What was racism like in the 1940

Visuals , including photographs, movies, television clips and artwork, played a key role in advancing the movement. The form of anti-black violence with the most striking parallels to contemporary conversations is police brutality. Civil rights protests exacerbated tensions between African Americans and police, with events like the Orangeburg Massacre of , in which law enforcement officers shot and killed three student activists at South Carolina State College, and the Glenville shootout , which left three police officers, three black nationalists and one civilian dead, fostering mistrust between the two groups.

Today, this legacy is exemplified by broken windows policing , a controversial approach that encourages racial profiling and targets African American and Latino communities. The history of protest and revolt in the United States is inextricably linked with the racial violence detailed above. Prior to the Civil War, enslaved individuals rarely revolted outright.

Nat Turner , whose insurrection ended in his execution, was one of the rare exceptions. A fervent Christian , he drew inspiration from the Bible. Other enslaved African Americans practiced less risky forms of resistance, including working slowly, breaking tools and setting objects on fire. One of the few successful uprisings of the period was the Creole Rebellion. In the fall of , enslaved African Americans traveling aboard The Creole mutinied against its crew, forcing their former captors to sail the brig to the British West Indies, where slavery was abolished and they could gain immediate freedom.

An April revolt found enslaved New Yorkers setting fire to white-owned buildings and firing on slaveholders. The ensuing Montgomery bus boycott , in which black passengers refused to ride public transit until officials met their demands, led the Supreme Court to rule segregated buses unconstitutional. Do you think you would respond nonviolently? George Washington—revolutionary guerrilla fighter!

Martin Luther King Jr. And what is it America has failed to hear? In doing so, the movement ensured that its proponents would attract the unwelcome attention of the FBI and other government agencies. Many of the protests now viewed as emblematic of the fight for racial justice took place in the s. On August 28, , more than , people gathered in D. Make those who are comfortable with our oppression—make them uncomfortable—Dr.

Two years after the March on Washington, King and other activists organized a march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery. Organized in response to the manifest obstacles black individuals faced when attempting to vote, the Selma March actually consisted of three separate protests.

The first of these, held on March 7, , ended in a tragedy now known as Bloody Sunday. As peaceful protesters gathered on the Edmund Pettus Bridge —named for a Confederate general and local Ku Klux Klan leader—law enforcement officers attacked them with tear gas and clubs. One week later, President Lyndon B. Johnson offered the Selma protesters his support and introduced legislation aimed at expanding voting rights.

Along the way, interior designer Carl Benkert used a hidden reel-to-reel tape recorder to document the sounds—and specifically songs—of the event. The protests of the early and mids culminated in the widespread unrest of and By the end of the riots, 43 people were dead.

Hundreds sustained injuries, and more than 7, were arrested. The Detroit riots of prefaced the seismic changes of On February 1, black sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker died in a gruesome accident involving a malfunctioning garbage truck. Though King is lionized today, he was highly unpopular at the time of his death.

According to a Harris Poll conducted in early , nearly 75 percent of Americans disapproved of the civil rights leader , who had become increasingly vocal in his criticism of the Vietnam War and economic inequity.

In all, the Holy Week Uprisings spread to nearly cities, leaving 3, people injured and 43 dead. In May, thousands flocked to Washington, D. Racial unrest persisted throughout the year, with uprisings on the Fourth of July , a protest at the Summer Olympic Games , and massacres at Orangeburg and Glenville testifying to the tumultuous state of the nation. Other aspects of modern protest draw directly on uprisings of earlier eras. A black woman who identifies as a lesbian, for instance, may face prejudice based on her race, gender or sexuality.

And the traffic running through those roads are the practices and policies that discriminate against people. Now if an accident happens, it can be caused by cars traveling in any number of directions, and sometimes, from all of them. So if a black woman is harmed because she is in an intersection, her injury could result from discrimination from any or all directions. About 90 participants in the Montgomery Bus Boycott , including King, were indicted under a law forbidding conspiracy to obstruct the operation of a business.

Found guilty, King immediately appealed the decision. Meanwhile, the boycott stretched on for more than a year, and the bus company struggled to avoid bankruptcy. On November 13, , in Browder v.

Gayle, the U. Although the Supreme Court declared segregation of public schools illegal in Brown v. Board of Education , the decision was extremely difficult to enforce, as 11 southern states enacted resolutions interfering with, nullifying or protesting school desegregation.

In Arkansas, Governor Orval Faubus made resistance to desegregation a central part of his successful reelection campaign. The following September, after a federal court ordered the desegregation of Central High School, located in the state capital of Little Rock, Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine African American students from entering the school.

For millions of viewers throughout the country, the unforgettable images provided a vivid contrast between the angry forces of white supremacy and the quiet, dignified resistance of the African American students. After an appeal by the local congressman and mayor of Little Rock to stop the violence, President Dwight D. The nine Black students entered the school under heavily armed guard, marking the first time since Reconstruction that federal troops had provided protection for Black Americans against racial violence.

A federal court struck down this act, and four of the nine students returned, under police protection, after the schools were reopened in Heavily covered by the news media, the Greensboro sit-ins sparked a movement that spread quickly to college towns throughout the South and into the North, as young Black and white people engaged in various forms of peaceful protest against segregation in libraries, on beaches, in hotels and other establishments.

Rap Brown. By the early s, SNCC was effectively disbanded. Founded in by the civil rights leader James Farmer, the Congress of Racial Equality CORE sought to end discrimination and improve race relations through direct action.

Supreme Court banned segregation in interstate bus travel. In Boynton v. Virginia , the Court extended the earlier ruling to include bus terminals, restrooms and other related facilities, and CORE took action to test the enforcement of that ruling. Bound for New Orleans , the freedom riders were attacked by angry segregationists outside of Anniston, Alabama, and one bus was even firebombed.

Local law enforcement responded, but slowly, and U. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy eventually ordered State Highway Patrol protection for the freedom riders to continue to Montgomery, Alabama, where they again encountered violent resistance. Kennedy sent federal marshals to escort the riders to Jackson, Mississippi, but images of the bloodshed made the worldwide news, and the freedom rides continued.

By the end of the s, African Americans had begun to be admitted in small numbers to white colleges and universities in the South without too much incident. With the aid of the NAACP, Meredith filed a lawsuit alleging that the university had discriminated against him because of his race.

In September , the U. When Meredith arrived at Ole Miss under the protection of federal forces including U. Meredith went on to graduate from Ole Miss in , but the struggle to integrate higher education continued. Despite Martin Luther King, Jr. In mid-September, white supremacists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama during Sunday services; four young African American girls were killed in the explosion.

Governor George Wallace was a leading foe of desegregation, and Birmingham had one of the strongest and most violent chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. Birmingham had become a leading focus of the civil rights movement by the spring of , when Martin Luther King was arrested there while leading supporters of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference SCLC in a nonviolent campaign of demonstrations against segregation. After marching from the Washington Monument, the demonstrators gathered near the Lincoln Memorial, where a number of civil rights leaders addressed the crowd, calling for voting rights, equal employment opportunities for Black Americans and an end to racial segregation.

Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! Thanks to the campaign of nonviolent resistance championed by Martin Luther King Jr. That year, John F. Kennedy made passage of new civil rights legislation part of his presidential campaign platform; he won more than 70 percent of the African American vote. It was left to Lyndon Johnson not previously known for his support of civil rights to push the Civil Rights Act—the most far-reaching act of legislation supporting racial equality in American history—through Congress in June At its most basic level, the act gave the federal government more power to protect citizens against discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex or national origin.

It mandated the desegregation of most public accommodations, including lunch counters, bus depots, parks and swimming pools, and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission EEOC to ensure equal treatment of minorities in the workplace. The act also guaranteed equal voting rights by removing biased registration requirements and procedures, and authorized the U.

Office of Education to provide aid to assist with school desegregation. In a televised ceremony on July 2, , Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law using 75 pens; he presented one of them to King, who counted it among his most prized possessions. In the summer of , civil rights organizations including the Congress of Racial Equality CORE urged white students from the North to travel to Mississippi, where they helped register Black voters and build schools for Black children.

The summer had barely begun, however, when three volunteers—Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, both white New Yorkers, and James Chaney, a Black Mississippian—disappeared on their way back from investigating the burning of an African American church by the Ku Klux Klan.

In October , an all-white jury found seven of the defendants guilty and acquitted the other nine. Though the verdict was hailed as a major civil rights victory—it was the first time anyone in Mississippi had been convicted for a crime against a civil rights worker—the judge in the case gave out relatively light sentences, and none of the convicted men served more than six years behind bars.

In early , Martin Luther King Jr. On March 7, marchers got as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside Selma when they were attacked by state troopers wielding whips, nightsticks and tear gas. The brutal scene was captured on television, enraging many Americans and drawing civil rights and religious leaders of all faiths to Selma in protest. King himself led another attempt on March 9, but turned the marchers around when state troopers again blocked the road; that night, a group of segregationists fatally beat a protester, the young white minister James Reeb.

On March 21, after a U. Army troops and Alabama National Guard forces under federal control. Charismatic and eloquent, Malcolm X soon became an influential leader of the NOI, which combined Islam with Black nationalism and sought to encourage disadvantaged young Black people searching for confidence in segregated America. As the outspoken public voice of the Black Muslim faith, Malcolm challenged the mainstream civil rights movement and the nonviolent pursuit of integration championed by Martin Luther King, Jr.

He made a pilgrimage to Mecca that same year and underwent a second conversion, this time to Sunni Islam. On February 21, , during a speaking engagement in Harlem, three members of the NOI rushed the stage and shot Malcolm some 15 times at close range.

Less than a week after the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers were beaten and bloodied by Alabama state troopers in March , President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress, calling for federal legislation to ensure protection of the voting rights of African Americans.

The Voting Rights Act sought to overcome the legal barriers that still existed at the state and local level preventing Black citizens from exercising the right to vote given them by the 15th Amendment. Specifically, it banned literacy tests as a requirement for voting, mandated federal oversight of voter registration in areas where tests had previously been used and gave the U.

Along with the Civil Rights Act of the previous year, the Voting Rights Act was one of the most expansive pieces of civil rights legislation in American history, and it greatly reduced the disparity between Black and white voters in the U.

In Mississippi alone, the percentage of eligible Black voters registered to vote increased from 5 percent in to nearly 60 percent in In the mid s, 70 African Americans were serving as elected officials in the South, while by the turn of the century there were some 5, In the same time period, the number of Black people serving in Congress increased from six to about Children and members of the Black Panthers give the Black Power salute outside of their "liberation school" in San Francisco, California in Black Power was a form of both self-definition and self-defense for African Americans; it called on them to stop looking to the institutions of white America—which were believed to be inherently racist—and act for themselves, by themselves, to seize the gains they desired, including better jobs, housing and education.

Also in , Huey P. While its original mission was to protect Black people from white brutality by sending patrol groups into Black neighborhoods, the Panthers soon developed into a Marxist group that promoted Black Power by urging African Americans to arm themselves and demand full employment, decent housing and control over their own communities. Clashes ensued between the Panthers and police in California, New York and Chicago, and in Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter after killing a police officer.

His trial brought national attention to the organization, which at its peak in the late s boasted some 2, members. The Fair Housing Act of , meant as a follow-up to the Civil Rights Act of , marked the last great legislative achievement of the civil rights era.

Originally intended to extend federal protection to civil rights workers, it was later expanded to address racial discrimination in the sale, rental or financing of housing units. After the bill passed the Senate by an exceedingly narrow margin in early April, it was thought that the increasingly conservative House of Representatives , wary of the growing strength and militancy of the Black Power movement, would weaken it considerably.

Pressure to pass the bill increased amid the wave of national remorse that followed, and after a strictly limited debate the House passed the Fair Housing Act on April President Johnson signed it into law the following day. Over the next years, however, there was little decrease in housing segregation, and violence arose from Black efforts to seek housing in white neighborhoods. In this way, the ghetto—an inner city community plagued by high unemployment, crime and other social ills—became an ever more prevalent fact of urban Black life.

In more than cities, several days of riots, burning and looting followed his death. The accused killer, a white man named James Earl Ray, was captured and tried immediately; he entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to 99 years in prison; no testimony was heard. Ray later recanted his confession, and despite several inquiries into the matter by the U. A year earlier, Representative Shirley Chisholm of New York became a national symbol of both movements as the first major party African American candidate and the first female candidate for president of the United States.

Though she failed to win a primary, Chisholm received more than votes at the Democratic National Convention. She claimed she never expected to win the nomination. When I ran for the Congress, when I ran for president, I met more discrimination as a woman than for being Black. Men are men.

President John F. Kennedy first used the phrase in , in an executive order calling on the federal government to hire more African Americans. By the mid s, many universities were seeking to increase the presence of minority and female faculty and students on their campuses.

After Allan Bakke, a white California man, applied twice without success, he sued U. Bakke, the U. Supreme Court ruled that the use of strict racial quotas was unconstitutional and that Bakke should be admitted; on the other hand, it held that institutions of higher education could rightfully use race as a criterion in admissions decisions in order to ensure diversity.

In subsequent decisions over the next decades, the Court limited the scope of affirmative action programs, while several U. He was a leading voice for Black Americans during the early s, urging them to be more politically active and heading up a voter registration drive that led to the election of Harold Washington as the first Black mayor of Chicago in The following year, Jackson ran for the Democratic nomination for president.

He ran again in and received 6. Throughout his long career, Jackson has inspired both admiration and criticism for his tireless efforts on behalf of the Black community and his outspoken public persona. His son, Jesse L. Jackson Jr.

The right was predictably outraged. The New York Times editorialised that he should stick to singing. Leaders of major civil rights organisations declared their loyalty to the US. The hearings culminated with the testimony of Jackie Robinson, who had integrated Major League Baseball two years earlier. Later in life, Robinson said he regretted having appeared. But his testimony reflected the cautiousness of mainstream Black leadership, like the NAACP, toward Robeson and his more radical circles.

Indeed, according to historian Marilynn S Johnson, mainstream organisations thought Black leftists were too focused on police violence, to the neglect of other issues. The concert organisers attempted to mount the show on the 27th, but people from the town blocked access to the location, as local police officers looked on without intervening.

In a preview of what was to come, rocks and epithets were hurled at arriving concertgoers. Riding in a car with friends, Robeson made it as far as the edge of the ground, but when his fellow passengers saw what was happening, they pushed him to the floor and drove off, despite his protests. The concert would go on, he said, on the following Sunday of September 4. The night before the performance, two effigies of Robeson were burned near the concert grounds.

Anti-Black and anti-Semitic invective reverberated all over. Some attendees may have naively felt more secure when they noticed a state police command post, four ambulances and a helicopter circling in the sky. Robeson performed ringed by union members scanning the crowd and the environs; some noted men with rifles in trees and on hills surrounding the concert grounds.

Still, the singer completed his set. The brutality began afterwards and this time it was well-choreographed. Objects flew, shattering car windows. Some drivers and passengers were forcibly dragged from their cars and assaulted.