1F Theme 2 - The quest for civil rights, 1917-80

The Enquiry Frame

This is a breadth essay topic. You are not expected to write a separate miniature history of
every campaign, but you do need a clear chronological argument about change, continuity,
cause, consequence and significance across 1917-80.

Three questions hold the topic together:

• What barriers were campaigners trying to overcome? For Black Americans, the central
  barriers were Jim Crow, disfranchisement, racial violence, segregated education and
  economic exclusion. For Native American, Hispanic American and gay rights campaigners,
  the barriers included state policy, poverty, police harassment, cultural marginalisation,
  exclusion from political power and the denial of group identity.
• Which methods made progress possible? Legal challenge, lobbying, migration,
  unionisation, boycotts, sit-ins, marches, occupations, voting drives, community
  programmes and electoral politics all mattered, but their effectiveness depended on
  timing and federal response.
• How far had civil rights been achieved by 1980? The strongest answer distinguishes
  formal legal rights from lived equality. It also recognises that some movements sought
  integration into existing institutions, while others sought self-determination,
  community control or public recognition.

For exam judgement, avoid a simple story of progress. A sharper line is: civil rights
campaigns were most successful when they combined organised pressure with federal
intervention, but least successful where discrimination was informal, economic, local or
culturally embedded.

Jim Crow, Migration and Black Civil Rights, 1917-32

In 1917, the formal promises of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had been hollowed
out across much of the South. Black Americans faced a system often called Jim Crow:
racial segregation in schools, transport and public facilities; disfranchisement through
poll taxes, literacy tests, white primaries and intimidation; and a labour system in which
sharecropping, debt and low wages limited economic independence. White violence enforced
the system. Lynching, race riots and threats against Black voters were not accidental
breakdowns of order; they were part of how racial power was maintained.

This means "life in the South" should be explained as a political, social and economic
system, not only as personal prejudice. Segregated schools kept educational opportunity
unequal. Disfranchisement made it difficult for Black communities to alter county and state
government. Economic dependence on white landowners and employers made legal rights risky
to exercise. The Ku Klux Klan's revival in the 1910s and 1920s, alongside episodes of
racial violence such as East St Louis in 1917, the Red Summer of 1919 and Tulsa in 1921,
showed that Black progress could be met with organised white resistance.

The Great Migration changed the terrain of the struggle. From the First World War,
industrial labour shortages and reduced European immigration opened jobs in northern and
midwestern cities. Black newspapers such as the Chicago Defender publicised opportunities,
while families left the South to escape racial violence and Jim Crow. Between 1917 and
1932, migration helped build Black communities in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, New York and
Philadelphia. Harlem became a symbol of cultural confidence, but the political effects were
just as important: migrants could vote in many northern cities, join unions and churches,
expand the NAACP and Urban League, and become part of urban electoral machines.

Migration did not end racism. Northern and western Black communities faced housing
discrimination, job competition, police hostility and school segregation in practice. The
Red Summer of 1919 showed that racial violence followed demographic change. Yet migration
still mattered because it shifted civil rights from a mainly southern problem to a
national question. Politicians could not ignore Black voters in cities such as Chicago
and New York in the same way that southern state governments ignored Black voters who had
been disfranchised.

The best judgement for 1917-32 is therefore mixed. The South remained the centre of formal
racial oppression, but migration created new sources of leverage. It did not by itself
produce civil rights legislation, but it helped create the urban organisations, newspapers,
churches, voters and cultural confidence that later campaigns used.

Federal Openings and Direct Action, 1933-55

The New Deal changed Black civil rights indirectly. Franklin D. Roosevelt did not make
racial equality a central aim of his administration: he depended on southern Democrats in
Congress, refused to spend political capital on federal anti-lynching legislation, and
allowed many programmes to be administered locally, where white officials could discriminate.
Some major welfare and labour protections also excluded or disadvantaged agricultural and
domestic workers, occupations in which Black workers were heavily represented.

Yet the New Deal was not irrelevant. Relief work, the Works Progress Administration, the
National Youth Administration and public housing could benefit Black Americans, even if
unevenly. Mary McLeod Bethune and other members of the informal "Black Cabinet" pressed
for access to federal programmes. Eleanor Roosevelt gave visible support to Black civil
rights causes. Most importantly, the New Deal helped change political loyalties: many Black
voters in northern cities moved from the party of Lincoln towards the Democratic Party,
giving Democratic presidents a stronger electoral reason to listen.

The Second World War sharpened the contradiction between fighting fascism abroad and
accepting racism at home. A. Philip Randolph threatened a mass March on Washington in 1941
to protest discrimination in defence industries. Roosevelt responded with Executive
Order 8802, banning racial discrimination in defence employment and creating the Fair
Employment Practices Committee. The FEPC had weak enforcement powers, but it set an
important precedent: organised pressure could force federal action. The Double V
campaign, calling for victory over fascism abroad and racism at home, linked patriotism to
civil rights. Black veterans returned with a stronger claim to citizenship, while wartime
migration expanded Black urban communities still further.

Truman went further than Roosevelt, though within limits. His President's Committee on
Civil Rights produced To Secure These Rights in 1947, calling for stronger federal
protection. In 1948 Truman issued Executive Order 9981, committing the armed forces to
equal treatment and opportunity, and Executive Order 9980, addressing discrimination in
federal employment. These were major symbolic and institutional steps. However, most civil
rights bills still faced congressional obstruction, especially from southern Democrats.

Legal challenge was the most sustained method before 1955. The NAACP and its Legal Defense
Fund, led by lawyers such as Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, attacked the
legal foundations of segregation step by step. Important cases included Smith v.
Allwright in 1944, which weakened the white primary; Morgan v. Virginia in 1946,
which challenged segregation in interstate bus travel; Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948,
which limited court enforcement of racially restrictive housing covenants; and Sweatt v.
Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma in 1950, which exposed inequality in graduate
education. The major breakthrough came with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, when
the Supreme Court ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional. Brown II in
1955 ordered desegregation with "all deliberate speed", a phrase that allowed delay as well
as progress.

By 1955, the movement was moving from legal challenge towards direct action. This did not
mean law became unimportant. It meant that court victories needed mobilisation to force
implementation. CORE's interracial activism, the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, local bus
boycotts and the long tradition of NAACP organising all prepared the ground. When Rosa
Parks was arrested in Montgomery in December 1955, the bus boycott drew on legal
precedent, church organisation, women's activism, local networks and economic pressure.
That is why 1955 is a turning point: it joined legal strategy to mass nonviolent direct
action.

Mass Mobilisation, Black Power and the Northern Turn, 1955-68

Between 1955 and 1965, southern-based campaigning became the most visible face of Black
civil rights. The pattern was not random protest. Campaigners selected targets where local
segregation could be challenged, white resistance could be exposed, and the federal
government could be pressured to act.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56 showed that disciplined, local, economic pressure
could defeat segregation in city transport. It also made Martin Luther King Jr. a national
leader and encouraged the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in
1957. The Greensboro sit-ins of 1960 turned students into a driving force and led to
the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The Freedom Rides of
1961 tested federal rulings against segregation in interstate travel and forced the Kennedy
administration and the Interstate Commerce Commission to act. The Birmingham campaign
of 1963 used direct action against one of the South's most segregated cities; the violence
of police commissioner Bull Connor's response helped build support for federal civil rights
legislation. The March on Washington in August 1963 linked racial justice to jobs and
economic citizenship. Freedom Summer in 1964 and the Selma campaign in 1965 showed
that voting rights remained central despite earlier legislation.

This southern strategy worked because it combined moral pressure, media attention, court
precedents, grassroots courage and federal embarrassment. It also had limits. Local people
often faced job loss, eviction, arrest or murder after national cameras moved on. Some
campaigns, such as Albany in 1961-62, struggled because local authorities avoided the kind
of televised brutality that made Birmingham so powerful. Federal politicians often acted
only after protest made inaction more costly than intervention.

By the mid-1960s, many activists argued that legal integration was too narrow a goal.
Black Power emerged from frustration with slow change, northern poverty, police brutality,
white violence, the limits of nonviolence and the feeling that Black communities needed
control over their own institutions. The phrase became nationally famous during the March
Against Fear in Mississippi in 1966, when Stokely Carmichael of SNCC called for Black
Power. The Black Panther Party, founded in Oakland in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale,
combined armed self-defence against police brutality with community programmes such as free
breakfasts and health clinics.

Black Power should not be reduced to violence. It was also about racial pride, independent
political power, cultural confidence and economic control. However, it did divide opinion.
Some white supporters and moderate Black leaders feared it would damage the coalition that
had helped pass civil rights legislation. Government surveillance and repression also
weakened radical organisations. For exam judgement, Black Power is best seen as both a
criticism of earlier civil rights methods and a response to problems those methods had not
solved.