1958.  The next school year, Faubus, with the overwhelming support of Arkansas’ voting public, closed down all public schools in Little Rock, leasing the buildings to ‘private’ school companies.  By spring of 1959, however, the public had had enough and the public schools were re-opened and slowly integrated.  When school re-opened in the fall of 1959, Faubus turned against segregationist protesters, and Little Rock police drove them away with fire hoses.

*In 1957, Congress would pass the first Civil Rights Act since Reconstruction.  Eisenhower promised Southern supporters that it was ‘the mildest civil rights bill possible.’  It set up a Civil Rights Commission to investigate violations of civil rights and to use federal injunctions to secure and protect voting rights.

*Brooks Hays would not be re-elected to Congress in 1958 (or to any other national office), although he would serve from 1961-64 as a special assistant to the President of the United States.

*Woodrow Mann and his family received death threats. When his term as mayor ended in 1958 he was forced to leave Little Rock and moved to Dallas where he returned to the insurance business.

*Orval Faubus was elected governor of Arkansas six times and served in the post for twelve years. After the 1965 Voting Act, making it easier for African Americans to vote, Faubus political career came to an end. Attempts in 1970, 1974 and 1986 all ended in failure. Orval Faubus died of cancer in December 1994.

*In 1957, King would organise the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which he would run until his death.  It united activists, mostly through Black churches, to resist discrimination through non-violent means.  It also had, according to the FBI, ties to the Communist party, but King was too popular and powerful to attack directly.  He was also criticised by some blacks, especially younger, more radical types, who eventually broke away from the SCLC and NAACP to form the Student Non-Violent Coordination Committee (SNCC) in 1960.  Many of these students were fresh from another form of non-violent protest, the sit-in.

*Although busses and schools might have been integrated by 1960, most restaurants had not.  Among the most popular were lunch counters, such as those at Woolworth’s department stores.  In Greensboro, North Carolina, the Woolworth’s lunch counter was only for whites.  In February, 1960, a group of black students sat in all the seats, filling up the counter, and demanding service.  Not only did this keep the counter from doing legitimate business, but it called attention to the discrimination.  Soon it spread to other businesses.  Under pressure from the public and from economic concerns, Woolworth’s desegregated their lunch counters in July.  The rapid success of this non-violent protest would bring optimism to the civil rights movement and prestige to SNCC, formed early in the Sit-in campaign.

*Despite these victories, there was still much to do before full civil rights and complete equality could be obtained.
 

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