28.1: Origins of the Movement

• Nearly 1 million black men and women in military service served between 1939 and 1945.

  • Many combat veterans and their families were bitterly distorted by the discrepancy between fighting totalitarianism outside Germany and continuing military segregation and racism.

• In the late 1940s, only approximately 10% of eligible southern Black people voted in urban areas, most of them.

• All but the most determined blacks are denied a compound of legal and extrajudicial measures.

• The NAACP had been chipping on the legal basis of segregation since the late 1930's.

  • Civil rights lawyers have launched a series of lawsuits in sectional institutions seeking full equality rather than a frontal assault on Plessy separate but equal rule

• The southern manifestation was signed in 1956 by 101 Congressmen from the former Confederated States and their countries were urged to refuse to disagree.

• President Eisenhower refused to give Brown public support and helped to the resistance to the south.

28.2: No Easy Road to Freedom, 1957-1962

• The extraordinary and complex man was Martin Luther King Jr.

  • He was born at Atlanta in 1929 and was raised as the son of an eminent Baptist minister by a middle class.

• King has a degree in Divinity from the Crozer Theological Colleges in Pensylvania and a PhD in Theology from Boston University, following a graduation from prestigious Morehouse College, an all-school.

• In the white counter at Wolworth's lunch and politically ordered coffee and doughnuts on Monday, February 1 1960, 4 Black freshwomen of North Carolina Agricultural and technical college in Greensboro sat down.

  • They were denied service, as the students had anticipated.

  • However, until the closing time the four students remained at the counter.

• A new generation of activists and leaders was brought into the civil rights cause by the sit-in movement.

• During the very close presidential campaign of 1960, the race was held from the center stage.

  • Richard Nixon was a leading Republican voice in favor of stronger civil rights law, while Senator John F. Kennedy, who was the Democratic nominee of the Civil Rights Congress, had played almost no role in the 1950's.

• In Spring 1961, the National Director of the Congress of Racial Equality, James Farmer, announced plans for a South Ride on Interracial Freedom.

  • The aim was to check that court orders prohibit segregation in interstate and terminal rooms were being complied with.

• SNCC, NAACP, and other local groups formed a coalition in Albany, a small city in southwestern Georgia, known to be the Albany movement.

28.3: The Movement at High Tide, 1963-1965

• At the end of 1962, in Birmingham, Alabama, Martin Luther King decided with his SCLC allies to begin a new campaign against segregation.

  • Birmingham, America's most isolated large city, has a profound racial violence history.

  • In schools, restaurants, city park and warehouse rooms, African Americans endured complete segregation

• President Kennedy was convinced that the growth of black activism and white support was a moment when he called for extensive civil rights laws.

  • The need for federal action has also been made clearer than ever by the continued white resistance in the South.

• The March in Washington was an extraordinary demonstration of interracial unity as a mark in the fight for civil rights.

  • It has fostered the spirits of leaders of the Movement and of liberals who are pressing Congress on the new civil rights law.

• While Johnson and his Liberal Allies won the Congressional battle for a new civil rights laws bill, the Freedom Summer project has been launched by a coalition of activists leaded by the SNCC to register black voters and directly challenge the iron rule of segregation.

• Confronted by the limits of nonviolent protest and election policy, younger activists in the SNCC were increasingly drawn to Malcolm X's militant rhetoric and vision, which was the main spokesman for the black nationalist religious sector, the Nation of Islam, since 1950.

• In 1964, Lyndon Johnson won a landslide in the reelection, which accounted for 61% of the public voting.

  • Of the 6 million blacks who voted in the elections – 2 million more than in 1960 – overwhelmingly 94% voted for Johnson

28.4: Civil Rights Beyond Black and White

• The west and southwest Mexican American community included both U.S. citizens and Mexican non-citizens.

  • After World War II, several Mexican American political organisations, emphasizing their american identity, sought to ensure equal rights and equal opportunity for their community.

• In 1898, during the final phases of the Spanish-American war, the United States seized Puerto Rico.

  • The Jones Act of 1917 made the island unincorporated in the U.S. and granted all Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship

• The hard World War II relocation program has devastated the West Coast japanese Americans

• In the post-war years, the status and lives of Indians also changed considerably.

  • Congress reversed New Deal policies underlining the Indian sovereignty and the independence of culture.

• The political equality created by the civil rights movement encouraged efforts to modernize and reform the immigration policies of the country.

  • A new Act on Immigration and Nationality was passed in 1965 by Congress abolishing national quotas of origin in place since the 1920s and replacing the hemispheric limit overall