Civil Rights

African Americans

African Americans, more than any other group, have been at the center of civil struggles throughout U.S. history. Their struggle for liberty began with the first law passed by the Virginia Assembly in 1661 making persons of African descent slaves for the duration of their lives. The U.S. Constitution implicitly recognized the right of White landowners to hold slaves; it was not until the implementation of the 13th Amendment of 1865 that slavery and involuntary servitude were outlawed. Jim Crow laws helped circumvent these rights by allowing the virtual enslavement of poor Blacks through sharecropping and legalized segregation of schools, transportation, and public accommodations well into the 20th century. The 14th Amendment of 1868, intending to protect emancipated slaves from the physical and legal retaliation of their former masters, also failed to do so as African Americans were persecuted by organized terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Following the Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, legal segregation and the principle of “separate but equal” were sanctioned by the law. By far the most influential civil rights organization in the African American movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) pressed the issue of equality all the way back to the Supreme Court. Today the legacy of the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision in 1954 demanding the desegregation of public schools helps protect the rights of people of color; women; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) persons; and persons with disabilities. The leaders of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, including Martin Luther King, Jr., [Page 1048]Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks, were the inspiration for tactics and concepts that sparked and empowered subsequent movements for women, Latinos/as, Asian Americans, Native Americans, the LGBT community, and the poor.

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