The Civil Rights Movement

Revised Edition

Bruce J Dierenfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317863717
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The civil rights movement was arguably the most important reform in American history. This book recounts the extraordinary and often bloody story of how tens of thousands of ordinaryAfrican-Americansovercame long odds to dethrone segregation, to exercise the right to vote and to improve their economic standing.

Organized in a clear chronological fashion, the book shows how concerted pressure in a variety of forms ultimately carried the day in realizing a more just society for African- Americans. It will provide students of American history with an invaluable, comprehensive introduction to the Civil Rights Movement.

Part 1

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THE MISSISSIPPI PLAN

1

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Jim Crow South

Thirteenth Amendment: This 1865 constitutional amendment abolished slavery in the United States.

 

Fourteenth Amendment: This 1868 constitutional amendment made blacks citizens and guaranteed them ‘equal protection of the laws.’

For a few years after the Civil War ended in 1865, it looked as if four million blacks would enter the mainstream of society. In what amounted to a revolution in black status, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution ended slavery, promised ‘equal protection of the laws’ to both races, and granted suffrage to black males [Doc. 1, p. 140]. Congress used this authority to enact the nation’s first civil rights laws, recognizing blacks as citizens with inviolable rights, prohibiting racial violence, and opening public accommodations and conveyances to all. As a consequence, many former slaves legalized their marriages, moved about without passes, attended school, testified in court, voted and held political office, and decided for whom and how long they wished to work.

Fifteenth Amendment: This 1870 constitutional amendment prohibited racial discrimination in voting.

 

Mississippi Plan: The violent restoration of southern white governments after Reconstruction.

 

Ku Klux Klan: A white terrorist organization against integration.

 

Lynching: The murder of 3,500 blacks by angry whites, often by hanging from trees.

To redeem the South from this ‘nigger domination,’ whites terrorized and slaughtered blacks in what was called the Mississippi Plan. Vigilante groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, castrated, raped, and lynched thousands of black men and women. In 1899, near Atlanta, Georgia, Sam Hose was accused of murdering his employer, Alfred Cranford, and raping Cranford’s wife. Two thousand whites took the law into their own hands and disrobed ‘this monster in human form,’ chained him to a tree, cut off his ears, fingers, and genitals, skinned his face, and plunged knives into his body before setting him ablaze. As his eyes bulged from their sockets and his blood sizzled, he cried, ‘Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus.’ The crowd fought over pieces of his heart, liver, and bones, which were sliced up for prized souvenirs. Although Cranford’s widow told investigators that Hose killed her husband in self-defense and had never touched her, a local newspaper defended the lynchers as ‘intensely religious, home-loving, and just.’ Such sadistic ‘Negro barbecues’ amused whites and were intended as a grim warning to blacks never to seek equality. In this nightmare world, a black Mississippian recalled that ‘to kill a Negro wasn’t nothing. It was like killing a chicken or killing a snake. The whites would say, “Niggers jest supposed to die, ain’t no damn good anyway – so jest go on an’ kill ‘em.”’ Appalled by the frequency of such attacks, writer Mark Twain called America the ‘United States of Lyncherdom.’

Poll Tax: A tax levied by southern states to disfranchise blacks and poor whites.

 

Grandfather Clause: A legal provision in southern states that exempted whites from voting restrictions aimed at blacks.

 

Literacy Tests: A device used by southern registrars to disqualify blacks from voting.

Once blacks were intimidated, white politicians devised all manner of tricks to keep them from the voting booth. Whites claimed that removing blacks from politics would end electoral corruption and improve race relations as blacks accepted their proper place in society. Southern states imposed poll taxes that were payable in cash months before elections at a time when farmhands were cash poor. In Louisiana, the legislature effectively eliminated blacks from the political process by restricting the franchise to male descendants of grandfathers who could vote right after the Civil War. In South Carolina, officials set up eight ballot boxes – one for each office – and invalidated ballots that semiliterate black voters placed in the wrong box. In addition, the voting rolls were kept lily white by testing a black person’s literacy, tossing out improperly completed forms, and, ultimately, just closing the registrar’s office for days. These measures reduced black voting in the South to 3 per cent in 1900 and crushed all opposition to the white-controlled Democratic party. South Carolina governor Ben Tillman boasted, ‘We have done our best. We have scratched our heads to find out how we could eliminate the last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it.’ The federal government sat idly by as these outrages were perpetrated.

Reconstruction: The federal government’s attempts after the Civil War to restore the defeated Confederate states to the Union and to assist the former slaves.

 

Jim Crow: A nineteenth-century minstrel character whose caricature of black culture became identified with segregationist practices in the South.

 

Black Codes: Southern state laws enacted after the Civil War that greatly restricted black mobility, economic opportunity, and political expression.

As the North retreated after Reconstruction, the South instituted a rigid caste system called Jim Crow, so named from a minstrel caricature of the 1830s. In the Black Codes, lawmakers barred blacks from attending white schools, marrying whites, testifying in court, having a gun, or owning property. Southern states rewrote their constitutions to separate the races from birth to burial. Signs appeared reading ‘white’ and ‘colored’ for drinking fountains, toilets, telephone booths, and bus stations. Each race had its own hospital and prison; theaters consigned blacks to the balcony, which was nicknamed ‘the buzzard’s roost’; libraries were for whites only. Racial mores permitted whites to call black men ‘Boy’ or ‘Uncle,’ never ‘Mr’ or ‘Sir.’ Blacks were expected to walk in the gutter when whites came along. Except for family cooks, maids, and wet-nurses, not even in death could a black be near a white. Whites could mix with blacks, however. Because white men raped black women and fathered mulatto children – a crime called miscegenation – this color-conscious society defined a person with even one drop of black blood as black and thus forever barred from society’s privileges. Incredibly, whites imagined that their black servants and farmhands truly loved them.

Miscegenation: Marriage or cohabitation between men and women of different races.

Stereotypes reflecting such prejudice proliferated and made black mistreatment seem logical. Racist artists depicted black adults with bulbous lips, bulging eyes, and vacuous smiles and black children eating watermelon and playing with jungle animals. These outlandish images appeared on cereal boxes, in advertisements, and as lawn ornaments. The theater staged popular minstrel shows that ridiculed blacks. In these productions, white men in blackface sang songs, such as ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me.’ Thomas Dixon demonized black men as crazed rapists of white women in his popular novel The Clansman, which became the first modern film, The Birth of a Nation. The message from this stereotyping was that blacks were subhuman.

The Birth of a Nation: A 1915 silent film that portrayed newly freed blacks as buffoons and rapists and thereby justified the KKK’s vigilantism.

 

 

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): The Supreme Court decision that permitted racial segregation.

 

Segregation: The enforced separation of the races.

For a century, the US Supreme Court sanctioned white supremacy. After the Civil War, the Court invalidated attempts by the federal government to grant basic civil rights to the freedmen. In 1883, the Court robbed the 14th Amendment of much of its meaning when it barred racial discrimination by states, but not by businessmen who ran hotels and restaurants. The time had come, justice Joseph Bradley declared, for blacks to cease being ‘the special favorite of the laws.’ In the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court subverted the meaning of the 14th Amendment still further to devise the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine that sanctioned segregated public facilities. With the Court’s blessing, South Carolina segregated the races step-by-step, beginning with trains (1898) and proceeding to streetcars (1905), restaurants (1906), textile factories (1915), circuses (1917), pool halls (1924), and beaches (1934). Edgar Gardner Murphy, an Episcopal cleric and reformer from Texas, concluded that white supremacists had moved ‘from an undiscriminating attack upon the Negro’s ballot to a like attack upon his schools, his labor, his life – from the contention that no Negro shall vote to the contentions that no Negro shall learn, that no Negro shall labor, and that no Negro shall live.’

Boycott: An organized campaign to promote civil rights by refusing to buy goods or services.

 

 

Sambo: A black person compelled to act deferentially toward whites.

Blacks fiercely resisted this new social order. Tens of thousands escaped to the West, especially Kansas and Oklahoma, where they built homesteads and towns beyond the reach of white supremacy. More commonly, ministers, businessmen, and newspaper editors vigorously protested against violence and discrimination through equal rights leagues, lawsuits, and boycotts. T. Thomas Fortune of the New York Age formed the Afro-American League in 1890 to denounce lynchings, unequal schools, separate railroad cars, the leasing of black prisoners, and the exclusion of blacks from juries. Twenty-five southern cities experienced boycotts of the newly segregated streetcars. Blacks also searched for political allies, but the Republicans were too weak, the Democrats too hostile, the Populist third party too opportunistic, and all of them too racist. Given black poverty, illiteracy, and internal squabbling, as well as unified white opposition, such resistance was sporadic and short-lived. Before long, Jim Crow laws seemed unassailable, and many blacks survived by becoming ‘good Negroes’ known as Sambos, retreating from public life and praying for a better day.

Part 2

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THE NEW NEGRO

2

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Origins of the Movement

Washington, Booker T. (1856–1915): Ex-slave who founded Tuskegee Institute to promote his belief that blacks should seek economic self-reliance first, not political equality.

Disfranchisement: The various means, such as the poll tax and white primaries, to prevent blacks from voting.

Blacks were never reconciled to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction to the Series
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Publisher's Acknowledgement
• Abbreviations
• Chronology
• Who's Who
• Glossary
• Maps
• The Problem
• Part One The Mississippi Plan
• Part Two The New Negro
• Part Three Freedom Bound
• Part Four The Movement Fractures
• Part Five The Dream Deferred
• Part Six Documents
• Further Reading
• Index
• Plate