Civil Rights Movement

Background and Context

After the Civil War, many states passed a number of racially discriminatory laws, and racial violence against Blacks was both brutal and widespread. In 1896, the Supreme Court held in Plessy v. Ferguson that legalized segregation was constitutional as long as separate but equal public facilities (e.g., schools) were provided to Blacks. Organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, which engaged in concerted and organized acts of violence against Blacks that included murder, flourished in the early part of the 20th century. In this context, civil rights efforts on the part of Blacks and other groups were focused primarily on legal efforts to overturn racially discriminatory laws and congressional lobbying to secure legislative assistance at the federal level. These efforts made some progress, culminating in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Plessy v. Ferguson and held that separate schools for White and Black Americans could never be equal and thus were not constitutionally permissible.

Although the Court ordered the desegregation of all public schools “with all deliberate speed,” school desegregation efforts at the elementary, secondary, and college levels were difficult to enforce. Federal military personnel were required to enforce desegregation orders in places such as Little Rock, Arkansas, as well as at the University of Alabama and the University of Mississippi, and many cities in the South chose to shut down their public school system for a year or longer rather than integrate the schools. Years later, Thurgood Marshall, the lead attorney who brought Brown v. Board of Education to the Supreme Court, quipped: “Now I know what ‘deliberate speed' means—it means ‘very slowly.’” Impatience with the slow progress of the use of legislation and the courts to effect change led directly to the civil rights movement.

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