Civil Rights Movement

African American Civil Rights Movement

Black churches were central to the movement's organization and leadership. Churches hosted mass meetings and freedom schools. Most of the movement's major leaders were ministers.

The modern civil rights movement began with the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” ruling for public education. The Supreme Court's historic, unanimous ruling failed to set a timeline or procedure for school integration. Local attempts to integrate schools had varying levels of success because segregationists, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), and white citizens’ councils used vehicles of local control to resist integration. Some states even outlawed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and similar organizations. In some communities, lynchings occurred well into the 1950s and 1960s.

In 1955, the murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago, made national headlines. Till was visiting family in Mississippi and said “Bye, baby” to Carolyn Bryant, a white cashier at a store in town. Bryant's husband Roy and brother-in-law allegedly kidnapped Till in the middle of the night, violently beat and murdered him, and dumped his body in the river. At trial, Roy Bryant and his brother-in-law were acquitted of all charges, though they later accepted a paid interview in which they confessed in graphic detail how they murdered Till.

Montgomery

In 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, the Women's Political Council organized against bus segregation. African American passengers were required to sit in the back of the bus and to stand if a white passenger needed the seat. Rosa Parks's December 1 arrest for refusing to relinquish her seat marked the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott, organized by the Women's Political Council. When the NAACP hesitated to get involved, local [Page 519]ministers formed the Montgomery Improvement Association to direct the campaign. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a new minister in town and was elected to head the organization. King believed that nonviolence would effectively appeal to the conscience of American society. African Americans in Montgomery supported the boycott by staying off buses or donating cars or other resources. Citizens walked to work or participated in carpools, and taxis offered discounted fares. The boycott ended after 386 days, when the Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling in Gayle v. Browder (1956) that bus segregation was unconstitutional. Nevertheless, segregationists continued to resist integration with implied and actual violence. More than 20 cities took up Montgomery's cause to desegregate their local bus systems.

Transcript

• – but I have it clearly in mind, and it is this that I should like to ask you, whether that isn't the underlying problem.
• I think that underlies everything. I think the Supreme Court decision has, of course, given our minorities a hope that one of their great opportunities, the opportunity for education, would really be open to them. But naturally, any person who really studies the situation knows that that opportunity can only come as other human rights are recognized and accepted.

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