essay about african american civil rights

If you're seeing this message, it means we're having trouble loading external resources on our website.

If you're behind a web filter, please make sure that the domains *.kastatic.org and *.kasandbox.org are unblocked.

To log in and use all the features of Khan Academy, please enable JavaScript in your browser.

Course: US history   >   Unit 8

Introduction to the civil rights movement.

• African American veterans and the Civil Rights Movement
• Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
• Emmett Till
• The Montgomery Bus Boycott
• "Massive Resistance" and the Little Rock Nine
• The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
• The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965
• SNCC and CORE

Black Power

• The Civil Rights Movement

• The Civil Rights Movement is an umbrella term for the many varieties of activism that sought to secure full political, social, and economic rights for African Americans in the period from 1946 to 1968.
• Civil rights activism involved a diversity of approaches, from bringing lawsuits in court, to lobbying the federal government, to mass direct action, to black power.
• The efforts of civil rights activists resulted in many substantial victories, but also met with the fierce opposition of white supremacists .

The emergence of the Civil Rights Movement

Civil rights and the supreme court, nonviolent protest and civil disobedience, the unfinished business of the civil rights movement, what do you think.

• See Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
• See C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955).
• See Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
• See Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State during World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Stephen Tuck,  Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
• See Michael J. Klarman, Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
• See Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006).
• See Michael Eric Dyson, The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016).
• See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010).
• See Tavis Smiley, ed., The Covenant with Black America: Ten Years Later (Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, Inc., 2016).

Want to join the conversation?

• Upvote Button navigates to signup page
• Downvote Button navigates to signup page
• Flag Button navigates to signup page

• History Classics
• Your Profile
• Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window)
• This Day In History
• History Podcasts
• History Vault

Civil Rights Movement

By: History.com Editors

Updated: May 14, 2024 | Original: October 27, 2009

The civil rights movement was a struggle for social justice that took place mainly during the 1950s and 1960s for Black Americans to gain equal rights under the law in the United States. The Civil War officially abolished slavery , but it didn’t end discrimination against Black people—they continued to endure the devastating effects of racism, especially in the South. By the mid-20th century, Black Americans, along with many other Americans, mobilized and began an unprecedented fight for equality that spanned two decades.

Jim Crow Laws

During Reconstruction , Black people took on leadership roles like never before. They held public office and sought legislative changes for equality and the right to vote.

In 1868, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution gave Black people equal protection under the law. In 1870, the 15th Amendment granted Black American men the right to vote. Still, many white Americans, especially those in the South, were unhappy that people they’d once enslaved were now on a more-or-less equal playing field.

To marginalize Black people, keep them separate from white people and erase the progress they’d made during Reconstruction, “ Jim Crow ” laws were established in the South beginning in the late 19th century. Black people couldn’t use the same public facilities as white people, live in many of the same towns or go to the same schools. Interracial marriage was illegal, and most Black people couldn’t vote because they were unable to pass voter literacy tests.

Jim Crow laws weren’t adopted in northern states; however, Black people still experienced discrimination at their jobs or when they tried to buy a house or get an education. To make matters worse, laws were passed in some states to limit voting rights for Black Americans.

Moreover, southern segregation gained ground in 1896 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Plessy v. Ferguson that facilities for Black and white people could be “separate but equal."

World War II and Civil Rights

Prior to World War II , most Black people worked as low-wage farmers, factory workers, domestics or servants. By the early 1940s, war-related work was booming, but most Black Americans weren’t given better-paying jobs. They were also discouraged from joining the military.

After thousands of Black people threatened to march on Washington to demand equal employment rights, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 on June 25, 1941. It opened national defense jobs and other government jobs to all Americans regardless of race, creed, color or national origin.

Black men and women served heroically in World War II, despite suffering segregation and discrimination during their deployment. The Tuskegee Airmen broke the racial barrier to become the first Black military aviators in the U.S. Army Air Corps and earned more than 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses. Yet many Black veterans were met with prejudice and scorn upon returning home. This was a stark contrast to why America had entered the war to begin with—to defend freedom and democracy in the world.

As the Cold War began, President Harry Truman initiated a civil rights agenda, and in 1948 issued Executive Order 9981 to end discrimination in the military. These events helped set the stage for grass-roots initiatives to enact racial equality legislation and incite the civil rights movement.

On December 1, 1955, a 42-year-old woman named Rosa Parks found a seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus after work. Segregation laws at the time stated Black passengers must sit in designated seats at the back of the bus, and Parks complied.

When a white man got on the bus and couldn’t find a seat in the white section at the front of the bus, the bus driver instructed Parks and three other Black passengers to give up their seats. Parks refused and was arrested.

As word of her arrest ignited outrage and support, Parks unwittingly became the “mother of the modern-day civil rights movement.” Black community leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) led by Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr ., a role which would place him front and center in the fight for civil rights.

Parks’ courage incited the MIA to stage a boycott of the Montgomery bus system . The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted 381 days. On November 14, 1956, the Supreme Court ruled segregated seating was unconstitutional. 

Little Rock Nine

In 1954, the civil rights movement gained momentum when the United States Supreme Court made segregation illegal in public schools in the case of Brown v. Board of Education . In 1957, Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas asked for volunteers from all-Black high schools to attend the formerly segregated school.

On September 4, 1957, nine Black students, known as the Little Rock Nine , arrived at Central High School to begin classes but were instead met by the Arkansas National Guard (on order of Governor Orval Faubus) and a screaming, threatening mob. The Little Rock Nine tried again a couple of weeks later and made it inside, but had to be removed for their safety when violence ensued.

Finally, President Dwight D. Eisenhower intervened and ordered federal troops to escort the Little Rock Nine to and from classes at Central High. Still, the students faced continual harassment and prejudice.

Their efforts, however, brought much-needed attention to the issue of desegregation and fueled protests on both sides of the issue.

Civil Rights Act of 1957

Even though all Americans had gained the right to vote, many southern states made it difficult for Black citizens. They often required prospective voters of color to take literacy tests that were confusing, misleading and nearly impossible to pass.

Wanting to show a commitment to the civil rights movement and minimize racial tensions in the South, the Eisenhower administration pressured Congress to consider new civil rights legislation.

On September 9, 1957, President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 into law, the first major civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. It allowed federal prosecution of anyone who tried to prevent someone from voting. It also created a commission to investigate voter fraud.

Sit-In at Woolworth's Lunch Counter

Despite making some gains, Black Americans still experienced blatant prejudice in their daily lives. On February 1, 1960, four college students took a stand against segregation in Greensboro, North Carolina when they refused to leave a Woolworth’s lunch counter without being served.

Over the next several days, hundreds of people joined their cause in what became known as the Greensboro sit-ins. After some were arrested and charged with trespassing, protesters launched a boycott of all segregated lunch counters until the owners caved and the original four students were finally served at the Woolworth’s lunch counter where they’d first stood their ground.

Their efforts spearheaded peaceful sit-ins and demonstrations in dozens of cities and helped launch the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to encourage all students to get involved in the civil rights movement. It also caught the eye of young college graduate Stokely Carmichael , who joined the SNCC during the Freedom Summer of 1964 to register Black voters in Mississippi. In 1966, Carmichael became the chair of the SNCC, giving his famous speech in which he originated the phrase "Black power.”

Freedom Riders

On May 4, 1961, 13 “ Freedom Riders ”—seven Black and six white activists–mounted a Greyhound bus in Washington, D.C. , embarking on a bus tour of the American south to protest segregated bus terminals. They were testing the 1960 decision by the Supreme Court in Boynton v. Virginia that declared the segregation of interstate transportation facilities unconstitutional.

Facing violence from both police officers and white protesters, the Freedom Rides drew international attention. On Mother’s Day 1961, the bus reached Anniston, Alabama, where a mob mounted the bus and threw a bomb into it. The Freedom Riders escaped the burning bus but were badly beaten. Photos of the bus engulfed in flames were widely circulated, and the group could not find a bus driver to take them further. U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (brother to President John F. Kennedy ) negotiated with Alabama Governor John Patterson to find a suitable driver, and the Freedom Riders resumed their journey under police escort on May 20. But the officers left the group once they reached Montgomery, where a white mob brutally attacked the bus. Attorney General Kennedy responded to the riders—and a call from Martin Luther King Jr.—by sending federal marshals to Montgomery.

On May 24, 1961, a group of Freedom Riders reached Jackson, Mississippi. Though met with hundreds of supporters, the group was arrested for trespassing in a “whites-only” facility and sentenced to 30 days in jail. Attorneys for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP ) brought the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court, which reversed the convictions. Hundreds of new Freedom Riders were drawn to the cause, and the rides continued.

In the fall of 1961, under pressure from the Kennedy administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued regulations prohibiting segregation in interstate transit terminals

March on Washington

Arguably one of the most famous events of the civil rights movement took place on August 28, 1963: the March on Washington . It was organized and attended by civil rights leaders such as A. Philip Randolph , Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr.

More than 200,000 people of all races congregated in Washington, D. C. for the peaceful march with the main purpose of forcing civil rights legislation and establishing job equality for everyone. The highlight of the march was King’s speech in which he continually stated, “I have a dream…”

King’s “ I Have a Dream” speech galvanized the national civil rights movement and became a slogan for equality and freedom.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 —legislation initiated by President John F. Kennedy before his assassination —into law on July 2 of that year.

King and other civil rights activists witnessed the signing. The law guaranteed equal employment for all, limited the use of voter literacy tests and allowed federal authorities to ensure public facilities were integrated.

Bloody Sunday

On March 7, 1965, the civil rights movement in Alabama took an especially violent turn as 600 peaceful demonstrators participated in the Selma to Montgomery march to protest the killing of Black civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson by a white police officer and to encourage legislation to enforce the 15th amendment.

As the protesters neared the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were blocked by Alabama state and local police sent by Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, a vocal opponent of desegregation. Refusing to stand down, protesters moved forward and were viciously beaten and teargassed by police and dozens of protesters were hospitalized.

The entire incident was televised and became known as “ Bloody Sunday .” Some activists wanted to retaliate with violence, but King pushed for nonviolent protests and eventually gained federal protection for another march.

Voting Rights Act of 1965

When President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965, he took the Civil Rights Act of 1964 several steps further. The new law banned all voter literacy tests and provided federal examiners in certain voting jurisdictions. 

It also allowed the attorney general to contest state and local poll taxes. As a result, poll taxes were later declared unconstitutional in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections in 1966.

Part of the Act was walked back decades later, in 2013, when a Supreme Court decision ruled that Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional, holding that the constraints placed on certain states and federal review of states' voting procedures were outdated.

Civil Rights Leaders Assassinated

The civil rights movement had tragic consequences for two of its leaders in the late 1960s. On February 21, 1965, former Nation of Islam leader and Organization of Afro-American Unity founder Malcolm X was assassinated at a rally.

On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on his hotel room's balcony. Emotionally-charged looting and riots followed, putting even more pressure on the Johnson administration to push through additional civil rights laws.

Fair Housing Act of 1968

The Fair Housing Act became law on April 11, 1968, just days after King’s assassination. It prevented housing discrimination based on race, sex, national origin and religion. It was also the last legislation enacted during the civil rights era.

The civil rights movement was an empowering yet precarious time for Black Americans. The efforts of civil rights activists and countless protesters of all races brought about legislation to end segregation, Black voter suppression and discriminatory employment and housing practices.

Six Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement

Though their stories are sometimes overlooked, these women were instrumental in the fight for equal rights for African‑Americans.

How the Black Power Movement Influenced the Civil Rights Movement

With a focus on racial pride and self‑determination, leaders of the Black Power movement argued that civil rights activism did not go far enough.

8 Key Laws That Advanced Civil Rights

Since the abolishment of slavery, the U.S. government has passed several laws to address discrimination and racism against African Americans.

A Brief History of Jim Crow. Constitutional Rights Foundation. Civil Rights Act of 1957. Civil Rights Digital Library. Document for June 25th: Executive Order 8802: Prohibition of Discrimination in the Defense Industry. National Archives. Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-In. African American Odyssey. Little Rock School Desegregation (1957).  The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute Stanford . Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Global Freedom Struggle. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute Stanford . Rosa Marie Parks Biography. Rosa and Raymond Parks. Selma, Alabama, (Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965). BlackPast.org. The Civil Rights Movement (1919-1960s). National Humanities Center. The Little Rock Nine. National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior: Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site. Turning Point: World War II. Virginia Historical Society.

Photo Galleries

Sign up for Inside History

Get HISTORY’s most fascinating stories delivered to your inbox three times a week.

By submitting your information, you agree to receive emails from HISTORY and A+E Networks. You can opt out at any time. You must be 16 years or older and a resident of the United States.

More details : Privacy Notice | Terms of Use | Contact Us

Kenneth R. Janken
Professor, Department of African and Afro-American Studies and
Director of Experiential Education, Office of Undergraduate Curricula
University of North Carolina
National Humanities Center Fellow
©National Humanities Center

When most Americans think of the Civil Rights Movement, they have in mind a span of time beginning with the 1954 Supreme Court’s decision in , which outlawed segregated education, or the Montgomery Bus Boycott and culminated in the late 1960s or early 1970s. The movement encompassed both ad hoc local groups and established organizations like the

The drama of the mid-twentieth century emerged on a foundation of earlier struggles. Two are particularly notable: the NAACP’s campaign against lynching, and the NAACP’s legal campaign against segregated education, which culminated in the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision.

The NAACP’s anti-lynching campaign of the 1930s combined widespread publicity about the causes and costs of lynching, a successful drive to defeat Supreme Court nominee John J. Parker for his white supremacist and anti-union views and then defeat senators who voted for confirmation, and a skillful effort to lobby Congress and the Roosevelt administration to pass a federal anti-lynching law. Southern senators filibustered, but they could not prevent the formation of a national consensus against lynching; by 1938 the number of lynchings declined steeply. Other organizations, such as the left-wing National Negro Congress, fought lynching, too, but the NAACP emerged from the campaign as the most influential civil rights organization in national politics and maintained that position through the mid-1950s.

Houston was unabashed: lawyers were either social engineers or they were parasites. He desired equal access to education, but he also was concerned with the type of society blacks were trying to integrate. He was among those who surveyed American society and saw racial inequality and the ruling powers that promoted racism to divide black workers from white workers. Because he believed that racial violence in Depression-era America was so pervasive as to make mass direct action untenable, he emphasized the redress of grievances through the courts.

The designers of the Brown strategy developed a potent combination of gradualism in legal matters and advocacy of far-reaching change in other political arenas. Through the 1930s and much of the 1940s, the NAACP initiated suits that dismantled aspects of the edifice of segregated education, each building on the precedent of the previous one. Not until the late 1940s did the NAACP believe it politically feasible to challenge directly the constitutionality of “separate but equal” education itself. Concurrently, civil rights organizations backed efforts to radically alter the balance of power between employers and workers in the United States. They paid special attention to forming an alliance with organized labor, whose history of racial exclusion angered blacks. In the 1930s, the National Negro Congress brought blacks into the newly formed United Steel Workers, and the union paid attention to the particular demands of African Americans. The NAACP assisted the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the largest black labor organization of its day. In the 1940s, the United Auto Workers, with NAACP encouragement, made overtures to black workers. The NAACP’s successful fight against the Democratic white primary in the South was more than a bid for inclusion; it was a stiff challenge to what was in fact a regional one-party dictatorship. Recognizing the interdependence of domestic and foreign affairs, the NAACP’s program in the 1920s and 1930s promoted solidarity with Haitians who were trying to end the American military occupation and with colonized blacks elsewhere in the Caribbean and in Africa. African Americans’ support for WWII and the battle against the Master Race ideology abroad was matched by equal determination to eradicate it in America, too. In the post-war years blacks supported the decolonization of Africa and Asia.

The Cold War and McCarthyism put a hold on such expansive conceptions of civil/human rights. Critics of our domestic and foreign policies who exceeded narrowly defined boundaries were labeled un-American and thus sequestered from Americans’ consciousness. In a supreme irony, the Supreme Court rendered the Brown decision and then the government suppressed the very critique of American society that animated many of Brown ’s architects.

White southern resistance to Brown was formidable and the slow pace of change stimulated impatience especially among younger African Americans as the 1960s began. They concluded that they could not wait for change—they had to make it. And the Montgomery Bus Boycott , which lasted the entire year of 1956, had demonstrated that mass direct action could indeed work. The four college students from Greensboro who sat at the Woolworth lunch counter set off a decade of activity and organizing that would kill Jim Crow.

Elimination of segregation in public accommodations and the removal of “Whites Only” and “Colored Only” signs was no mean feat. Yet from the very first sit-in, Ella Baker , the grassroots leader whose activism dated from the 1930s and who was advisor to the students who founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), pointed out that the struggle was “concerned with something much bigger than a hamburger or even a giant-sized Coke.” Far more was at stake for these activists than changing the hearts of whites. When the sit-ins swept Atlanta in 1960, protesters’ demands included jobs, health care, reform of the police and criminal justice system, education, and the vote. (See: “An Appeal for Human Rights.” ) Demonstrations in Birmingham in 1963 under the leadership of Fred Shuttlesworth’s Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, which was affiliated with the SCLC, demanded not only an end to segregation in downtown stores but also jobs for African Americans in those businesses and municipal government. The 1963 March on Washington, most often remembered as the event at which Dr. King proclaimed his dream, was a demonstration for “Jobs and Justice.”

Movement activists from SNCC and CORE asked sharp questions about the exclusive nature of American democracy and advocated solutions to the disfranchisement and violation of the human rights of African Americans, including Dr. King’s nonviolent populism, Robert Williams’ “armed self-reliance,” and Malcolm X’s incisive critiques of worldwide white supremacy, among others. (See: Dr. King, “Where Do We Go from Here?” ; Robert F. Williams, “Negroes with Guns” ; and Malcolm X, “Not just an American problem, but a world problem.” ) What they proposed was breathtakingly radical, especially in light of today’s political discourse and the simplistic ways it prefers to remember the freedom struggle. King called for a guaranteed annual income, redistribution of the national wealth to meet human needs, and an end to a war to colonize the Vietnamese. Malcolm X proposed to internationalize the black American freedom struggle and to link it with liberation movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Thus the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s was not concerned exclusively with interracial cooperation or segregation and discrimination as a character issue. Rather, as in earlier decades, the prize was a redefinition of American society and a redistribution of social and economic power.

Guiding Student Discussion

Students discussing the Civil Rights Movement will often direct their attention to individuals’ motives. For example, they will question whether President Kennedy sincerely believed in racial equality when he supported civil rights or only did so out of political expediency. Or they may ask how whites could be so cruel as to attack peaceful and dignified demonstrators. They may also express awe at Martin Luther King’s forbearance and calls for integration while showing discomfort with Black Power’s separatism and proclamations of self-defense. But a focus on the character and moral fiber of leading individuals overlooks the movement’s attempts to change the ways in which political, social, and economic power are exercised. Leading productive discussions that consider broader issues will likely have to involve debunking some conventional wisdom about the Civil Rights Movement. Guiding students to discuss the extent to which nonviolence and racial integration were considered within the movement to be hallowed goals can lead them to greater insights.

Nonviolence and passive resistance were prominent tactics of protesters and organizations. (See: SNCC Statement of Purpose and Jo Ann Gibson Robinson’s memoir, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It. ) But they were not the only ones, and the number of protesters who were ideologically committed to them was relatively small. Although the name of one of the important civil rights organizations was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, its members soon concluded that advocating nonviolence as a principle was irrelevant to most African Americans they were trying to reach. Movement participants in Mississippi, for example, did not decide beforehand to engage in violence, but self-defense was simply considered common sense. If some SNCC members in Mississippi were convinced pacifists in the face of escalating violence, they nevertheless enjoyed the protection of local people who shared their goals but were not yet ready to beat their swords into ploughshares.

Armed self-defense had been an essential component of the black freedom struggle, and it was not confined to the fringe. Returning soldiers fought back against white mobs during the Red Summer of 1919. In 1946, World War Two veterans likewise protected black communities in places like Columbia, Tennessee, the site of a bloody race riot. Their self-defense undoubtedly brought national attention to the oppressive conditions of African Americans; the NAACP’s nationwide campaign prompted President Truman to appoint a civil rights commission that produced To Secure These Rights , a landmark report that called for the elimination of segregation. Army veteran Robert F. Williams, who was a proponent of what he called “armed self-reliance,” headed a thriving branch of the NAACP in Monroe, North Carolina, in the early 1950s. The poet Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” dramatically captures the spirit of self-defense and violence.

Often, deciding whether violence is “good” or “bad,” necessary or ill-conceived depends on one’s perspective and which point of view runs through history books. Students should be encouraged to consider why activists may have considered violence a necessary part of their work and what role it played in their overall programs. Are violence and nonviolence necessarily antithetical, or can they be complementary? For example the Black Panther Party may be best remembered by images of members clad in leather and carrying rifles, but they also challenged widespread police brutality, advocated reform of the criminal justice system, and established community survival programs, including medical clinics, schools, and their signature breakfast program. One question that can lead to an extended discussion is to ask students what the difference is between people who rioted in the 1960s and advocated violence and the participants in the Boston Tea Party at the outset of the American Revolution. Both groups wanted out from oppression, both saw that violence could be efficacious, and both were excoriated by the rulers of their day. Teachers and students can then explore reasons why those Boston hooligans are celebrated in American history and whether the same standards should be applied to those who used arms in the 1960s.

An important goal of the Civil Rights Movement was the elimination of segregation. But if students, who are now a generation or more removed from Jim Crow, are asked to define segregation, they are likely to point out examples of individual racial separation such as blacks and whites eating at different cafeteria tables and the existence of black and white houses of worship. Like most of our political leaders and public opinion, they place King’s injunction to judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin exclusively in the context of personal relationships and interactions. Yet segregation was a social, political, and economic system that placed African Americans in an inferior position, disfranchised them, and was enforced by custom, law, and official and vigilante violence.

The discussion of segregation should be expanded beyond expressions of personal preferences. One way to do this is to distinguish between black and white students hanging out in different parts of a school and a law mandating racially separate schools, or between black and white students eating separately and a laws or customs excluding African Americans from restaurants and other public facilities. Put another way, the civil rights movement was not fought merely to ensure that students of different backgrounds could become acquainted with each other. The goal of an integrated and multicultural America is not achieved simply by proximity. Schools, the economy, and other social institutions needed to be reformed to meet the needs for all. This was the larger and widely understood meaning of the goal of ending Jim Crow, and it is argued forcefully by James Farmer in “Integration or Desegregation.”

A guided discussion should point out that many of the approaches to ending segregation did not embrace integration or assimilation, and students should become aware of the appeal of separatism. W. E. B. Du Bois believed in what is today called multiculturalism. But by the mid-1930s he concluded that the Great Depression, virulent racism, and the unreliability of white progressive reformers who had previously expressed sympathy for civil rights rendered an integrated America a distant dream. In an important article, “Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?” Du Bois argued for the strengthening of black pride and the fortification of separate black schools and other important institutions. Black communities across the country were in severe distress; it was counterproductive, he argued, to sacrifice black schoolchildren at the altar of integration and to get them into previously all-white schools, where they would be shunned and worse. It was far better to invest in strengthening black-controlled education to meet black communities’ needs. If, in the future, integration became a possibility, African Americans would be positioned to enter that new arrangement on equal terms. Du Bois’ argument found echoes in the 1960s writing of Stokely Carmichael ( “Toward Black Liberation” ) and Malcolm X ( “The Ballot or the Bullet” ).

Scholars Debate

Any brief discussion of historical literature on the Civil Rights Movement is bound to be incomplete. The books offered—a biography, a study of the black freedom struggle in Memphis, a brief study of the Brown decision, and a debate over the unfolding of the movement—were selected for their accessibility variety, and usefulness to teaching, as well as the soundness of their scholarship.

Walter White: Mr. NAACP , by Kenneth Robert Janken, is a biography of one of the most well known civil rights figure of the first half of the twentieth century. White made a name for himself as the NAACP’s risk-taking investigator of lynchings, riots, and other racial violence in the years after World War I. He was a formidable persuader and was influential in the halls of power, counting Eleanor Roosevelt, senators, representatives, cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices, union leaders, Hollywood moguls, and diplomats among his circle of friends. His style of work depended upon rallying enlightened elites, and he favored a placing effort into developing a civil rights bureaucracy over local and mass-oriented organizations. Walter White was an expert in the practice of “brokerage politics”: During decades when the majority of African Americans were legally disfranchised, White led the organization that gave them an effective voice, representing them and interpreting their demands and desires (as he understood them) to those in power. Two examples of this were highlighted in the first part of this essay: the anti-lynching crusade, and the lobbying of President Truman, which resulted in To Secure These Rights . A third example is his essential role in producing Marian Anderson’s iconic 1939 Easter Sunday concert at the Lincoln Memorial, which drew the avid support of President Roosevelt and members of his administration, the Congress, and the Supreme Court. His style of leadership was, before the emergence of direct mass action in the years after White’s death in 1955, the dominant one in the Civil Rights Movement.

There are many excellent books that study the development of the Civil Rights Movement in one locality or state. An excellent addition to the collection of local studies is Battling the Plantation Mentality , by Laurie B. Green, which focuses on Memphis and the surrounding rural areas of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi between the late 1930s and 1968, when Martin Luther King was assassinated there. Like the best of the local studies, this book presents an expanded definition of civil rights that encompasses not only desegregation of public facilities and the attainment of legal rights but also economic and political equality. Central to this were efforts by African Americans to define themselves and shake off the cultural impositions and mores of Jim Crow. During WWII, unionized black men went on strike in the defense industry to upgrade their job classifications. Part of their grievances revolved around wages and working conditions, but black workers took issue, too, with employers’ and the government’s reasoning that only low status jobs were open to blacks because they were less intelligent and capable. In 1955, six black female employees at a white-owned restaurant objected to the owner’s new method of attracting customers as degrading and redolent of the plantation: placing one of them outside dressed as a mammy doll to ring a dinner bell. When the workers tried to walk off the job, the owner had them arrested, which gave rise to local protest. In 1960, black Memphis activists helped support black sharecroppers in surrounding counties who were evicted from their homes when they initiated voter registration drives. The 1968 sanitation workers strike mushroomed into a mass community protest both because of wage issues and the strikers’ determination to break the perception of their being dependent, epitomized in their slogan “I Am a Man.” This book also shows that not everyone was able to cast off the plantation mentality, as black workers and energetic students at LeMoyne College confronted established black leaders whose positions and status depended on white elites’ sufferance.

Brown v. Board of Education: A Brief History with Documents , edited by Waldo E. Martin, Jr., contains an insightful 40-page essay that places both the NAACP’s legal strategy and 1954 Brown decision in multiple contexts, including alternate approaches to incorporating African American citizens into the American nation, and the impact of World War II and the Cold War on the road to Brown . The accompanying documents affirm the longstanding black freedom struggle, including demands for integrated schools in Boston in 1849, continuing with protests against the separate but equal ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson of 1896, and important items from the NAACP’s cases leading up to Brown . The documents are prefaced by detailed head notes and provocative discussion questions.

Debating the Civil Rights Movement , by Steven F. Lawson and Charles Payne, is likewise focused on instruction and discussion. This essay has largely focused on the development of the Civil Rights Movement from the standpoint of African American resistance to segregation and the formation organizations to fight for racial, economic, social, and political equality. One area it does not explore is how the federal government helped to shape the movement. Steven Lawson traces the federal response to African Americans’ demands for civil rights and concludes that it was legislation, judicial decisions, and executive actions between 1945 and 1968 that was most responsible for the nation’s advance toward racial equality. Charles Payne vigorously disagrees, focusing instead on the protracted grassroots organizing as the motive force for whatever incomplete change occurred during those years. Each essay runs about forty pages, followed by smart selections of documents that support their cases.

Kenneth R. Janken is Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and Director of Experiential Education, Office of Undergraduate Curricula at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP and Rayford W. Logan and the Dilemma of the African American Intellectual . He was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2000-01.

Illustration credits

To cite this essay: Janken, Kenneth R. “The Civil Rights Movement: 1919-1960s.” Freedom’s Story, TeacherServe©. National Humanities Center. DATE YOU ACCESSED ESSAY. <https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/freedom/1917beyond/essays/crm.htm>

NHC Home   |   TeacherServe   |   Divining America   |   Nature Transformed   |   Freedom’s Story About Us   |   Site Guide   |   Contact   |   Search

TeacherServe® Home Page National Humanities Center 7 Alexander Drive, P.O. Box 12256 Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 27709 Phone: (919) 549-0661 Fax: (919) 990-8535 Copyright © National Humanities Center. All rights reserved. Revised: April 2010 nationalhumanitiescenter.org

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center
• Introduction & Top Questions

Abolitionism to Jim Crow

• Du Bois to Brown
• Montgomery bus boycott to the Voting Rights Act
• From Black power to the assassination of Martin Luther King
• Into the 21st century
• Black Lives Matter and Shelby County v. Holder

When did the American civil rights movement start?

• What did Martin Luther King, Jr., do?
• What is Martin Luther King, Jr., known for?
• Who did Martin Luther King, Jr., influence and in what ways?
• What was Martin Luther King’s family life like?

American civil rights movement

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• NeoK12 - Educational Videos and Games for School Kids - Civil Rights Movement
• History Learning Site - The Civil Rights Movement in America 1945 to 1968
• Library of Congress - The Civil Rights Movement
• National Humanities Center - Freedom's Story - The Civil Rights Movement: 1919-1960s
• John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum - Civil Rights Movement
• civil rights movement - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
• civil rights movement - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

The American civil rights movement started in the mid-1950s. A major catalyst in the push for civil rights was in December 1955, when NAACP activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man.

Who were some key figures of the American civil rights movement?

Martin Luther King, Jr. , was an important leader of the civil rights movement. Rosa Parks , who refused to give up her seat on a public bus to a white customer, was also important. John Lewis , a civil rights leader and politician, helped plan the March on Washington .

What did the American civil rights movement accomplish?

The American civil rights movement broke the entrenched system of racial segregation in the South and achieved crucial equal-rights legislation.

What were some major events during the American civil rights movement?

The Montgomery bus boycott , sparked by activist Rosa Parks , was an important catalyst for the civil rights movement. Other important protests and demonstrations included the Greensboro sit-in and the Freedom Rides .

What are some examples of civil rights?

Examples of civil rights include the right to vote, the right to a fair trial, the right to government services, the right to a public education, and the right to use public facilities.

Recent News

American civil rights movement , mass protest movement against racial segregation and discrimination in the southern United States that came to national prominence during the mid-1950s. This movement had its roots in the centuries-long efforts of enslaved Africans and their descendants to resist racial oppression and abolish the institution of slavery . Although enslaved people were emancipated as a result of the American Civil War and were then granted basic civil rights through the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution , struggles to secure federal protection of these rights continued during the next century. Through nonviolent protest, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s broke the pattern of public facilities’ being segregated by “race” in the South and achieved the most important breakthrough in equal-rights legislation for African Americans since the Reconstruction period (1865–77). Although the passage in 1964 and 1965 of major civil rights legislation was victorious for the movement, by then militant Black activists had begun to see their struggle as a freedom or liberation movement not just seeking civil rights reforms but instead confronting the enduring economic, political, and cultural consequences of past racial oppression.

(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Britannica essay on “Monuments of Hope.”)

American history has been marked by persistent and determined efforts to expand the scope and inclusiveness of civil rights. Although equal rights for all were affirmed in the founding documents of the United States, many of the new country’s inhabitants were denied essential rights. Enslaved Africans and indentured servants did not have the inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that British colonists asserted to justify their Declaration of Independence . Nor were they included among the “People of the United States” who established the Constitution in order to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Instead, the Constitution protected slavery by allowing the importation of enslaved persons until 1808 and providing for the return of enslaved people who had escaped to other states.

As the United States expanded its boundaries, Native American peoples resisted conquest and absorption. Individual states, which determined most of the rights of American citizens , generally limited voting rights to white property-owning males, and other rights—such as the right to own land or serve on juries—were often denied on the basis of racial or gender distinctions. A small proportion of Black Americans lived outside the slave system, but those so-called “free Blacks” endured racial discrimination and enforced segregation . Although some enslaved persons violently rebelled against their enslavement ( see slave rebellions ), African Americans and other subordinated groups mainly used nonviolent means—protests, legal challenges, pleas and petitions addressed to government officials, as well as sustained and massive civil rights movements—to achieve gradual improvements in their status.

During the first half of the 19th century, movements to extend voting rights to non-property-owning white male labourers resulted in the elimination of most property qualifications for voting, but this expansion of suffrage was accompanied by brutal suppression of American Indians and increasing restrictions on free Blacks. Owners of enslaved people in the South reacted to the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia by passing laws to discourage antislavery activism and prevent the teaching of enslaved people to read and write. Despite this repression, a growing number of Black Americans freed themselves from slavery by escaping or negotiating agreements to purchase their freedom through wage labour. By the 1830s, free Black communities in the Northern states had become sufficiently large and organized to hold regular national conventions, where Black leaders gathered to discuss alternative strategies of racial advancement. In 1833 a small minority of whites joined with Black antislavery activists to form the American Anti-Slavery Society under the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison .

Frederick Douglass became the most famous of the formerly enslaved persons who joined the abolition movement . His autobiography—one of many slave narratives —and his stirring orations heightened public awareness of the horrors of slavery. Although Black leaders became increasingly militant in their attacks against slavery and other forms of racial oppression, their efforts to secure equal rights received a major setback in 1857, when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected African American citizenship claims. The Dred Scott decision stated that the country’s founders had viewed Blacks as so inferior that they had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” This ruling—by declaring unconstitutional the Missouri Compromise (1820), through which Congress had limited the expansion of slavery into western territories—ironically strengthened the antislavery movement, because it angered many whites who did not hold enslaved people. The inability of the country’s political leaders to resolve that dispute fueled the successful presidential campaign of Abraham Lincoln , the candidate of the antislavery Republican Party . Lincoln’s victory in turn prompted the Southern slave states to secede and form the Confederate States of America in 1860–61.

Although Lincoln did not initially seek to abolish slavery, his determination to punish the rebellious states and his increasing reliance on Black soldiers in the Union army prompted him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) to deprive the Confederacy of its enslaved property . After the American Civil War ended, Republican leaders cemented the Union victory by gaining the ratification of constitutional amendments to abolish slavery ( Thirteenth Amendment ) and to protect the legal equality of formerly enslaved persons ( Fourteenth Amendment ) and the voting rights of male ex-slaves ( Fifteenth Amendment ). Despite those constitutional guarantees of rights, almost a century of civil rights agitation and litigation would be required to bring about consistent federal enforcement of those rights in the former Confederate states. Moreover, after federal military forces were removed from the South at the end of Reconstruction , white leaders in the region enacted new laws to strengthen the “ Jim Crow ” system of racial segregation and discrimination. In its Plessy v. Ferguson decision (1896), the Supreme Court ruled that “ separate but equal ” facilities for African Americans did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment , ignoring evidence that the facilities for Blacks were inferior to those intended for whites.

The Southern system of white supremacy was accompanied by the expansion of European and American imperial control over nonwhite people in Africa and Asia as well as in island countries of the Pacific and Caribbean regions. Like African Americans, most nonwhite people throughout the world were colonized or economically exploited and denied basic rights, such as the right to vote . With few exceptions, women of all races everywhere were also denied suffrage rights ( see woman suffrage ).

For full functionality of this site it is necessary to enable JavaScript. Click here for instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your web browser.

The Civil Rights Movement

• CommonLit is a nonprofit that has everything teachers and schools need for top-notch literacy instruction: a full-year ELA curriculum, benchmark assessments, and formative data. Browse Content Who We Are About

Handout A: Background Essay: African Americans in the Gilded Age

Background Essay: African Americans in the Gilded Age

Directions: Read the essay and answer the review questions at the end.

In the late nineteenth century, the promise of emancipation and Reconstruction went largely unfulfilled and was even reversed in the lives of African Americans. Southern blacks suffered from horrific violence, political disfranchisement, economic discrimination, and legal segregation. Ironically, the new wave of racial discrimination that was introduced was part of an attempt to bring harmony between the races and order to American society.

Constitutional amendments were ratified during and after the war to protect the natural and civil rights of African Americans. The Thirteenth Amendment forever banned slavery from the United States, the Fourteenth Amendment protected black citizenship, and the Fifteenth Amendment granted the right to vote to African-American males. In addition, a Freedmen’s Bureau was established to help the economic condition of former slaves, and Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1875.

Roadblocks to Equality

Despite these legal protections, the economic condition of African Americans significantly worsened in the last few decades of the nineteenth century. Poor southern black farmers were generally forced into sharecropping whereby they borrowed money to plant a year’s crop, using the future crop as collateral on the loan. Often, they owed so much of the resulting crop that they fell into debt for the following year and eventually into a state of debt peonage. Since 90 percent of African Americans lived in the rural South, most were sharecroppers. The story was not much different as African Americans moved to southern and northern cities. Black women found work as domestic servants and men in urban factories, but they were usually in menial, low-paying jobs because white employers discriminated against African Americans in hiring. Black workers also faced a great deal of racism at the hands of labor unions which severely limited their ability to secure high-paying, skilled jobs. While the Knights of Labor and United Mine Workers were open to blacks, the largest skilled-worker union, the American Federation of Labor, curtailed black membership, thereby limiting them to menial labor.

African Americans throughout the country suffered from violence and intimidation. The most infamous examples of violence were brutal lynchings, or executions without due process, by angry white mobs. These travesties resulted in hangings, burnings, shootings, and mutilations for between 100 and 200 blacks—especially black men falsely accused of raping white women—annually. Race riots broke out in southern and northern cities from New Orleans and Atlanta to New York and Evansville, Indiana, causing dozens of deaths and property damage.

Although African Americans were elected to Congress and state legislatures during Reconstruction, and enjoyed the constitutional right to vote, black civil rights were systematically stripped away in a campaign of disfranchisement. One method was to charge a poll tax to vote, which precious few black sharecroppers could afford to pay. Another strategy was the literacy test which few former slaves could pass. Furthermore, the white clerks at courthouses had already decided that any black applicant would fail, regardless of his true reading ability. Since both of those devices at times excluded poor whites as well, grandfather clauses were introduced to exempt from the literacy test anyone whose father or grandfather had the right to vote before the Civil War. Moreover, the Supreme Court declared the 1875 Civil Rights Act guaranteeing equal access to public facilities and transportation to be unconstitutional in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) because the law regulated the private discriminatory conduct of individuals rather than government discrimination.

Segregation

One of the most pervasive and visible signs of racism was the rise of informal and legal segregation, or separation of the races. In a wholesale violation of liberty and equality, southern state legislatures passed “Jim Crow” segregation laws that denied African Americans equal access to public facilities such as hotels, restaurants, parks, and swimming pools. Southern schools and public transportation had vastly inferior “separate but equal” facilities that left the black minority subject to unjust majority rule. Housing covenants and other devices kept blacks in separate neighborhoods from whites. African Americans in the North also suffered informal residential segregation and economic discrimination in jobs.

In one of its more infamous decisions, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation statutes were legal in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). In Plessy, the Court decided that “separate, but equal” public facilities did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment or imply the inferiority of African Americans. Justice John Marshall Harlan was one of the two dissenters who wrote, “Our constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.”

Progressive and Race Relations

One of the great ironies of the series of reforms instituted in the early twentieth century known as the Progressive Era was that segregation and racism were deeply enshrined in the movement. Progressives were a group of reformers who believed that the industrialized, urbanized United States of the nineteenth century had outgrown its eighteenth-century Constitution. That Constitution did not give government, especially the federal government, enough power to deal with unprecedented problems. Many Progressives embraced Social Darwinism and eugenics which was part of the most advanced science and social science taught in universities and scientific circles. Social Darwinism ranked various groups, which its proponents considered “races,” according to certain characteristics and labelled Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic peoples as superior and Southeastern Europeans, Jews, Asians, Hispanics, and Africans as inferior races. Therefore, there was a supposed scientific basis for segregation as the “higher” races ruled the “lower.” Moreover, Progressives generally endorsed segregation as a means of achieving their central goal of social order and harmony between the races. There were notable exceptions, such as Jane Addams, black Progressives such as W.E.B. DuBois, and the Progressives of both races who founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), but Progressive ideology contributed to the growth of segregation.

Progressive Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson generally supported the segregationist order. While Roosevelt courageously invited African-American leader Booker T. Washington to dinner in the White House and condemned lynching, he discharged 170 black soldiers because of a race riot in Brownsville, Texas in 1906. Wilson had perhaps a worse record on civil rights as his administration fired many black federal employees and segregated federal departments.

Black Leadership

Several black leaders advanced the cause of black civil rights and helped organize African Americans to defend their interests through self help. The highly-educated journalist, Ida B. Wells, launched a crusade against lynching by exposing the savage practice. She also challenged segregation by refusing to change her seat on a train because it was in an area reserved for white women. Other African Americans unsuccessfully boycotted segregated streetcars in urban areas but utilized a method that would prove successful in the mid-twentieth century.

A debate took shape between two African-American leaders, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. Washington was a former slave who founded the Tuskegee Institute for blacks in the 1880s and wrote Up from Slavery. He advocated that African Americans achieve racial equality slowly by patience and accommodation. Washington thought that blacks should be trained in industrial education and demonstrate the character virtues of hard work, thrift, and self-respect. They would therefore prove that they deserved equal rights and equal opportunity for social mobility. At the 1895 Atlanta Exposition, Washington delivered an address that posited, “In the long run it is the race or individual that exercises the most patience, forbearance, and self-control in the midst of trying conditions that wins…the respect of the world.”

DuBois, on the other hand, was a Harvard and Berlin-educated intellectual who believed that African Americans should win equality through a liberal arts education and fighting for political and civil equality. He wrote the Souls of Black Folk and laid out a vision whereby the “talented tenth” among African Americans would receive an excellent education and become the teachers and other professionals who would uplift fellow members of their race. He and other black leaders organized the Niagara Movement that fought segregation, lynching, and disfranchisement. In 1909 the movement’s leaders founded the NAACP, which fought for black equality and initiated a decades-long legal struggle to end segregation. DuBois edited its journal named The Crisis and wrote about issues affecting African Americans. He had the simple wish to “make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.”

Wartime Changes

American participation in the Spanish-American War and World War I initiated a dramatic change in the lives of African Americans and in the demography of American society. In both wars, black soldiers were relegated to segregated units and generally assigned to menial jobs rather than front-line combat. However, black soldiers had opportunities to fight in the charges against the Spanish in Cuba and against the Germans in the trenches of France. They demonstrated that they were just as courageous as white men even as they fought for a country that excluded them from its democracy. Moreover, travel to the North and overseas showed thousands of African Americans the possibility of freedom and equality that would be reinforced in World War II while fighting tyranny abroad.

Wartime America witnessed rapid change in the lives of African Americans especially in the rural South. Hundreds of thousands left southern farms to migrate to cities in the South such as Birmingham or Atlanta, or to northern cities in a mass movement called the Great Migration. This internal migration greatly increased the number of African Americans living in American cities. As a result, tensions grew with whites over jobs and housing that led to deadly race riots during and immediately after the war. However, a thriving black culture in the North also resulted in the Harlem Renaissance and the celebration of black artists.

The Great Migration eventually led to over six million African Americans following these migration patterns and laying the foundation for the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-twentieth century. Blacks resisted segregation when it was instituted and continued to organize to challenge its threat to liberty and equality in America.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

• What constitutional protections did the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments give African Americans?
• What economic conditions did African Americans face in the south and north in the late nineteenth century?
• What kinds of violence did African Americans suffer during the late nineteenth century?
• Despite the amendments to the Constitution protecting the rights of African Americans, what discriminatory devices systematically took away these rights?
• What was the ruling in the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) case? Did the case result in the advance or reversal of the rights of African Americans? Explain your answer.
• Did African Americans make gains or suffer setbacks to their rights during the Progressive Era? Explain your answer.
• Compare and contrast the means and goals of achieving black equality for Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois.
• How did World War I and the Great Migration change the lives of African Americans?

Why Ulysses S. Grant Was More Important Than You Think

Grant’s presidency is often overlooked, but his accomplishments around civil rights are getting more consideration from historians.

President Andrew Johnson barely escaped being convicted by the Senate during his impeachment trial of 1868. The Tennessean had been selected as Abraham Lincoln’s running mate in 1864 in a gesture of unity between North and South, with an eye toward reconciliation after the war. But Johnson was unsuited to the tasks of Reconstruction, particularly leading the Republic in accepting formerly enslaved people into public life. He left office and eventually faded from public view.

The country, wracked by divisions, looked for a unifying savior, and in 1868 overwhelmingly elected Ulysses S. Grant, the Civil War general and the most prominent American of his time. Grant’s presidency is often overlooked, but his accomplishments around civil rights are getting more consideration from historians.

According to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education , African Americans looked on Grant with favor : “Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, but it was Grant who actually freed the slaves.”

What’s the evidence for this? First, there was Grant’s record on the battlefield. While other Union generals dithered, Grant took aggressive action against the rebellious states of the Confederacy. African Americans credited his leadership with the liberation of huge slices of the South as his Union Army pressed from the west.

Second, Grant also backed enlisting formerly enslaved people to the cause before many others did, and supported the Fifteenth Amendment, which provided suffrage for African American men. And as president, in 1871 Grant created the U.S. Department of Justice to enforce basic rights for African Americans, then under siege by Ku Klux Klan terrorism.

In 1875, Grant signed the landmark Civil Rights Act, ending separation in public accommodations and more. (This legislation was later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.) He also signed the Enforcement Acts, which protected the voting rights of Blacks in the old Confederacy, a central initiative of Reconstruction.

“Grant oversaw a social revolution that was unprecedented,” notes scholar Joann Waugh, as, for a fleeting moment, Blacks in the South exercised political power and seemed on the cusp of transforming an entrenched racist culture.

Yet it was not to last. And much of that, note some Reconstruction scholars, was the reluctance of Grant to fully exercise federal authority to enforce the civil rights of African Americans. Had he more strongly asserted his own views on civil rights, a new South might well have emerged. By the end of his second term, the North had exhausted its interest in Reconstruction, and the oppression of African Americans asserted itself once again.

Grant, as general of the Union Army, himself offered generous terms to the vanquished foes, opposing proposals to indict the Confederacy’s leadership for treason. He was, as president, reluctant to press too hard on his former military enemy.

Weekly Newsletter

Get your fix of JSTOR Daily’s best stories in your inbox each Thursday.

Privacy Policy   Contact Us You may unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the provided link on any marketing message.

Grant left office at the end of his two terms in 1877. His administration was plagued by corruption, although Grant himself has largely been seen as not personally involved with the crimes of his underlings. Always a bad businessman, Grant invested in speculative ventures that toward the end of his life rendered him nearly penniless, until he wrote a best-selling memoir.

He died in New York in 1885 at the age of sixty-three. Over a million people lined the street for his funeral procession. Grant’s Tomb, now a quiet refuge on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, was the most popular tourist attraction in New York City for more than forty years, a testament to the impact the eighteenth president retained in nineteenth-century life.

Support JSTOR Daily! Join our new membership program on Patreon today.

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR.

Get Our Newsletter

More stories.

• Taiping: China’s Nineteenth-Century Civil War

• Becoming the British Virgin Islands

Endangered: North American Cricket

Reclaiming a Coal Town

Recent posts.

• Dorothy Richardson and the Stream of Consciousness
• Defining and Redefining Intersex
• The Ethics of On-Screen Violence in The Sympathizer

Support JSTOR Daily

Sign up for our weekly newsletter.

African-American Women and the Civil Rights Movement Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Without doubt, Paul Hendrickson, Bernice McNair Barnett and Danielle L. McGuire assert that Black women made noteworthy contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. As Barnett (163) notes, Black women were at the forefront of formulating tactics and strategies, initiating protests and securing resources such as communication networks, money and personnel that necessitated the success of collective action.

These included distinctive women such as Aurelia Browder, Jo Ann Gibson and Viola White among others. Such women formulated strategies and tactics such as declining to ride buses to work to boycott against the segregation laws, “I had stopped riding because I wanted better treatment” (Hendrickson 290).

They also refused to give seats to White passengers in buses, “I am not going to move out of my seat…I got the privilege to sit here like anybody” (Hendrickson 294) as a way of initiating protests. In addition, Black women with fair skin also used the sneering strategy; reminding the Whites who thought and treated them as Whites that they were not different from Blacks, “was a member of the darker race” (Hendrickson 293).

Conspicuously, Black women such as Mrs. Gilmore formed clubs that sought money to finance the movement (Barnett 168). In addition, they sought after the personnel that the movement required. For instance, the Albany Movement had a woman leader who organized young people to attend demonstrations and meetings (Barnett 168).

However, despite their paramount contributions, sometimes more than men “and it was women more than men” (Hendrickson 289), Black women remained invisible in reference to their recognition as leaders in the movement, except for a few such as Rosa Parks. Evidently, Black women were not under any male leaders’ directives, including the most influential male, Martin Luther King, a clear indication that they deserved recognition on their own.

The Black women took their own initiatives. This is because they “shared a common desire for freedom from oppression” (Barnet 163) that made them have the courage to start their initiatives without relying on men directives. They were angered by the unjust segregation laws that made them victims of racialism, and unjust treatment by officers and in the public (McGuire 59). Hence, they took their own initiatives because they “wanted better treatment” (290) which they would get if they cooperated with the Black people in the movement.

The key factors that left the Black women unrecognized or led to recognition of just a few of them as leaders are class, race and gender biases (Barnet 163). In terms of gender bias, focus on Civil Rights Movement research was on the elite Black male professionals such as Martin Luther King and ministers, not the women.

In addition, women were negatively stereotyped as poor, illegitimate and female-headed, thus making them unworthy of recognition as leaders. In reference to race, Feminist scholarship’s focus was on White women activism. In terms of class, there was a middle-class orientation ignoring and excluding the working-class and poor Black women experiences in the civil movement. This yielded the perception that Black women were politically passive, organizers or followers, not leaders.

In reference to the discussion above, it is crucial to talk about Black women’s contribution to the movement. While focusing on individuals would explore key women leaders in the movement, other women, the invisible, would be left out. Hence, it warrants that Black women be explored using an all- inclusive framework.

This demand exploring the sex-specific ways that Black women contributed to the movement because they collectively have a “history of their own” (Barnet 165), a reflection of their own role, concerns and values as women and Afro-Americans.

Works Cited

Barnett, Bernice McNair. “Invisible Southern Black Women Leaders in the Civil Rights Movement: The Triple Constraints of Gender, Race, and Class”. Gender and Society , 7.2 (1993):162-182. Print.

Hendrickson, Paul, “1944-The Ladies Before Rosa: Let Us Now Praise Unfamous Women”. Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8. 2 (2005): 287-298. Print.

McGuire, Danielle L. “At the Dark End of the Street”. Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. 40-67. Print.

• The Saudi Women Movement Related to Work
• Responding to the Work on Textile Mills: From Consent to Liberation
• Summary: “In the Red: Chinese Banks Moving Into U.S. Market” by Danielle Kurtzleben
• The Case of Bernice Demovski: Educational Administration
• Thomas Barnett and Michael Klare: Analysis of the Views
• Sisters and Solidarity: Women and Unions in Canada
• Women in World War II
• Asian Studies: Suharto’s Fall
• The Adoption of Feminist Doctrine in Canada
• Feminist Movement in Canada
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2019, May 13). African-American Women and the Civil Rights Movement. https://ivypanda.com/essays/african-american-women-and-the-civil-rights-movement-essay/

"African-American Women and the Civil Rights Movement." IvyPanda , 13 May 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/african-american-women-and-the-civil-rights-movement-essay/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'African-American Women and the Civil Rights Movement'. 13 May.

IvyPanda . 2019. "African-American Women and the Civil Rights Movement." May 13, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/african-american-women-and-the-civil-rights-movement-essay/.

1. IvyPanda . "African-American Women and the Civil Rights Movement." May 13, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/african-american-women-and-the-civil-rights-movement-essay/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "African-American Women and the Civil Rights Movement." May 13, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/african-american-women-and-the-civil-rights-movement-essay/.

Civil Rights (African American)

By James Wolfinger and Stanley Keith Arnold | Reader-Nominated Topic

Black Philadelphians have fought for civil rights since the nineteenth century and even before. Early demands focused on the abolition of slavery and desegregation of public accommodations. The movement gained greater power as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth and the World War I-era Great Migration brought tens of thousands of African Americans to the Philadelphia region. This exponential growth in the African American population gave Black Philadelphians the numbers and resources necessary to effect political change. Such efforts were never limited to the ballot box, access to which had been legally gained by constitutional amendment, but were instead linked to community needs for adequate housing, economic opportunity, and social and educational services. As African Americans gained greater rights, especially in the post-World War II period, Black Philadelphians shifted more to emphasizing the need to achieve results based on their legal equality. The struggle to maintain civil rights and translate those rights into concrete results extended beyond the classic period of the 1960s and continued to shape Philadelphia into the twenty-first century.

Civil rights activists in the nineteenth century focused on the abolition of slavery, securing voting rights, and gaining equal access to public accommodations. Richard Allen (1760-1831), who was born into slavery and became a prominent minister, founded the Free African Society that pushed for the abolition of slavery. Octavius Catto (1839-71) helped raise troops to fight in the Civil War and afterward led the campaign for voting rights, until he was assassinated while trying to exercise the franchise in 1871. Catto also worked with William Still (1821-1902) to desegregate the city’s streetcars, which led the Pennsylvania state legislature to pass a law in 1867 requiring streetcar companies to carry passengers regardless of color. Such activism helped lead to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which declared African Americans were entitled to equal treatment in public accommodations. Reverend Fields Cook (1817-97) tested the law and won a case against Philadelphia’s Bingham House Hotel when he was denied a room in 1876.

The civil rights movement gained greater momentum in the early twentieth century with the Great Migration. The Black population in Philadelphia surged from some 63,000 in 1900 to over 134,000 twenty years later. New arrivals lent their energy to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, and the city’s Black newspaper, the Philadelphia Tribune , (published by E. Washington Rhodes [1895-1970], established 1884). Through these organizations, they demanded greater access to jobs and adequate housing. Yet a brutal race riot over housing desegregation in 1918 that left two people dead and dozens injured demonstrated that Philadelphia was not the land of hope that many prayed they had found.

Expanding Residential Access

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, African Americans deepened their commitment to securing civil rights. In the 1920s, they expanded their access to residential areas in North, South, and West Philadelphia. They also supported a flowering of Black culture with authors such as Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961) from Fredricksville in Camden County, New Jersey, and venues such as the Dunbar Theater at Broad and Lombard in Philadelphia, giving Philadelphia a smaller version of the Harlem Renaissance. The Great Depression devastated African American efforts to secure more housing and create a vibrant community, and in the process, radicalized Black political activism. In the early 1930s, African American unemployment crested at 61 percent, and tens of thousands of people lost their homes. In response, Black Philadelphians joined the Democratic Party, the National Negro Congress , and the Communist Party. They engaged in “Don’t buy where you can’t work” campaigns to pressure employers to end discrimination. And they demanded that political leaders meet a number of pressing needs: public housing to make up for the lack of decent and affordable housing, access to government-funded jobs, and an Equal Rights Bill (passed by the state legislature in 1935) to once again guarantee access to public accommodations.

Demands for civil rights in the area of jobs, housing, and political recognition continued into World War II. As the federal government poured billions of dollars into Philadelphia industries, African Americans flocked to the city. The Black population grew from some 250,000 in 1940 to 376,000 by the end of the war decade, and many of these residents supported the national Double V campaign that called for victory over fascism abroad and over Jim Crow at home. A presidential executive order, prompted by A. Philip Randolph ’s (1889-1979) March on Washington Movement, prohibited discrimination in hiring at industries receiving defense contracts and was a reminder that the federal government could be an ally in pushing for civil rights. Nonetheless, many companies tried to maintain a segmented system that confined Black workers to specific jobs. Employment practices at the Philadelphia Transportation Company, for example, led to a campaign promoted by the NAACP and its leader Carolyn D. Moore (1916-1998) (who had started in the organization in Norristown , Pennsylvania) to secure driving jobs for African Americans. When the federal government ordered the desegregation of the workforce in August 1944, white workers staged one of the largest hate strikes of World War II, shutting down the city for nearly a week. African Americans also had to continue their struggle in the city’s neighborhoods, where redlining and other discriminatory loan policies restricted African Americans to the most dilapidated communities. Federal Housing Administration policies as well as violence perpetrated by some white Philadelphians kept new public housing segregated as well.

The experience of World War II transformed civil rights in Philadelphia as the concerted efforts of the NAACP and local interracial organizations energized the Black community. Although there were fears that interracial strife would grow after the war, a strong economy and the diligence of the civil rights community prevented the rise of racial violence. Economic concerns took particular precedence in this era, as African Americans who had been hired in defense-related industries feared they would lose their jobs. Civil rights activists such as the Reverend E. Luther Cunningham (1909-1964) seized the moment and in 1948 secured passage of a municipal Fair Employment Practices ordinance that the state later adopted in similar form. New Jersey already had such a law on the books (passed in 1945), and Delaware added its own version of the law in 1960. Black Philadelphians also helped elect Democrat Joseph Clark (1901-90) as mayor in 1951, which cemented the political reorientation of the city and led to the implementation of the Home Rule Charter that provided for a Commission on Human Relations, one of the first agencies in the nation dedicated to preventing discrimination.

Decades of Job Losses

Although the new Democratic administration paid greater attention to African American rights and increased civil service opportunities, deindustrialization and persistent housing segregation showed the need for continued civil rights agitation. Philadelphia lost some 250,000 industrial jobs between the 1950s and the 1980s, and as workplace opportunities evaporated many African Americans were disproportionately affected because they could not follow the jobs to the suburbs. Many white Philadelphians moved to suburban developments such as Levittown , Pennsylvania. Suburbanization freed up housing stock for some middle-class Black residents to move into city neighborhoods that had previously been off limits, but racist lending practices and white violence meant most suburban housing excluded Black settlement. In 1957, a race riot broke out when white homeowners protested the arrival of the Myers family in Levittown.

White intransigence sharpened Black Philadelphians’ commitment to a civil rights movement that transformed Philadelphia in the 1960s. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-68) had been introduced to Satyagraha (Mahatma Gandhi’s movement based on passive political resistance) at Philadelphia’s Fellowship House, an interracial organization in the late 1940s. King studied at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, and lived in Camden, New Jersey, from 1949 to 1951. As a result, King was well acquainted with Philadelphia’s civil rights community. Local civil rights activists provided moral and material support to King, who visited the city several times in the 1960s. Inspired by the national movement, local civil rights leaders such as the Reverend Leon Sullivan (1922-2001) and NAACP branch president Cecil B. Moore employed new tactics. In 1960, Sullivan and other Black ministers launched a boycott of Tasty Baking Company, one of the city’s largest businesses, over its refusal to hire Black workers. The success of the boycott influenced Moore to initiate street protests against racial discrimination in the construction industry and in food markets that did not hire Black employees. This activism drew greater power with the passage of federal affirmative action legislation and found support from white allies in the Northern Student Movement, Fellowship House, and other area organizations.

While increasing protests contributed to a rising level of consciousness among Black Philadelphians, they were unable to stem the tide of frustration in the city’s poorest communities, especially in North Philadelphia. In the early 1960s, North Philadelphia had the city’s highest poverty and unemployment rates and tense relations with the police. On August 28, 1964, rioting broke out after an altercation between two Black motorists and two police officers. Hundreds were arrested and injured, and the uprising indicated the emergence of a new militancy among many Black Philadelphians. Some activists turned to more militant organizations such as the Nation of Islam, the Black Panthers, and the Black People’s Unity Movement in Camden. Although the Philadelphia area had a long history of interracial civil rights organizing, an increasing number of activists influenced by Black Power ideology criticized the role of whites in the movement.

The Black Power Movement

By the late 1960s, the Black Power movement had significant influence in the civil rights community. Both traditional civil rights activists and younger Black militants coalesced around the issue of education. Thousands protested the exclusion of African Americans from an all-white private school, Girard College , located in North Philadelphia. The movement against educational racism involved parents (mainly African American women), educators, and students. In addition to enduring inferior schools, Black students criticized dress codes that excluded traditional African garb and demanded a curriculum that included Black history. In late 1967, Black students launched a major protest at Board of Education headquarters and were attacked by police. The clash exemplified persistent tensions between the Black community and the police.

While street protests continued in the late 1960s, an increasing number of civil rights activists sought public office. Buoyed by the passage of significant federal civil rights legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, these activists believed that they could considerably influence the political process. C. Delores Tucker (1927-2005) became the first Black Pennsylvanian appointed to the office of secretary of state. David P. Richardson (1948-1995) was elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in 1972. In 1984, W. Wilson Goode (b. 1938) became Philadelphia’s first Black mayor. Although this new generation of political leaders had its roots in activism, their different power bases reflected an increasing maturation of the movement. Tucker had been active in the mainstream civil rights struggle and the rapidly emerging feminist movement. Richardson began his activism as a community organizer, while Goode’s rise was propelled by his support among the city’s Black religious establishment. Goode’s success was in part fueled by the work of the city’s first Black deputy mayor, Charles W. Bowser (1930-2010), who had run unsuccessfully for mayor in the 1970s. In turn, Goode’s administration paved the way for future Black mayors John Street (b. 1943) and Michael Nutter (b. 1957). While Black officials took power at a more formal level, a growing number of community based organizations recognized the limits of their offices. The Kensington Welfare Rights Union, for example, articulated the demands of poor and working-class people of all races beyond what was provided in legislation.

Although the election of President Barack Obama (b. 1961) demonstrated the gains made by civil rights activists, Black Philadelphians recognized the many problems they still faced. In the 2000s, Philadelphia’s civil rights movement witnessed the emergence of organizations that addressed crime, joblessness, education, and immigration among other issues. In all, the changing demographics and economic environment of the Philadelphia region represented new challenges and extensions of old ones for the next generation of civil rights activists. Yet despite these challenges, the history of Philadelphia’s civil rights movement demonstrated the gains African Americans made.

James Wolfinger is Professor of History and Education at DePaul University. He is the author of Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love and Running the Rails: Capital and Labor in the Philadelphia Transit Industry . (Author information current at time of publication.)

Stanley Keith Arnold is associate professor of history at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of Building the Beloved Community: Philadelphia Interracial Civil Rights Organizations and Race Relations, 1930-1970. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Copyright 2017, Rutgers University

Octavius Catto, 1839-1871

Library of Congress

Octavius Catto was born free on February 22, 1839, in South Carolina. Catto, the son of a preacher, attended many segregated schools before finishing his education at the Institute for Colored Youth. After graduating, Catto began teaching at his alma mater in 1859, using his role as an educator to improve the African American community. Catto’s activism took shape after the Civil War when he served as secretary of the Pennsylvania Equal Rights League and vice president of the State Convention of Colored People in 1865.

Through his activism, Catto sought increased African American voting rights, desegregated educational institutions, and improved public services. After asking the mayor of Philadelphia, Daniel Fox, to consider greater protection for African American voters who were being harassed and intimidated at the polls, Catto was murdered on Election Day, October 10, 1871. He was shot by a white man, later identified as Frank Kelly. Although there were numerous witnesses to the shooting, Kelly was not convicted of a crime.

W.E.B. DuBois, 1868-1963

W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt) DuBois, was born on February 23, 1868, in Massachusetts. After becoming the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University, DuBois completed his classic sociological study of the conditions of African Americans living in the Seventh Ward of Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Negro. In 1905 DuBois founded the Niagara Movement, and then the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1910. Both organizations pursued civil rights and equality for African Americans. DuBois served as editor of The Crisis and used the monthly magazine to help spread the message of the NAACP. The publication was critical of the treatment African Americans received in the United States while serving as a source of information for the community. After a lifelong career dedicated to civil rights and advocacy for African Americans, DuBois became a permanent resident of Ghana. One day after his death on August 28, 1963, hundreds of thousands of protesters marched on Washington, D.C., and held a moment of silence for one of the earliest civil rights leaders in the African American community.

March on Washington

Riding the wave of influential campaigns for civil rights in Birmingham, Alabama, as well as mass demonstrations throughout the country, organizers coordinated the March on Washington to call for jobs and freedom. The march took place on August 28, 1963, with around 300,000 protesters converging on Washington, D.C., where they heard one of the most famous speeches delivered, the “I Have a Dream” address by Martin Luther King Jr. Attending were some of the most prominent civil rights activists in the country, such as Philadelphia’s Cecil B. Moore.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day March, January 19, 2015

These demonstrators turned out on Martin Luther King Jr. Day on January 19, 2015, here heading south on Broad Street toward City Hall. Many protesters carried signs with messages reflecting social issues such as police brutality, a raise of minimum wage, the need for jobs, and the fight against racism. Many of the issues represented at the march were the same as the issues spotlighted at the 1963 March on Washington where King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. (Photograph by Donald D. Groff for the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia)

Protestors outside Girard College

National Archives

Established in 1848 by the bequest of wealthy merchant Stephen Girard, Girard College was intended for white male orphans. After numerous attempts in the 1950s to desegregate the school through the courts, African Americans began organizing civic demonstrations outside the school, as in this photograph from 1965. The call for civil rights included access to quality education, leading to struggles to desegregate schools all over the country. By 1968, African American males began attending Girard College; girls were not admitted until 1984.

Protests Against Discriminatory Hiring Practices

Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries

Protesters gather outside of a school construction site at Thirty-First and Dauphin Streets in Philadelphia’s Strawberry Mansion neighborhood in May 1963. Neighborhood residents joined with civil rights activists to draw attention to discriminatory hiring practices in the building trades and demand inclusion of African Americans.

Cecil B. Moore

Temple University Libraries, Special Collection Research Center

Cecil B. Moore (center, to the left of Martin Luther King Jr.) was a prominent figure in Philadelphia's civil rights movement at a time when the African American population of Philadelphia was steadily growing but racially discriminatory practices still prevailed. Born in West Virginia in 1915, Moore moved to Philadelphia after serving in World War II to study law at Temple University. After graduating in 1953, Moore became a defense attorney who specialized in helping working class African American clients. The number of working-class African Americans in Philadelphia grew steadily in the post-World War II period, but an economic downturn beginning in the 1950s made it difficult for working-class individuals to find jobs or afford any services beyond the necessities. Moore's confrontational and direct approach in the courtroom continued when he entered the public sphere to combat social injustice.

African Americans made up roughly one-third of Philadelphia's population by the 1970s, but racially discriminatory practices routinely affected their lives. Moore's confrontational approach to fighting for the African American community was powerful but controversial. He did not opt for private negotiations or compromises for what he felt was the right course of action. While president of the Philadelphia branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1963 to 1967, he encouraged African Americans to picket and protest for the right to join labor unions, de-segregate businesses, and receive better public education. He complemented these tactics with programs aimed at getting the growing African American community to vote and become more involved with local politics. Moore also restarted the fight to desegregate Girard College in 1964 and acted as the main attorney on the case until 1968, when the Supreme Court ruled that Girard College's attendance policy was unconstitutional. Some criticized Moore's tactics as too aggressive, but they achieved results and acknowledgement of national civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. This photograph of Moore and King was taken during the struggle to desegregate Girard College in 1965.

Moore died from cardiac arrest at age 63 in 1979, but his legacy as a civil rights leader has lived on in numerous acknowledgements around Philadelphia. A section of Columbia Street between Front and Thirty-Third Street was renamed Cecil B. Moore Avenue in 1987, and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) rededicated the Broad Street line subway station on Cecil B. Moore Avenue as the Cecil B. Moore Station.

Bayard Rustin

Bayard Rustin was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and became one of its most famous natives as a prominent activist during the civil rights era of the 1960s. Rustin worked closely with Mahatma Gandhi in India and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., eventually becoming one of his key advisers. As a pacifist, Rustin organized several nonviolent protests, including the 1963 march on Washington. As an openly gay man, Rustin also fought for equal rights for homosexuals in New York during the 1980s. Rustin died in August 1987. In November 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U.S. government’s highest civilian award.

Related Topics

• Philadelphia and the Nation
• Cradle of Liberty

Time Periods

• Twenty-First Century
• Twentieth Century after 1945
• Twentieth Century to 1945
• Nineteenth Century after 1854
• Nineteenth Century to 1854
• North Philadelphia
• Abolitionism
• African American Migration
• American Friends Service Committee
• Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens
• Armstrong Association of Philadelphia
• Baseball: Negro Leagues
• Black Power
• Civil Rights (LGBT)
• Colonization Movement (Africa)
• Columbia Avenue Riot
• Educational Reform
• Fair Housing
• Free African Society
• Free Black Communities
• Girard’s Bequest
• International Peace Mission Movement and Father Divine
• Lawnside, New Jersey
• Martin Luther King Jr. Day
• Mayors (Philadelphia)
• Mother Bethel AME Church: Congregation and Community
• Murder of Octavius Catto
• National Freedom Day
• National Colored Convention Movement
• Opportunities Industrialization Center (OIC)
• Philadelphia Plan
• Public Housing
• Sullivan Principles
• Underground Railroad
• United States Colored Troops
• American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
• Salem (City), New Jersey
• Memorial Day
• Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
• African American Museum in Philadelphia
• Popular Music
• Civil Rights (Persons With Disabilities)
• Black Lives Matter
• Episcopal Church
• Civil Rights (Women)

Related Reading

Arnold, Stanley. Building the Beloved Community: Philadelphia’s Interracial Civil Rights Organizations and Race Relations, 1930-1970 . Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014.

Bauman, John. Public Housing, Race, and Renewal: Urban Planning in Philadelphia, 1920-1974 . Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987.

Canton, David . Raymond Pace Alexander: A New Negro Lawyer Fights for Civil Rights in Philadelphia . Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.

Countryman, Matthew. Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

Levenstein, Lisa. A Movement without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

McKee, Guian. The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Myers, Daisy D. Sticks ’n Stones: The Myers Family in Levittown . York, Pa.: York County Heritage Trust, 2005.

Perkiss, Abigail . Making Good Neighbors: Civil Rights, Liberalism, and Integration in Postwar Philadelphia . Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2014.

Wolfinger, James. Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Related Collections

• Evening Bulletin Clippings Collection Urban Archives Temple University, Philadelphia.
• Fellowship Commission Papers Urban Archives Temple University, Philadelphia.
• Philadelphia Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Records Urban Archives Temple University, Philadelphia.
• Philadelphia Urban League Records Urban Archives Temple University, Philadelphia.

Related Places

• Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection
• Girard College
• Philadelphia Tribune

Backgrounders

Connecting Headlines with History

• Girard College names interim president (WHYY, June 8, 2012)
• Black History Month youth essay contest doubles as way to honor Germantown's 'Unsung Heroes' (WHYY, February 17, 2014)
• Thousands march to 'Reclaim MLK' in Philly (WHYY, January 19, 2015)
• Activists relate to King's shift from dreamer to radical (WHYY, January 16, 2017)
• Civil Rights in a Northern City (Temple University)
• Civil Rights Resources (Historical Society of Pennsylvania)
• Civil Rights: A Movement is Born in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: The Great Experiment)
• Octavius Catto Historical Marker (ExplorePAHistory.com)
• Legacy of Courage: W.E.B. DuBois and the Philadelphia Negro
• African American Baseball in Philadelphia Historical Marker (ExplorePAHistory.com)

Connecting the Past with the Present, Building Community, Creating a Legacy

African American Studies: Primary Sources

Digital collections, microfilm collections.

• Organizations
• Personal Papers
• Selected Digital Collections
• Microfilm A-Z
• Manuscripts
• Archival Collections
• Public Policy Collections
• African Americans and Princeton
• Data and Statistics

Civil Rights during the Bush Administration  Civil Rights during the Bush Administration: Subject File of the White House Office of Records Management, 1989-1993, documents civil rights legislation and other human rights issues from 1989-1993. The collection is organized according to the White House Office of Records Management filing system. The documents cover the following categories: human rights, equality, education, employment, ethnic origin groups, right to housing, voting rights, women, freedoms, civil disturbances, genocide, and ideologies. 

Civil Rights during the Carter Administration, 1977-1981, Part 1: Papers of the Special Assistant for Black Affairs, Section A   Civil Rights during the Carter Administration, 1977-1981, Part 1: Papers of the Special Assistant for Black Affairs, Section A, compiles a large set of documents on significant civil rights issues, events, and personalities during the 1977-1981 presidency of Jimmy Carter. Reflecting the concern by both administration officials and minority group leaders that economic discrimination had become the most important manifestation of racial prejudice, the collection includes as much material on employment and minority business as on social topics like education and housing. 

Civil Rights during the Carter Administration, 1977-1981, Part 1: Papers of the Special Assistant for Black Affairs, Section B   Civil Rights during the Carter Administration, 1977-1981, Part 1: Papers of the Special Assistant for Black Affairs, Section B compiles a large set of documents on significant civil rights issues, events, and personalities during the 1977-1981 presidency of Jimmy Carter. The focus of the documents is on both positive and negative aspects: equal opportunity on the one side, entrenched discrimination on the other. 

Civil Rights during the Carter Administration, 1977-1981, Part 1: Papers of the Special Assistant for Black Affairs, Section C   Civil Rights during the Carter Administration, 1977-1981, Part 1: Papers of the Special Assistant for Black Affairs, Section C brings together a large set of documents on significant civil rights issues, events, and personalities during the 1977-1981 presidency of Jimmy Carter. 

Civil Rights during the Carter Administration, 1977-1981, Part 1: Papers of the Special Assistant for Black Affairs, Section D   Civil Rights During the Carter Administration, 1977-1981, Part 1: Papers of the Special Assistant for Black Affairs, Section D compiles a large set of documents on significant civil rights issues, events, and personalities during Jimmy Carter's presidency. Reflecting the concern by administration officials and minority group leaders that economic discrimination had become the leading manifestation of racial prejudice, the collection includes as much material on employment and minority business as on social topics like education and housing. 

Civil Rights during the Eisenhower Administration, Part 1: White House Central Files, Series A, School Desegregation   Civil Rights During the Eisenhower Administration, Part 1: White House Central Files, Series A: School Desegregation brings together a large amount of material on the civil rights issues, events, and personalities that rose to prominence during the 1953-1961 presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, a critical period in the history of the civil rights movement in the United States. 

Civil Rights during the Johnson Administration, 1963-1969, Part I: The White House Central Files   The purpose of the new series, Civil Rights during the Johnson Administration, is to gather a selection of major documents from three key types of records at the Johnson Library--White House Central Files and Aides Files, the Administrative History of an important agency, and oral histories--and to make these readily available to scholars everywhere. 

Civil Rights during the Johnson Administration, 1963-1969, Part II: Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: Administrative History   Civil Rights during the Johnson Administration, 1963-1969, Part II: Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: Administrative History consists of two sets of files on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library: administrative history files and White House Central Files. The White House Central Files are further broken down into federal correspondence, files of Bill Moyers, and files of George Reedy. The collection contains mainly reports, correspondence, studies, and hearing transcripts. 

Civil Rights during the Johnson Administration, 1963-1969, Part III: Oral Histories   Interviews with a large number of civil rights advocates--including Charles Evers, James Farmer, Aaron Henry, Clarence Mitchell, Joseph Rauh, Bayard Rustin, Roy Wilkins, Andrew Young, and Whitney Young--portray events from a vantage point away from Washington and provide a measure of Johnson's performance by representatives of the civil rights movement which stirred presidential action in the first place. 

Civil Rights during the Johnson Administration, 1963-1969, Part IV. Papers of the White House Conference on Civil Rights   The White House Conference on Civil Rights occurred at a crossroads for the civil rights movement and the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson. Originally conceived in mid-1965 by the president and his advisers at the height of cooperation between civil rights workers and the federal government, the conference was held a year later during deteriorating relations between activists and Washington.  

Civil Rights during the Johnson Administration, 1963-1969, Part V: Records of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission)   Records of the National Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission) include transcripts and background material of Commission meetings and Commission and staff subject [office] files. The addenda includes a copy of the Final Report, copies of Army After Action Reports, and previously restricted material from the Office of Investigations--City Files on Detroit. 

Civil Rights during the Kennedy Administration, 1961-1963, Part 1: The White House Central Files and Staff Files and the President's Office Files   The White House Central Files were designed as a reference service for the president and his staff to document White House activities. The Central Files consist of four major components: the Subject File, the Name File, the Chronological File, and the Confidential File. The Name File is essentially an index to the Subject File. The Chronological File contains only copies of outgoing correspondence.  

Civil Rights during the Kennedy Administration, 1961-1963, Part 2: The Papers of Burke Marshall, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights   This collection includes the following files: Chronological Correspondence File (February 1961-January 1965), Alphabetical Correspondence File and General Correspondence File (January 1961-December 1964), Special Correspondence File (July 1961-September 1964), Telephone Logs (February 1961-May 1965), Civil Rights Division Reports (1961-1964), Alabama File (1962-1964), Mississippi File (1962-1964), School File (1961-1964), Case Documents File, Civil Rights Act of 1964 File, and Subject File. 

Civil Rights during the Kennedy Administration, 1961-1963, Part 3: The Civil Rights Files of Lee C. White   This series deals with both civil rights in general and specific topics such as education, equal employment opportunity, and housing. It also contains material relating to activities of the Subcabinet Group on Civil Rights and meetings of various citizens' groups concerning civil rights. 

Civil Rights during the Nixon Administration, 1969-1974, Part 1: The White House Central Files   The Subject File of the White House Central Files contains correspondence and reports pertaining to the functions and operations of the White House; the federal government; and state, local, and foreign governments.  

Civil Rights Movement and the Federal Government: Records of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, 1958-1973   The Civil Rights Movement and the Federal Government: Records of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, 1958-1973 highlights attempts by the federal government to combat civil rights infringements and violations from 1958 to 1973, with some files dating back to 1918. 

Civil Rights Movement and the Federal Government, Records of the Interstate Commerce Commission on Discrimination in Transportation, 1961-1970   This collection includes more than 300 case files of informal complaints that the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) investigated and in many cases sought to remedy through the Commission's Bureau of Enforcement.  

Civil Rights Movement and the Federal Government: Records of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Police-Community Relations in Urban Areas, 1954-1966   The collection includes reports on police brutality, false arrests, police inaction, race relations, and police training programs in cities including Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and St. Louis. Organizations represented in the documents include the Congress of Racial Equality, NAACP, and American Civil Liberties Union.  

Civil Rights Movement and the Federal Government: Records of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, School Desegregation in the South, 1965-1966 .   This collection brings together a large number of documents on the implementation of "freedom of choice" school desegregation plans in the South and bordering states. 

Civil Rights Movement and the Federal Government: Records of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Special Projects, 1960-1970   This collection brings together a large set of Commission on Civil Rights documents on significant civil rights issues mainly during the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations. 

Department of Justice Classified Subject Files on Civil Rights, 1914-1949   This collection of Department of Justice files on civil rights offers a glimpse into the minds of ordinary men and women, both black and white, in the first half of the twentieth century. Ranging from 1911 until 1943, the documents center broadly on the practice of lynching and specifically upon the thousands of letters written to protest this form of extralegal "punishment." The core of the collection consists of two bundles of letters to the president, covering 1911-1941 and 1921-1940.

Fannie Lou Hamer: Papers of a Civil Rights Activitist, Political Activitist, and Woman   Fannie Lou Hamer was an voting rights activist and civil rights leader. She was instrumental in organizing Mississippi Freedom Summer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and later became the Vice-Chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, attending the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in that capacity. Her plain-spoken manner and fervent belief in the Biblical righteousness of her cause gained her a reputation as an electrifying speaker and constant activist of civil rights.

Fight for Racial Justice and the Civil Rights Congress  The Civil Rights Congress (CRC) was established in 1946 to, among other things, "combat all forms of discrimination against…labor, the Negro people and the Jewish people, and racial, political, religious, and national minorities." The CRC arose out of the merger of three groups with ties to the Communist Party, the International Labor Defense (ILD), the National Negro Congress, and the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties. CRC campaigns helped pioneer many of the tactics that civil rights movement activists would employ in the late 1950s and 1960s. The CRC folded in 1955 under pressure from the U.S. Attorney General and the House Un-American Activities Committee, which accused the organization of being subversive.

James Meredith, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Integration of the University of Mississippi   In the fall of 1962 the college town of Oxford, Mississippi, erupted in violence. At the center of the controversy stood James Meredith, an African American who was attempting to register at the all-white University of Mississippi, known as "Ole Miss." Meredith had the support of the federal government, which insisted that Mississippi honor the rights of all its citizens, regardless of race. Mississippi’s refusal led to a showdown between state and federal authorities and the storming of the campus by a segregationist mob. Two people died and dozens were injured. In the end, Ole Miss, the state of Mississippi, and the nation were forever changed. 

Papers of the NAACP, Part 01: Meetings of the Board of Directors, Records of Annual Conferences, Major Speeches, and Special Reports   This collection consists of six sections: the Minutes of the Board of Directors Meetings, 1909-1950; Monthly Reports of NAACP Officers, 1918-1950; Annual Conference Proceedings, 1910-1950; Proceedings of the Annual Business Meetings, 1912-1950; and Special Correspondence, 1910-1939. 

Papers of the NAACP, Part 03: The Campaign for Educational Equality, Series A: Legal Department and Central Office Records, 1913-1940   The documents in this collection are organized into three sections: Administrative File (three series), Legal File (five series), and Addendum File (five series). Material in the Administrative File deals with discrimination in education, discrimination in teachers' salaries, and other general educational issues. 

Rosa Parks Papers    Approximately 7,500  items  as well  as  2,500 photographs, with the bulk of the material dating from 1955 to 2000, documenting many aspects of Parks's private life and public activism on behalf of civil rights for African Americans. 

President Truman's Committee on Civil Rights   President Truman's Committee on Civil Rights spans the period from late 1946, leading up to President Truman's creation of the President's Committee on Civil Rights, established by Executive Order 9808 of December 6, 1946, through completion of the Committee's final report, "To Secure These Rights," in late 1947. 

Ralph J. Bunche Oral Histories Collection on the Civil Rights Movement   The Ralph J. Bunche Oral History Collection from the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center is a unique resource for the study of the era of the American civil rights movement. Included here are transcriptions of close to 700 interviews with those who made history in the struggles for voting rights, against discrimination in housing, for the desegregation of the schools, to expose racism in hiring, in defiance of police brutality, and to address poverty in the African American communities. 

The Bush Presidency and Development and Debate Over Civil Rights Policy and Legislation   This collection contains materials on civil rights, the development of civil rights policy, and the debate over civil rights legislation during the administration of President George H.W. Bush and during his tenure as vice president. Contents of this collection includes memoranda, talking points, correspondence, legal briefs, transcripts, news summaries, draft legislation, statements of administration policy (SAP’s), case histories, legislative histories and news-clippings covering a broad range of civil rights issues.

• We Were Prepared for the Possibility of Death:" Freedom Riders in the South, 1961  

Freedom Riders were civil rights activists that rode interstate buses into the segregated South to test the United States Supreme Court decision in  Boynton v. Virginia.  Boynton had outlawed racial segregation in the restaurants and waiting rooms in terminals serving buses that crossed state lines. Five years prior to the Boynton ruling, the Interstate Commerce Commission had issued a ruling in Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company that had explicitly denounced the Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of separate but equal in interstate bus travel, but the ICC had failed to enforce its own ruling, and thus Jim Crow travel laws remained in force throughout the South.  Date range: 1961

• The North: Civil Rights and Beyond in Urban America Interactive "living archive" that preserves the stories of the "foot soldiers" of the Civil Rights and other Movements in the North. The first module presents stories from Newark, N.J.

American Civil Liberties Union Archives, 1917-1950

MC001 Seeley G. Mudd Library           Finding Aid

Consists of the records of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), documenting its activities in protecting individual rights under the leadership of Roger Baldwin. Its primary aims have been the defense of free speech and press, separation of church and state, free exercise of religion, due process of law, equal protection of the law, and privacy rights of all citizens. The collection contains primarily correspondence and clippings. Also included are the records of the ACLU’s predecessor organization, the National Civil Liberties Bureau (1917-1920) of the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM) and some material documenting a 1912 Industrial Workers of the World free speech trial.

American Civil Liberties Union Archives, 1950-1995

Documents the activities of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in protecting individual rights between 1950 and 1995. The collection contains correspondence, clippings, court documents, memoranda, printed matter, minutes, reports, briefs, legal files, exhibit materials, and audio-visual materials. Also included are materials from ACLU affiliate organizations, the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee and national office legal department records (1945-1960).

Bayard Rustin Papers  

RECAP Microfilm 11662                       Printed guide (Film B) E185.97.R93 B392    23 reels

Reproduces the papers of noted civil rights leader and political activist Bayard Rustin.  The originals are in the A. Philip Randolph Institute, New York N.Y., which were later transferred by the Institute to the Library of Congress.

Civil Rights and Social Activism in the South, Series 1-3

RECAP Microfilm 12030           Printed guide (FilmB) E185.6.C585 2007          104 reels

Online guide  to Series 1, Parts 1-2            Online guide  to Series 2

Series 1, Civil rights and social activism in Alabama. Part 1, The John L. LeFlore papers, 1926-1976 (15 reels); Part 2: Records of the Non-Partisan Voters League, 1956-1987 (29 reels) -- Series 2, The Legal Battle for Civil Rights in Alabama. Part 1, Vernon Z. Crawford reords, 1958-1978 (6 reels); Part 2: Selctions from the Blacksher, Menefee & Stein records (37 reels) -- Series 3: James A. Dombrowski and the Southern Conference Educational Fund (17 reels).

Civil Rights During the Bush administration: subject file of the White House Office of Records Management, 1989-1993

RECAP Microfilm 12460          Printed Guide: (FilmB) E185.615 .B87 2008     23 reels

"Microfilmed from the holdings of the George Bush Presidential Library, College Station, Texas."  “The documents reproduced in this publication are records of the Bush Administration, 1989-1993, in the custody of the National Archives."

Civil rights During the Carter administration, 1977-1981

RECAP Microfilm 12451          Printed guide (FilmB) E185.615 .C3518 2006 

Part I, Sections A-D  

Reproduces document files collected by the office of Louis E. Martin, special assistant to the president, whose primary focus was on civil rights issues and minority affairs. Documents include internal White House memoranda, correspondence between White House and federal agency officials, government reports, invitation lists for major events, correspondence from individuals and organizations, and newspaper articles and editorials.

Civil Rights During the Eisenhower Administration

RECAP Microfilm 12450          Printed guide (FilmB) E185.61.C483 2006          14 reels

Part 1. White House central files.  Series A, School desegregation.

Civil Rights During the Kennedy Administration, 1961-1963

RECAP Microfilm 05859                     Printed guide (FilmB) JC599.U5 C59                47 reels

A collection from the holdings of the John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts. Part 1. The White House Central Files and Staff Files and the President’s office Files.  Part 2. The Papers of Burke Marshall, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights.

Civil Rights During the Johnson Administration, 1963-1969

RECAP Microfilm 05445                     Printed guide (FilmB) JK1717.L38          69 reels

Part 1. White House Central Files.  Part 2. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Administrative History.  Part 3. Oral Histories.  Part 4. Records of the White House Conference on Civil Rights, 1965-1966.  Part 5. Records of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission).

Civil Rights During the Nixon Administration, 1969-1974   

RECAP Microfilm 09172                     Printed guide (FilmB) E185.615. C587          46 reels

Part 1. White House Central Files.

Detroit Urban League Papers, 1916-1950, at the University of Michigan

RECAP Microfilm 09607                     Printed guide (FilmB) F574.D49 N454          35 reels

Fannie Lou Hamer Papers, 1966-1978

RECAP Microfilm 11839                       Printed guide (Film B) E185.97.H35 A3 2005a          17 reels

Noted civil rights activist and co-chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. 

FBI file on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

RECAP Microfilm 09178          Printed guide (FilmB) E185.61 .F355          2 reels

Franklin D. Roosevelt and Race Relations

RECAP Microfilm 12390                     Printed guide: (FilmB) E806 .F6917 2008          18 reels

This is a collection of essential materials for the study of the early development of the Civil Rights Movement--concerned with the issues of lynching, segregation, race riots, and employment discrimination.

Papers of the Civil Rights Congress

Microfilm 11925                     Printed guide (FilmB) E185.61.C59 1988          125 reels

Part 1. Case Files.  Part 2. Files of William Patterson and the National Office.  Part 3. Publications.  Part 4. Communist Party USA files.  Part 5. Citizens Emergency Defense Conference.

“The Civil Rights Congress (CRC) was established in 1946, and fought for the protection of the civil rights and liberties of African Americans and suspected communists primarily through litigation, political agitation, and the mobilization of public sentiment.  African American lawyer and Communist leader William Patterson served as executive secretary of the organization throughout its existence.”

Papers of the Congress of Racial Equality, 1941-1967

RECAP Microfilm 04276           Printed guide (FilmB) Z1361.N39 M46 1980     49 reels

Founded in 1942 by a group of interracial pacifists, CORE was one of the most important national organizations of the African American freedom movement.

Papers of the Congress of Racial Equality: Addendum, 1944-1968

RECAP Microfilm 04562                     Printed Guide (FilmB) E185.61.P36

Papers of the NAACP

RECAP Microfilm 05354                     Printed guide (FilmB) Z1361.N39 G84          1001+ reels

Organization records of America’s oldest and largest civil rights organization.

President Truman’s Commission on Civil Rights

RECAP Microfilm 05573                     Printed guide (FilmB) E813.J84           10 reels

Public Housing, Racial Policies, and Civil Rights : The Inter-Group Relations Branch of the Federal Public Housing Administration, 1936-1963

RECAP Microfilm 0000      Printed guide: NA           31 reels

Records of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1954-1970

RECAP Microfilm 10096                     Printed guide (FilmB) E185.61.S687      61 reels

pt. 1. Records of the President’s office (21 reels) -- pt. 2. Records of the Executive Director and Treasurer (22 reels) -- pt. 3. Records of the Public Relations Dept. (10 reels) -- pt. 4. Records of the Program Dept. (29 reels).

Southern Civil Rights Litigation Records for the 1960s

RECAP Microfilm 05448                    Printed guide (FilmB) KF4756.A1 G84 or (SF) KF4756.A1 G84     170 reels

Contains the records of major civil rights cases from the archives of the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Lawyers Constitution Defense Committee, and individual attorneys.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Papers, 1959-1972

Microfilm 04530           Printed guide (FilmB) E185.5.xS78          73 reels

Covers the activities of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) founded in 1960 at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. The organization was known for staging nonviolent protests and sit-ins. 

      See also   Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of California, The Movement

Microfilm S00846        Underground press collection. Listing of contents ((Film B) Z6951.U4)

William H. Hastie Papers.  Part 2. Civil Rights, Organizational, and Private Activities

RECAP Microfilm 11824                       Printed guide (FilmB) KF373.H38A25          42 reels

Attorney William Henry Hastie was the first African American appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit by President Truman in 1949.  Part 2 of the collection documents his activities as a civil rights lawyer, educator, and judge.  Part I, covering his opinions are available in the Federal Reporter in print, LexisNexis and Westlaw (online in both the academic and law school versions).

• << Previous: Home
• Next: FBI Files >>
• Last Updated: Dec 20, 2023 3:51 PM
• URL: https://libguides.princeton.edu/aasps

Top of page

Collection Civil Rights History Project

Youth in the civil rights movement.

At its height in the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement drew children, teenagers, and young adults into a maelstrom of meetings, marches, violence, and in some cases, imprisonment. Why did so many young people decide to become activists for social justice? Joyce Ladner answers this question in her interview with the Civil Rights History Project, pointing to the strong support of her elders in shaping her future path: “The Movement was the most exciting thing that one could engage in.  I often say that, in fact, I coined the term, the ‘Emmett Till generation.’  I said that there was no more exciting time to have been born at the time and the place and to the parents that movement, young movement, people were born to… I remember so clearly Uncle Archie who was in World War I, went to France, and he always told us, ‘Your generation is going to change things.’” 

Several activists interviewed for the Civil Rights History Project were in elementary school when they joined the movement. Freeman Hrabowski was 12 years old when he was inspired to march in the Birmingham Children’s Crusade of 1963. While sitting in the back of church one Sunday, his ears perked up when he heard a man speak about a march for integrated schools. A math geek, Hrabowski was excited about the possibility of competing academically with white children. While spending many days in prison after he was arrested at the march, photographs of police and dogs attacking the children drew nationwide attention. Hrabowski remembers that at the prison, Dr. King told him and the other children, “What you do this day will have an impact on children yet unborn.” He continues, “I’ll never forget that. I didn’t even understand it, but I knew it was powerful, powerful, very powerful.” Hrabowski went on to become president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where he has made extraordinary strides to support African American students who pursue math and science degrees.

As a child, Marilyn Luper Hildreth attended many meetings of the NAACP Youth Council in Oklahoma City because her mother, the veteran activist Clara Luper, was the leader of this group. She remembers, “We were having an NAACP Youth Council meeting, and I was eight years old at that time. That’s how I can remember that I was not ten years old. And I – we were talking about our experiences and our negotiation – and I suggested, made a motion that we would go down to Katz Drug Store and just sit, just sit and sit until they served us.” This protest led to the desegregation of the drug store’s lunch counter in Oklahoma City.  Mrs. Hildreth relates more stores about what it was like to grow up in a family that was constantly involved in the movement.

While some young people came into the movement by way of their parents’ activism and their explicit encouragement, others had to make an abrupt and hard break in order to do so, with some even severing familial ties. Joan Trumpauer Mulholland was a young white girl from Arlington, Virginia, when she came to realize the hypocrisy of her segregated church in which she learned songs such as “Jesus loves the little children, red and yellow, black and white.” When she left Duke University to join the movement, her mother, who had been raised in Georgia, “thought I had been sort of sucked up into a cult… it went against everything she had grown up and believed in.  I can say that a little more generously now than I could have then.” Phil Hutchings’ father was a lifetime member of the NAACP, but couldn’t support his son when he moved toward radicalism and Black Power in the late 1960s. Hutchings reflects on the way their different approaches to the struggle divided the two men, a common generational divide for many families who lived through those times:  “He just couldn’t go beyond a certain point.  And we had gone beyond that… and the fact that his son was doing it… the first person in the family who had a chance to complete a college education. I dropped out of school for eleven years… He thought I was wasting my life.  He said, ‘Are you … happy working for Mr. Castro?’”

Many college student activists sacrificed or postponed their formal education, but they were also picking up practical skills that would shape their later careers. Michael Thelwell remembers his time as a student activist with the Nonviolent Action Group, an organization never officially recognized by Howard University and a precursor to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC): “I don’t think any of us got to Howard with any extensive training in radical political activism. By that I mean, how do you write a press conference [release]? How you get the attention of the press? How do you conduct a nonviolent protest? How do you deal with the police? How do you negotiate or maneuver around the administration? We didn’t come with that experience.” Thelwell’s first job after he graduated from college was to work for SNCC in Washington, D.C., as a lobbyist.

Similar reflections about young people in the freedom struggle are available in other collections in the Library.  One such compelling narrative can be found in the webcast of the 2009 Library of Congress lecture by journalist and movement activist, Tracy Sugarman, entitled, “We Had Sneakers, They Had Guns: The Kids Who Fought for Civil Rights in Mississippi.”    As is readily apparent from that lecture and the previous examples, drawn from the Civil Rights History Project collection, the movement completely transformed the lives of young activists.  Many of them went on to great success as lawyers, professors, politicians, and leaders of their own communities and other social justice movements. They joined the struggle to not only shape their own futures, but to also open the possibilities of a more just world for the generations that came behind them.

National Museum of African American History & Culture

• Plan Your Visit
• Group Visits
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Accessibility Options
• Sweet Home Café
• Museum Store
• Museum Maps
• Our Mobile App
• Search the Collection
• Initiatives
• Museum Centers
• Publications
• Digital Resource Guide
• The Searchable Museum
• Exhibitions
• Freedmen's Bureau Search Portal
• Early Childhood
• Talking About Race
• Digital Learning
• Strategic Partnerships
• Ways to Give
• Internships & Fellowships
• Today at the Museum
• Upcoming Events
• Ongoing Tours & Activities
• Past Events
• Host an Event at NMAAHC
• About the Museum
• The Building
• Meet Our Curators
• Founding Donors
• Corporate Leadership Councils
• NMAAHC Annual Reports

How Fannie Lou Hamer Challenged a Nation

Born on October 6, 1917, the youngest of 20 children, legendary community organizer and civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer (née Townsend) grew up in the racial oppression and terror of post-Reconstruction Mississippi. Her parents were sharecroppers who picked cotton for a white plantation owner, an exploitative arrangement that kept the family in extreme poverty.

At the age of six, Hamer joined her family in the cotton fields between classes at the schoolhouse provided for sharecroppers’ children. By the age of 12, she was forced to work on the plantation full time. Though her schooling was limited, Hamer educated herself by diligently studying her Bible. In church, she also fell in love with singing. Her amazing voice and formidable faith both became defining features of her later activism.

In 1944, she married a man named Perry Hamer. Together, they worked on the plantation for the next 18 years. The couple wanted to have a family, but in 1961 a white doctor subjected Hamer to a hysterectomy without her knowledge or consent. This type of forced sterilization was so common that the Black community had a name for the procedure: a “Mississippi appendectomy.”

This was one of many unjust experiences that led Hamer to join the Civil Rights Movement. In 1962, she attended a meeting hosted by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). It was a transformative event in her life.

“I had never heard, until 1962, that Black people could register and vote,” Hamer said. She was 44 years old and was determined to exercise the right she had so long been denied.

The following day, she joined 17 of her neighbors on a SNCC bus to Indianola, Mississippi, where they attempted to register to vote. Officials blocked most of the group but allowed Hamer to fill out an application and take a literacy test. She failed.

On the drive back, the bus was stopped and the driver was arrested for operating a bus that “was too yellow.” While the passengers were held on the bus, Hamer sang spirituals like “This Little Light of Mine” and “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”

Upon arriving home that night, Hamer was confronted by the plantation owner, who ordered her to withdraw her voter registration. She refused — and left the plantation that evening, never to return. “They kicked me off the plantation, they set me free,” she said. “It’s the best thing that could happen. Now I can work for my people.”

Hamer stepped up her activism for SNCC. She became involved in relief work, distributing donated food and clothes to the poorest residents of the Mississippi Delta. Having spent her entire life in poverty, she understood that racial justice was tied to economic justice.

Hamer was becoming well known for her organizing, which made her a target. On September 10, 1962, white supremacists sprayed 16 bullets into the house where she was staying. But the attack failed to scare her off. “The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.”

Fannie Lou Hamer with boxing legend Muhammad Ali at the Johnson Publishing Company office

On June 9, 1963, Hamer, now a SNCC field secretary, and several other activists were traveling back from a voter registration program in Charleston, South Carolina, when they decided to stop and eat at a bus station in Winona, Mississippi. In a brave act of civil disobedience, Hamer and a few of her companions sat at the station’s whites-only lunch counter.

The police were called, and Hamer and five others were arrested and taken to the Winona jailhouse. There, the women were brutally beaten over four terrifying days, leaving Hamer with severe injuries to her eyes, legs, and kidneys that would affect her for the rest of her life.

Yet, once again, Hamer was unshakable. She would later say that the beating had made her “as hard as metal.” She went on the road, leading SNCC meetings and visiting Black churches where she encouraged parishioners to vote. She became a gifted orator who would stir audiences with her passionate, unrehearsed speeches and gospel songs. Journalist Tracy Sugarman observed, “[Hamer’s] magnificent voice rolled through the chapel as she enlisted the Biblical ranks of martyrs and heroes to summon these folk to the Freedom banner.”

Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker at the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party convention

In 1964, Hamer helped organize the Freedom Summer Project, and cofounded the racially integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to challenge the state’s Democratic Party, which was dominated by white segregationists.

That effort culminated at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, where Hamer argued that, because Blacks were not allowed to vote in Mississippi, the state’s Democratic delegates were not legally elected. In a fiery speech, she pushed the party to seat the MFDP delegates and coined the now iconic phrase, “I’m just sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

Fearing that seating the MFDP delegates would cost him white southern votes, President Lyndon Johnson preempted Hamer’s remarks with an unscheduled televised press conference from the White House. Ironically, the television networks rebroadcast Hamer’s testimony during prime time, bringing her words to a far larger audience. Recounting her experiences of racial prejudice, Hamer exposed the lie at the center of American democracy. “Is this America,” she asked with tears in her eyes, “the land of the free and the home of the brave, where … our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings?”

While the Democratic Party refused to seat the MFDP, the convention brought Hamer to national prominence. It also set in motion a series of events that led to the passage of the 1965 Civil Rights Act, which banned local laws like the literacy test that had prevented Hamer from exercising her right to vote just a few years earlier.

That same year, Hamer announced her candidacy for the Mississippi House of Representatives in a challenge to white segregationist James Whitten. When the Democratic Party refused to allow her on the official ballot, an estimated 60,000 Black voters wrote in her name on “Freedom Ballots.”

Hamer also began to focus on building economic power as a path toward political power. In 1969, she launched the Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC) to increase economic opportunities for poor African Americans in the Delta. At its peak, the FFC was one of the largest employers in Sunflower County, Mississippi, and fed hungry people of all races. And in 1971, Hamer helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus to recruit, train, and support women to run for government office. That same year, she gave one of her most famous speeches at the University of Wisconsin, telling the predominantly white audience that “… your freedom is shackled in chains to mine. And until I am free, you are not free either.”

Over the next few years, Hamer’s activism waned as her health declined due to heart disease and breast cancer. She died on March 14, 1977. The mourners at her funeral included legends of the Civil Rights Movement, such as Ella Baker and Stokely Carmichael, and many notable politicians. Fittingly, the service concluded with a rendition of Hamer’s favorite song: “This Little Light of Mine.”

Funeral program for Fannie Lou Hamer, March 20, 1977

The National Museum of African American History and Culture is proud to celebrate the life and legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer. Members can immerse themselves in Hamer’s powerful story by listening to the Smithsonian Folkways African American Legacy Series’ re-release of Hamer’s 1963 album Songs My Mother Taught Me. The only known publicly available recording of Hamer singing, this GRAMMY-nominated compilation features raw recordings of Hamer singing spirituals, many of which became civil rights anthems, and monologues about her childhood and experiences as a leader of the Civil Rights Movement.

To learn more about Fannie Lou Hamer and other important figures and events in African American history, please visit our online Searchable Museum today. This groundbreaking—and 2022 CIO 100 Award–winning—initiative brings innovative, immersive digital experiences and evocative content directly into the homes of supporters like you.   

Subtitle here for the credits modal.

Top of page

Searching African American Newspapers in Chronicling America

February 28, 2023

Posted by: Malea Walker

Share this post:

Robin Pike, Head, Digital Collection Services Section in the Serial and Government Publications Division, conducted the following interviews with Errol Somay (Library of Virginia) in Richmond, VA, and Brian Irby (Arkansas State Archives), in Little Rock, AR.

Chronicling America* has grown its collection of newspapers by and for African Americans under the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) through the contributions of state partners . It currently holds African American titles spanning over 100 years from 1829 to 1963, with the bulk of available issues from the 1880s to the 1940s. Freemen (African Americans who were never enslaved) and recently emancipated people wrote the earliest newspapers, and prominent religious, political, community members, and career journalists wrote later newspapers. When reading about relevant topics and time periods, it is important to compare versions of the stories in the mainstream press with articles from the African American press.

The following interviews with NDNP partners from Arkansas and Virginia highlight three titles that provide details about the early civil rights movement, the end of school segregation, and post-Civil War Reconstruction in Richmond, VA, the former Confederate capital. We conclude with search strategies for users. More information can be found in this new guide, African American Newspapers .

Can you tell me about the significance of the newspaper titles by African Americans that Arkansas has included in Chronicling America?

Many of the African American newspaper titles at the Arkansas State Archives are short runs of scattered issues. In our current project phase, we digitized 11 titles , including a miscellaneous reel that contains 10 titles. Though these titles are incomplete, these newspapers are significant in that they provide a snapshot of communities that were largely invisible in the white press. Black Arkansans needed a way to record the daily lives and events that were important to their communities. They reported on church events, births, deaths, community concerts, sales of Black-owned businesses, honor roll at the local elementary school, etc. The goal of including all of these newspapers was simple: representation.

The most significant paper we have digitized is the Arkansas State Press (1941-1959). L.C. and Daisy Bates moved to Little Rock to establish a newspaper. Using printing equipment in the basement of the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, located in the heart of Little Rock’s thriving 9th Street African American business district, the newspaper covered state and national events. While the State Press was not the first paper published by Black Arkansans, it is the most significant given its longevity and its pointed coverage of the civil rights movement. Previous Black-owned-and-operated papers rarely expressed views that would upset the racial order that prevailed in Arkansas’s segregated society. L.C. Bates, along with his wife, co-editor Daisy Bates, changed how civil rights news was covered by focusing on the perspectives of those most affected. While other Black newspapers of the time shied away from reporting on injustices in Little Rock and Arkansas, the State Press covered it head on, which ultimately led to its demise in 1959.

The paper became nationally known during the Central High Crisis. Complying with the U.S. Supreme Court’s mandate that all public schools desegregate, Little Rock’s Central High began the process of admitting African American students in 1957, beginning with nine students. As the students met on a street corner on September 4 for the first day of school, they found screaming protestors demanding that Black students not be allowed into the school. Governor Orval Faubus mobilized the Arkansas National Guard to surround the school to prevent Black students from entering the building. In response, President Dwight Eisenhower took away control of the Arkansas National Guard from the governor and ordered the Guard to allow the students to enter the building. Throughout the crisis, Daisy Bates took an active role coordinating the students’ activities and reporting about their experiences as the first African American students to desegregate the city’s schools in the Arkansas State Press .

What have you have learned about these newspapers through the process of digitization?

Many African American newspapers do not survive in Arkansas prior to the 1950s. Since the newspapers were often small operations running in small towns, they left very little trace about the people that ran the paper and the dates they were published. With an obvious gap in our coverage of African American communities, we also have a gap in Arkansas’s history, inhibiting our ability to understand how these newspapers functioned within the communities and about the communities themselves.

Despite these challenges, we recognize the value of the newspapers and their ability to record stories that were overlooked by the dominant, white press. For instance, the Forrest City Herald (1896-18??) with only a few surviving issues from 1896, gives us insight into what the local African American community in Forrest City deemed valuable. On March 14, 1896, the paper reported the following news items: The Bible Church of the CME church in Forrest City was well attended and many attendees had good thoughts about the scripture reading. Miss Annie B. Fitzpatrick made many warm friends while visiting at Forrest City’s schools. Lugenia Bell, a new teacher, was expected to teach in one of the schools soon. Her father, Levi Bell, the paper reports “made great sacrifices to send her to school.” Though these events seem small, perhaps not even news worthy by today’s standards, they provide insights to Forrest City as a community that emphasized church, education, family, and friends.

How have these newspapers been used for research?

Though our African American newspapers are a recent addition to Chronicling America, the newspapers have been available in our collection at the Arkansas State Archives. In our experience working with the public, genealogical research has been a primary focus. So often, researchers have only a name to begin their research. They may not have birth and death dates and they may only have a vague idea of where their ancestor lived and when. The ability to keyword search in Chronicling America enables researchers to have a better ability to narrow their focus and to find out key details of their ancestor’s lives.

We have promoted Arkansas’s newspapers in Chronicling America to teachers and librarians. We have also been actively encouraging middle and high school students to use newspapers in Chronicling America. The use of primary source materials is important to understanding the subjects they are learning about in class. Using Chronicling America, these topics are no longer dry accounts in their textbooks, but are active, living stories that can bring about a greater appreciation for these topics. Through collaborative partnerships, word-of-mouth, and targeted marketing efforts, we hope that our African American newspapers will become a vital resource in learning about the past.

Is there anything else you would like to share about these newspapers or the Arkansas newspaper project? Where can readers find you online?

Our team has been encouraged by the public interest in the project and the pride that people take in sharing content from their local newspapers. Until recently, researchers have been limited in their ability to travel to our facility and the amount of time it takes to sift through newspaper microfilm. Now, with free access from any internet-connected device, more people have the ability to become researchers.

Through the process of digitizing Arkansas’s historic newspapers, we often ask ourselves–how do we know what we know about the past? We learn that to know anything about the past, we are tied to the primary sources. When an entire community is excluded, large gaps in that story distort our perspective of the past. Our goal, as a state participant in the NDNP project, is to find those papers and to fill in those gaps.

You can read more about Arkansas’s involvement in the National Digital Newspaper Program on our project website . Every Thursday our team takes over the Arkansas State Archives’s Facebook , Twitter , and Instagram accounts to post new and interesting content from the historic newspaper headlines.

Can you tell me about the significance of the newspaper titles by African Americans that Virginia has included in Chronicling America?

One of the key facts of the extant record of African American newspapers available to researchers is that many were not collected by local repositories. White-dominated organizations either did not receive copies or did not think it important enough to archive. However, the Richmond Planet survives as a nearly complete collection at the Library of Virginia (LVA). I have theorized that the savvy publisher of the Planet might have given the Governor a gift subscription that was moved over to the LVA for processing.

There are few newspaper titles in the 287-year history of Virginia newspaper publishing more historically significant than the Richmond Planet , which began in 1883. John Mitchell, Jr., one of the most important Virginians most people don’t know about, served as its publisher and “Fighting Editor” for almost 45 years, from 1885 to his death in 1929.

Given the scattered holdings of other African American papers, the LVA was excited to preserve, microfilm, and digitize the Richmond Planet and make the weekly publication fully text-searchable on Chronicling America. Mitchell’s life is the stuff of movies, standing tall in the face of crushing Jim Crow laws while doing what he could to protect his fellow African Americans from societal abuse and even lynching. Yet alongside Mitchell’s coverage of serious issues, he also included space, often on the front page, celebrating Richmond’s Black community and highlighting the accomplishments of individuals within that community.

For decades, the Planet had a singular voice, that of John Mitchell, Jr. who was a dogged believer in societal uplift but also did not hesitate to show in graphic detail the horrors of white supremacy. For example, he posted a list of all reported lynchings throughout the South, complete with a haunting faded half-tone image.

The papers should teach us the power of what I will call the alternative press. Read a story in the “paper of record,” and then read all about it in the Richmond Planet and you might read an entirely different story.

LVA has sponsored both regional and national African American genealogical society conferences, during which we educate people about the Planet . Many come to the conference already knowing about the importance of the title.

Is there anything else you would like to share about these newspapers or the Virginia newspaper project? Where can readers find you online?

Patrons may access digitized newspapers published in Virginia through Chronicling America (724,000 pages), as well as the LVA’s Virginia Newspaper Program’s freely accessible database Virginia Chronicle, which houses over 3 million pages of Virginia and West Virginia newspapers.

Search Strategies

The fastest way to find African American newspapers in Chronicling America is to go to the “ All Digitized Newspapers 1777-1963 ” tab and select “African American” in the “Ethnicity” dropdown menu. This list of newspaper titles is populated using the subject headings added by catalogers; at the time of this blog post, it currently contains 246 titles from 35 states and Washington, DC, though we are continuously adding new titles.

A researcher can then note the newspaper titles they want to search in, and then go to the Advanced Search tab and select only those titles. Select multiple titles to search at the same time by clicking while pressing the “Ctrl” key (on Windows) or “Cmd” key (on Mac).

In the title list , you will notice that some newspapers have a lot of issues while some only have one or a few issues. In 2022, the Library of Congress digitized and began putting online a microfilm collection of scattered African American newspaper issues collected from across the country in 1947. In February 2023, we added over 2,400 pages from Arkansas, California, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Washington, DC to this collection. Titles with a significant number of issues include the Oakland Sunshine and the Western Outlook from California; L’union from Louisiana; the Weekly Anglo-African from New York; the New Age from Oregon; the State Journal from Pennsylvania; and the Leader and the National Leader from Washington, DC. Mr. Somay’s and Mr. Irby’s statements that major institutions typically didn’t collect African American newspapers is reflected in this collection of scattered issues. In the present day, this collection provides a representative sample of Black newspapers from across the country, and provides glimpses into people’s lives and communities, rather than the whole story. To find coverage of a national story, you may need to look in the scattered issues of several newspapers.

By clicking on the name of the newspaper, you are taken to the title record for the newspaper, which includes a title essay. The title essay is written by each state partner and provides additional background information about the newspaper, its editor(s), information about the community it provided news to, and major events or themes the newspaper covered. For the collection of scattered issues, we have provided a short summary of the microfilm collection and will be working to provide additional contextual information about groups of related newspapers in the future.

As a search strategy, when looking for events or terms, it helps to use historic terms that were used in the era in which the newspaper was printed. These terms may not be in use today because they have fallen out of fashion or because they are considered racist or insensitive. We recommend that a researcher first browse the newspaper title to learn what terms may have been used in both African American newspapers and the prominent white newspapers for the period they are interested in to find terms to help their search.

More information about the Library’s African American newspapers can be found in this newly-published guide. Additional research topics on prominent African Americans and events related to Black history can be found in the Topics in Chronicling America .

*The  Chronicling America  historic newspapers online collection is a product of the  National Digital Newspaper Program  and jointly sponsored by the Library and the  National Endowment for the Humanities .

Follow Chronicling America on Twitter  @ChronAmLOC

Click here to subscribe  to  Headlines & Heroes –it’s free!

See All Comments

Add a Comment Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

‘We Should… Remove Blacks from This Planet’: White Students Sent Messages Fantasizing About Eliminating African-Americans While School Leaders ‘Turned a Blind Eye’ and Ignored Rampant Racism, Lawsuit Says

A Colorado middle school principal’s effort to extricate himself from a civil rights lawsuit that alleges he shares responsibility for racial discrimination against Black and biracial students at his school was denied by a U.S. district judge.

Castle Rock Middle School Principal John Veit argued that he is entitled to qualified immunity as a government official against a legal claim that he “failed to prevent a conspiracy” among white students in the school to deprive Black students of equal protection and access to education under federal civil rights laws.

The 2023 lawsuit , brought by three families against Veit and the Douglas County School District, detailed horrific instances of harassment, racial slurs and threats against their children. They claimed a pervasive pattern of racism and bullying existed at the district’s schools and alleged that school and district staff were aware of the discrimination and harm students faced but did not take sufficient action to stop it.

The complaint recounted how Black and biracial students, including four plaintiffs (identified as J.G., N.G., C.M., and D.C.) at Douglas County High School and Castle Rock Middle School “were regularly called the N-word, threatened with violence like lynchings and shootings, subjected to various racial and ethnic cleansing jokes, repeatedly called monkey and similar degrading epithets, exposed to ridicule and other forms of harassment by their peers, and made by teachers to argue the benefits of Jim Crow laws.”

In his ruling last week, U.S. District Judge John Kane said a conspiracy as defined by federal law among the plaintiffs’ student peers was convincingly established by allegations in the complaint which “show a concerted effort by students to humiliate, terrorize, and alienate” Black and biracial students.

The judge highlighted some of their allegations, including:

“One female told four other students in front of C.M. that she hoped another Black student wouldn’t join the class because ‘we already have one n-gger in this class.’”

“One student called D.C. ‘monkey boy’ as other students laughed along.”

“Students asked J.G. whether he picked the cotton his shirt was spun from. Another student threw cotton balls at J.G., laughing at him.”

“Students took pictures of C.M. while he was using the restroom without his knowledge and circulated it widely on the internet.”

“At the end of Black History Month, a student approached J.G. and told him that his month was over, and he could go back to wherever he came from.”

The complaint also alleges that race-based harassment of three students took place through a Snapchat group of more than 100 students in which “racially offensive comments and threats of killings were commonplace” and that students often tagged Black students “so that they would be sure to see the vile messages.”

In one such message, Kane noted, “Two students spoke about eliminating African-Americans from the planet with one proclaiming that we should j[ust] remove Blacks from this planet” and bring back [the] Holocaust.”

The judge said that “without a doubt the complaint sufficiently alleges the existence of a … conspiracy and Mr. Veit’s knowledge of that conspiracy.”

He cited plaintiffs’ claims that a student forwarded Veit an email about the students’ racist conduct and that after receiving the email, “Mr. Veit acknowledged he knew students of color were experiencing such discrimination.”

“I find Mr. Veit’s motion [to dismiss] to be groundless and consequently deny it,” Kane wrote.

Attorney Iris Halpern, who represents the families, said that the decision by the court “should serve as a warning to other school officials across the country: If you know about systemic racist bullying and harassment, and having the power to stop it, fail to do so, then you are in violation of our federal civil rights laws and can be held individually accountable,” reported CPR News. “Turning a blind eye or burying your head in the sand is not going to cut it.”

“We are happy the judge ruled that everyone who played a major role in the horrific racist harassment my children suffered can be held accountable,” said Lacey Ganzy, mother of Jeramiah Ganzy [J.G in the lawsuit], who was 14 when he faced racism and bullying at Castle Rock Middle School. “We look forward to this case moving along and to our ultimate day in court.”

Ganzy said she pursued the court case last year after the school district seemed indifferent to the complaints of her son as well as of her daughter Nevaeh, who then attended Douglas County High School. Nevaeh testified in April 2023 at a school board meeting that she was regularly called racial slurs and was asked by a teacher to debate in favor of Jim Crow laws during class, the Douglas County News-Press reported .

The Ganzy family has since moved to another, “more diverse” school district. Two of the other student plaintiffs switched to online schooling last year but have since returned.

In the spring of 2023, the Douglas County School District was facing pressure to respond to the results of a school climate sur vey, which showed large gaps between student groups along racial lines, reported CPR News.

The survey showed 71 percent of white students felt they belonged at their school, while only 56 percent of Black students did. Fourteen percent of white students said they’d been bullied on school property during the past 12 months, while 24 percent of Black students did. And crucially, 41 percent of Black students were disciplined versus 16 percent of white students.

When school district superintendent Erin Kane was asked what type of training was happening to prevent racism from occurring and to alleviate systemic racism, she responded that the district was working on training in a multi-year implementation plan.

At a school board meeting in May 2023, Kane said, “I want to express again how very sorry I and all of the district are that we had family experience racial remarks made by another student. Racism in any form is unacceptable at DCSD and a direct policy violation,” adding that multiple students had been suspended.

Other officials said Castle Rock Middle School students had participated in harassment and bullying presentations and that district leaders were working with the school on other behavior strategies for next year.

Ganzy was not impressed.

“I want them to be taught about Black history,” she said. “I want them to have absolutely no tolerance for any sort of discrimination of any kind. I want teachers to be actively looking for this kind of discrimination and to know how to better deal with it.”

According to the complaint, filed in August 2023, each student made complaints about their mistreatment to teachers and school staff, but district staff either didn’t respond at all or didn’t take the reports seriously. 

Only one student involved in the group chat was disciplined, and staff did not follow through on creating safety plans for students to return to in-person learning. The complaint also notes that the district hasn’t implemented anti-discrimination training for staff or students. The lawsuit demands “an injunction ordering Defendants to cease and desist from engaging in unlawful practices that deprive themselves and other students of color from accessing equal educational opportunities” and a jury trial to determine economic, compensatory, and punitive damages.

This spring Ganzy and her teenage children advocated at the Colorado State Capitol for passage of a new law that seeks to prevent harassment and discrimination in Colorado schools by improving reporting systems and training staff, reported CBS News .

The bill, SB 23-296 , which passed in June, “actually is everything we’ve been advocating for,” said Ganzy. “It just makes sense. It just says, ‘Hey, if you do this there’s consequences for your actions, and there’s education behind it.’”

Ganzy said the bill provides the clear distinction between a hate crime and bullying that she’s been pushing for. Schools had until July to begin implementing training.

Douglas County School District said in a statement in June that while their anti-discrimination and harassment polices “largely track with requirements” in the new legislation, they are “reviewing board policies in light of the new law to further advance the safety and well-being of all students.”

Of the ongoing lawsuit, the district said, “DCSD disputes that administrators either facilitated or permitted harassment and discrimination of African-American students to continue at school or otherwise tolerated a racially hostile educational environment. Numerous reasonable responsive actions were taken within the extent of school administrator authority.”

Last week, Judge Kane ordered both parties in the case to call his office on Aug. 13 to set up a scheduled hearing.

Related Stories

‘I Will Kill You!’: New Jersey Transit Driver Arrested After Choking Commuter to the Brim of His Death Over ‘Spitting’ On Bus In Shocking Video

‘I’ll Show You My Problem!’: Florida Man Angry Over Handicap Parking Shoots Driver to Death Then Threatens to Gun Down Wife When She Runs to His Aid

‘They Punching On People!’: Texas Cop Seen Hitting Multiple Children In Unprovoked Attack at a Pool Party. Victims’ Families Demand An Arrest, Not Just Termination