essay on african american civil rights

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.

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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>

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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
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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 ).

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?

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In many respects, the civil rights movement was a great success. Successive, targeted campaigns of non-violent direct action chipped away at the racist power structures that proliferated across the southern United States. Newsworthy protests captured media attention and elicited sympathy across the nation. Though Martin Luther King Jr.’s charismatic leadership was important, we should not forget that the civil rights cause depended on a mass movement. As the former SNCC member Diane Nash recalled, it was a ‘people’s movement’, fuelled by grass-roots activism (Nash, 1985). Recognising a change in the public mood, Lyndon Johnson swiftly addressed many of the racial inequalities highlighted by the civil rights movement. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 led to meaningful change in the lives of many Black Americans, dismantling systems of segregation and black disenfranchisement.

In other respects, the civil rights movement was less revolutionary. It did not fundamentally restructure American society, nor did it end racial discrimination. In the economic sphere, in particular, there was still much work to be done. Across the nation, and especially in northern cities, stark racial inequalities were commonplace, especially in terms of access to jobs and housing. As civil rights activists became frustrated by their lack of progress in these areas, the movement began to splinter towards the end of the 1960s, with many Black activists embracing violent methods. Over the subsequent decades, racial inequalities have persisted, and in recent years police brutality against Black Americans, in particular, has become an urgent issue. As the protests triggered by the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 have demonstrated, many of the battles of the 1960s are still being fought.

Though King and other members of the civil rights movement failed to achieve their broader goals, there can be no doubting their radical ambitions. As Wornie Reed, who worked on the Poor People’s Campaign, explains in this interview, King was undoubtedly a ‘radical’ activist, even if the civil rights movement itself never resulted in a far-reaching social revolution.

Transcript: Video 4: Wornie Reed

This free course is an adapted extract from the Open University course A113 Revolutions [ Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. ( Hide tip ) ] . It is one of four OpenLearn courses exploring the notion of the Sixties as a ‘revolutionary’ period. Learn more about these OpenLearn courses here .

Home — Essay Samples — History — History of the United States — Civil Rights Movement

Essays on Civil Rights Movement

Hook examples for civil rights movement essays, anecdotal hook.

Imagine standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, listening to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his iconic "I Have a Dream" speech. This moment in history epitomized the Civil Rights Movement's power and importance.

Question Hook

What does it mean to fight for civil rights? Explore the complex history, key figures, and lasting impact of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

Quotation Hook

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. How did civil rights activists like King refuse to stay silent and ignite change?

Statistical or Factual Hook

Did you know that in 1964, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin? Dive into the facts and milestones of the Civil Rights Movement.

Definition Hook

What defines a civil rights movement? Explore the principles, goals, and strategies that distinguish civil rights movements from other social justice movements.

Rhetorical Question Hook

Was the Civil Rights Movement solely about racial equality, or did it pave the way for broader social change and justice? Examine the movement's multifaceted impact.

Historical Hook

Travel back in time to the mid-20th century and uncover the roots of the Civil Rights Movement, from the Jim Crow era to the landmark Supreme Court decisions.

Contrast Hook

Contrast the injustices and systemic racism faced by African Americans prior to the Civil Rights Movement with the progress made through protests, legislation, and activism.

Narrative Hook

Meet Rosa Parks, a seamstress who refused to give up her bus seat, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Follow her courageous journey and the ripple effect it had on the Civil Rights Movement.

Controversial Statement Hook

Prepare to explore the controversies within the Civil Rights Movement, such as differing strategies among activists and debates over nonviolence versus militancy.

Brown V. Board of Education: a Landmark in The Struggle for Equality

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Freedom Summer: a Pivotal Moment in The American Civil Rights Movement

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Civil Rights Movement and The Struggles of African Americans During Those Times

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How The Civil Rights Movement Helped African Americans Achieve Their Rights

Martin luther king jr: influential figure in the civil rights movement, how martin luther king jr, rosa parks and malcolm x organized the civil rights movement, the role of the media in ushering the civil rights movement, development of racial tendencies in the united states, the civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s, a deeper look at the civil rights movement in america, generation of the civil rights movement, black lives matter in the civil rights movement, the civil rights movement about african american people, the civil rights movement and african american discriminations, a report on the events that helped martin luther king jr.'s prominence in america to push the civil rights movement, the civil rights movement about national indentify, the influence of jazz musicians on the civil rights movement, rosa parks and the civil rights movement, the contribution of local grass-roots activists to the civil rights movement, rosa parks: the lady of the civil rights, brown vs board of education, the way rosa parks leadership style changed the history, rosa parks: how one bold decision made a world leader.

United States

Racism, segregation, disenfranchisement, Jim Crow laws, socioeconomic inequality

W.E.B. Du Bois, Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Henry MacNeal Turner, John Oliver Killens

Civil rights movement was a struggle of African Americans and their like-minded allies for social justice in United States that came to national prominence during the mid-1950s. The purpose was to end legalized racial discrimination, disenfranchisement and racial segregation in the United States.

“Jim Crow” laws were established in the South beginning in the late 19th century with a purpose to separate Black people from white people. Black people couldn’t use the same public facilities as white people or go to the same schools. Although, Jim Crow laws weren’t adopted in northern states, Black people still experienced discrimination.

Forms of protest and civil disobedience included boycotts, such as the most successful Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956) that lasted for 381 days in Alabama; mass marches, such as the Children's Crusade in Birmingham in 1963 and Selma to Montgomery marches (1965) in Alabama; "sit-ins" such as the Greensboro sit-ins (1960) in North Carolina and Nashville sit-ins (1960) in Tennessee.

The Great March on Washington was held in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963. The purpose was to advocate for the civil and economic rights of African Americans. It was organized and attended by civil rights leaders such as A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King, Jr., who delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech.

On July 2, 1964, President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, and later sexual orientation and gender identity. The act "remains one of the most significant legislative achievements in American history".

The civil rights movement had tragic consequences for two of its leaders. On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated at a rally and Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on his hotel room’s balcony on April 4, 1968.

The Civil Rights Act of 1968 was signed into law by United States President Lyndon B. Johnson during the King assassination riots. It prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, and national origin.

The 20th-century civil rights movement produced an enduring transformation of the legal status of African Americans and other victims of discrimination.

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Civil Rights in the United States

Civil rights movement, government materials related to the civil rights era, primary sources: general.

• Seminal Documents

(Also see Africana Studies Primary Sources )

• History Vault: Civil Rights and the Black Freedom Struggle This link opens in a new window Manuscript and archival collections focusing on civil rights and the Black Freedom Movement of the 20th Century. Contains records of four of the most important civil rights organizations of the 1950s and 1960s: NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, and CORE.
• Black Life in America This link opens in a new window The experience and impact of African Americans, as recorded by the news media.
• The Black Panther (Newspaper) The newspaper of the Black Panther Party. Twenty issues of the Black Panther Party newspaper from between 1968-1973. The papers are posted on Libcom.org.
• Civil Rights (National Archives)
• The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Library of Congress) Exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the history that led up to it, and its immediate impact.
• Civil Rights Digital Library: Topics (Digital Library of Georgia) Select a topic to see archival collections and reference resources, many of which are available online.
• Civil Rights History Project (Library of Congress) Oral interviews and collections of people who participated in the Civil Rights movement.
• FBI Records: The Vault - Civil Rights FBI records included in the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) Library.
• Freedom Summer Collection (Wisconsin Historical Society) Manuscript collections documents the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964
• Hispanic Life in America This link opens in a new window The experience and impact of Hispanic Americans, as recorded by the news media.
• Historical Publications of the United States Commission on Civil Rights Documents from this commission, which have been at the forefront of federal and state efforts for civil rights.
• Jim Crow and Segregation (Library of Congress) Set of primary sources that reflects popular views of and causes and affects of racial segregation.
• The Krueger-Scott Oral History Project The Krueger-Scott oral histories is the largest collection of oral history interviews conducted with African-American residents of Newark who came to the city during the Great Migration, as well as those whose local roots stretch back generations. The faculty, staff and graduate students at Rutgers University-Newark who have worked on the collection in collaboration with local cultural institutions are proud to have helped preserve, archive, and make public these remarkable oral narratives that describe an as yet unwritten history of 20th-century African-American life. (source: website)
• Land of (Unequal) Opportunity: Documenting the Civil Rights Struggle in Arkansas From the University of Arkansas
• The NAACP: A Century in the Fight for Freedom The story of America's oldest and largest civil rights organization, told through letters, photographs, maps, and more. Part of the Library of Congress Primary Source sets.
• National Archives Civil Rights Records
• National Museum of African American History & Culture: Collections (Smithsonian) The National Museum of African American History and Culture is the only national museum devoted exclusively to the documentation of African American life, history, and culture.
• Voices of Civil Rights (Library of Congress) Exhibition that includes personal accounts and oral hstories. A collaboration of AARP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and the Library of Congress.
• Seminal Documents of the Civil Rights Movement

Civil Rights Data Collection

From the U.S. Department of Education

Illustrates that Civil Rights is not a historical phenomenon but an ongoing issue in the United States.

Library of Congress: Civil Rights Resource Guide

Links to over forty sites related to civil rights, library of congress: american memory, an important site from the library of congress. use the search box to find matches to terms such as civil rights, jim crow, martin luther king, etc., national museum of african american history and culture, a comprehensive smithsonian museum website.

In history and the humanities a primary source is a item produced from the time you are researching. Examples include a photograph, a letter, a newspaper article, and government documents.  Looking at actual sources from a specific time helps you get a firsthand account of what was happening then.

These resources will help you locate relevant primary sources. (See Primary Source Research for more guidance.)

Archives of searchable historical primary source materials. Note: This content has moved to the History Commons platform, but still contains the Accessible Archives collections subscribed to by Rowan University.

• African American Newspapers, Series 1 This link opens in a new window African American newspapers published in the U.S. from 1827-1998. more... less... Provides access to U.S. newspapers chronicling a century and a half of the African American experience.
• Archives Unbound This link opens in a new window Digital collection of historical documents from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. more... less... Collections cover a broad range of topics from the Middle Ages forward-from Witchcraft to World War II to twentieth-century political history.
• Historic Documents This link opens in a new window Primary source documents from 1972 forward in U.S. government and politics.

National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)

New york public library digital collections.

• Wall Street Journal (ProQuest Historical Newspapers) This link opens in a new window Online access to back issues of the Wall Street Journal, 1889 - 1999. more... less... Newspaper coverage is from 1889 through 1996. For more recent issues of the Wall Street Journal, select the Wall Street Journal (current) link.
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African American Studies: Primary Sources

Digital collections, microfilm collections.

• Organizations
• Personal Papers
• Selected Digital Collections
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• 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).

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The African American Civil Rights Movement Analytical 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

Introduction

How life could have been different had not been for the civil rights movement, how the civil rights movements influenced my career path, how the world would be had it not been for the civil rights movements.

Several major events took place in the United States and around the world during the 1960’s. The United States witnessed counter culture and social revolution that ended with abolishment of retrogressive laws that had established social taboos in the country (Beito & Royster, 2009).

In this paper I will discuss how my own life could have been different had it not been for the civil rights movements that happened in the 1960s. Secondly, I will show how the same event influenced my choice of career path, and finally, I will describe how the world could have been different had it not been for the civil rights movement.

The civil rights movement (commonly referred to as African American civil rights movements) describes the social movements that took place in the United States to end discrimination against black people and restore their right to vote (Farber, 1994). The majority of the campaigns begun in 1955 and were characterized by civil disobedience.

During the 1960s notable achievements were made including the passage of a Civil rights Act in 1964 that outlawed any form of discrimination towards people of a different “race, color or national origin in employment practices and public accommodations”; in 1965, the voting rights of African Americans were restored following the passage of the Voting Rights Act 1965; in the same year, the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965 was enacted (Harrison & Dye, 2008, p. 34).

The act allowed immigrants from other regions of the world, other than the traditional Europe to enter the United States (Goluboff, 2007). In 1968, “the Fair Housing Act 1968 was enacted” to ensure that everyone had an equal opportunity to buy or rent a house in the US (Harrison & Dye, 2008).

The achievements that were made following the civil rights movements inspired young people across the country and saw African Americans re-entering politics in the Southern States (Goluboff, 2007).

My life could have been significantly different had it not been for these legislative achievements that followed the civil rights movement. The civil rights Act of 1964 basically banned segregation in the US. It gave all the Americans the right to be served equally in facilities that were open to the public including equal access to education (Harrison & Dye, 2008).

I honestly believe that the peace and cultural diversity that we currently enjoyed in the US is as a result of the legislative changes that followed the civil rights movement. Had it not been for this changes I could now be living in a segregated society that is full of mistrust, violence and other social ills.

Notably, the civil rights movements did not only ensure equal rights for African Americans but also other minority groups such as Latinos and Asian Americans. In addition, the movements opened the eyes of the majority of the Americans thereby effectively transforming their attitudes. Had it not been for the civil rights movement I could now be part of a conservative society that basically trusts the government on everything. America could not be enjoying the role model status that it is currently accorded internationally.

Through the schooling process I have acquired many friends from different racial backgrounds. The segregation that was predominant prior to the civil rights movement denied Americans the opportunity to freely mix with people from other races. This implies that had the situation remained the same then I could not be having the freedom to associate with people from other races. It’s sad to think that I or some of my friends could have been denied a chance to pursue our dream careers.

Prior to the civil rights movements, Americans were not active people and frequently followed the government’s opinion (Farber, 1994). It’s important to note that following the civil rights movements many American citizens opened their eyes, changed their attitudes and begun to press for effective leadership. Everyone realized the need to pursue the American dream. Since then, Americans have played leading roles in determining the extent to which the government can indulge in international affairs.

Not so long after the civil rights movements, Americans were already urging their government to withdraw troops from Vietnam. Others pieces of lSegislations that were enacted following the civil rights movements such as the Voting Rights Act 1965 and the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965 have greatly influenced the American society (Beito & Royster, 2009).

African Americans have been politically active since the enactment of the voting rights Act 1965. Had it not been for the civil movements, I could now be part of a divided society where politics is an exclusive reserve for one race. I could never have lived to see a black president leading our country.

The Immigration Act allowed immigrant from all over the world to come to America. This has led to a culturally rich and diverse society that is comparable to none. Therefore without the 1960s civil rights movements I could not be enjoying the benefits of cultural diversity such as foods and festivities.

The events that were happening prior to the civil rights movement showed how human beings can subject fellow human beings to discrimination. Learning about such happenings gave me the desire to take a career path that can enable me to advocate for the rights of others, particularly those who are disadvantaged in the society.

I realized that many of our citizens are involved in epic struggles and really need support from the society in order to make it through (Beito & Royster, 2009). Therefore by selecting a course that offered me a chance to effectively contribute to the society through advocacy, I feel that it will be possible for me to live a fulfilling life that takes into account the needs of others.

The harsh struggles that characterize the American history, including the liberation wars and the civil rights movement have validated my desire to take a course in social sciences and understand how the society functions and how I can be able to assist through advocacy.

The racial conflicts that were taking place in America prior to the civil rights movements were also being witnessed in many parts of the world. Several governments around the world were not keen to protect the rights of their minority citizens.

For instance, majority of European nations had colonies in Africa where their representatives were subjecting Africans to exploitation and brutality. Other countries such as New Zealand and Australia had no formal laws to protect the rights of the indigenous minority citizens.

It’s important to note that the United States had portrayed itself as the leader of the free world and yet many of its citizens were being subjected to severe racial discrimination. Back then, Europe was the only important continent to the US as far good foreign relations were concerned.

Many communist states publicly lamented the hypocrisy portrayed by the United States. Thus the events that followed the civil rights movements validated the country’s portrayal as a model democracy that observed the rights of its citizens. The civil rights movement gave America the chance to appeal to many countries in the world without severing ties with its traditional allies in Europe.

Since then, the US has been able to play a role in the democratization of many countries around the world (Harrison & Dye, 2008). It has also been on the forefront in urging other countries to enact appropriate legislations that are needed to protect the rights of minority groups.

The effects of the civil rights movements played a role in the development of good relationships between the US and other regions whose descendants were initially being racially abused in the US. These regions include South America, Africa and Asia. The good relations have in turn created a platform for globalization.

Therefore without the laws that followed the civil rights movement globalization activities such as international trade could not have been developed to the current level. In addition, the US could not have gotten the voice to call for change in other countries, and thus most countries could still have been in chaotic states.

This paper sought to describe how the scenario could have been without the civil rights movement. It has established that the freedom and diversity currently enjoyed by Americans today could have been a pipe dream. The paper has also shown how the civil rights influenced my career path by inspiring the desire to advocate for other people’s rights. The effects of the civil rights movements also played a role in globalization.

Beito, D., & Royster, L. (2009). Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power. Illinois: University of Illinois press.

Farber, D. (1994). The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s. New York: Hill and Wang.

Goluboff, R. (2007). The Lost Promise of Civil Rights. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Harrison, B., & Dye, T. (2008). Power and Soceity: An introduction to social Sciences. Florida: Thomson Wadsworth.

• Perspectives in African American History and Culture
• Black Codes, Jim Crow, and Segregation Impact on African Americans in the US
• The Older Americans Act Of 1965
• Economic Growth of Singapore from 1965 to 2008
• Impact of Civil Rights Movement
• Civil Rights Movement
• The American Civil Right Movement
• Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade History
• Martin Luther King's “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”
• “Why We Can’t Wait” a Historical Document by Martin Luther King Jr.
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2018, June 26). The African American Civil Rights Movement. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-african-american-civil-rights-movement/

"The African American Civil Rights Movement." IvyPanda , 26 June 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/the-african-american-civil-rights-movement/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'The African American Civil Rights Movement'. 26 June.

IvyPanda . 2018. "The African American Civil Rights Movement." June 26, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-african-american-civil-rights-movement/.

1. IvyPanda . "The African American Civil Rights Movement." June 26, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-african-american-civil-rights-movement/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The African American Civil Rights Movement." June 26, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-african-american-civil-rights-movement/.

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How the Black Power Movement Influenced the Civil Rights Movement

By: Sarah Pruitt

Updated: July 27, 2023 | Original: February 20, 2020

By 1966, the civil rights movement had been gaining momentum for more than a decade, as thousands of African Americans embraced a strategy of nonviolent protest against racial segregation and demanded equal rights under the law.

But for an increasing number of African Americans, particularly young Black men and women, that strategy did not go far enough. Protesting segregation, they believed, failed to adequately address the poverty and powerlessness that generations of systemic discrimination and racism had imposed on so many Black Americans.

Inspired by the principles of racial pride, autonomy and self-determination expressed by Malcolm X (whose assassination in 1965 had brought even more attention to his ideas), as well as liberation movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the Black Power movement that flourished in the late 1960s and ‘70s argued that Black Americans should focus on creating economic, social and political power of their own, rather than seek integration into white-dominated society.

Crucially, Black Power advocates, particularly more militant groups like the Black Panther Party, did not discount the use of violence, but embraced Malcolm X’s challenge to pursue freedom, equality and justice “by any means necessary.”

The March Against Fear - June 1966

The emergence of Black Power as a parallel force alongside the mainstream civil rights movement occurred during the March Against Fear, a voting rights march in Mississippi in June 1966. The march originally began as a solo effort by James Meredith, who had become the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi, a.k.a. Ole Miss, in 1962. He had set out in early June to walk from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, a distance of more than 200 miles, to promote Black voter registration and protest ongoing discrimination in his home state.

But after a white gunman shot and wounded Meredith on a rural road in Mississippi, three major civil rights leaders— Martin Luther King, Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Floyd McKissick of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) decided to continue the March Against Fear in his name.

In the days to come, Carmichael, McKissick and fellow marchers were harassed by onlookers and arrested by local law enforcement while walking through Mississippi. Speaking at a rally of supporters in Greenwood, Mississippi, on June 16, Carmichael (who had been released from jail that day) began leading the crowd in a chant of “We want Black Power!” The refrain stood in sharp contrast to many civil rights protests, where demonstrators commonly chanted “We want freedom!”

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Civil Rights Movement

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 […]

Stokely Carmichael’s Role in Black Power

Though the author Richard Wright had written a book titled Black Power in 1954, and the phrase had been used among other Black activists before, Stokely Carmichael was the first to use it as a political slogan in such a public way. As biographer Peniel E. Joseph writes in Stokely: A Life , the events in Mississippi “catapulted Stokely into the political space last occupied by Malcolm X,” as he went on TV news shows, was profiled in Ebony and written up in the New York Times under the headline “Black Power Prophet.”

Carmichael’s growing prominence put him at odds with King, who acknowledged the frustration among many African Americans with the slow pace of change but didn’t see violence and separatism as a viable path forward. With the country mired in the Vietnam War , (a war both Carmichael and King spoke out against) and the civil rights movement King had championed losing momentum, the message of the Black Power movement caught on with an increasing number of Black Americans.

Black Power Movement Growth—and Backlash

King and Carmichael renewed their alliance in early 1968, as King was planning his Poor People’s Campaign, which aimed to bring thousands of protesters to Washington, D.C., to call for an end to poverty. But in April 1968, King was assassinated in Memphis while in town to support a strike by the city’s sanitation workers as part of that campaign.

In the aftermath of King’s murder, a mass outpouring of grief and anger led to riots in more than 100 U.S. cities . Later that year, one of the most visible Black Power demonstrations took place at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, where Black athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised black-gloved fists in the air on the medal podium.

By 1970, Carmichael (who later changed his name to Kwame Ture) had moved to Africa, and SNCC had been supplanted at the forefront of the Black Power movement by more militant groups, such as the Black Panther Party , the US Organization, the Republic of New Africa and others, who saw themselves as the heirs to Malcolm X’s revolutionary philosophy. Black Panther chapters began operating in a number of cities nationwide, where they advocated a 10-point program of socialist revolution (backed by armed self-defense). The group’s more practical efforts focused on building up the Black community through social programs (including free breakfasts for school children ).

Many in mainstream white society viewed the Black Panthers and other Black Power groups negatively, dismissing them as violent, anti-white and anti-law enforcement. Like King and other civil rights activists before them, the Black Panthers became targets of the FBI’s counterintelligence program, or COINTELPRO, which weakened the group considerably by the mid-1970s through such tactics as spying, wiretapping, flimsy criminal charges and even assassination .

Legacy of Black Power

Even after the Black Power movement’s decline in the late 1970s, its impact would continue to be felt for generations to come. With its emphasis on Black racial identity, pride and self-determination, Black Power influenced everything from popular culture to education to politics, while the movement’s challenge to structural inequalities inspired other groups (such as Chicanos, Native Americans, Asian Americans and LGBTQ people) to pursue their own goals of overcoming discrimination to achieve equal rights.

The legacies of both the Black Power and civil rights movements live on in the Black Lives Matter movement . Though Black Lives Matter focuses more specifically on criminal justice reform, it channels the spirit of earlier movements in its efforts to combat systemic racism and the social, economic and political injustices that continue to affect Black Americans.

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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.

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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)

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Article contents

African americans in the great depression and new deal.

• Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy Department of History Eastern Michigan University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.632
• Published online: 19 November 2020

For African Americans, the Great Depression and the New Deal (1929–1940) marked a transformative era and laid the groundwork for the postwar black freedom struggle in the United States. The outbreak of the Great Depression in 1929 caused widespread suffering and despair in black communities across the country as women and men faced staggering rates of unemployment and poverty. Once Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), a Democrat, was inaugurated as president in 1933, he launched a “New Deal” of ambitious government programs to lift the United States out of the economic crisis. Most African Americans were skeptical about benefiting from the New Deal, and racial discrimination remained rampant. However, a cohort of black advisors and activists critiqued these government programs for excluding African Americans and enacted some reforms. At the grassroots level, black workers pressed for expanded employment opportunities and joined new labor unions to fight for economic rights. As the New Deal progressed a sea change swept over black politics. Many black voters switched their allegiance from the Republican to the Democratic Party, waged more militant campaigns for racial justice, and joined interracial and leftist coalitions. African Americans also challenged entrenched cultural stereotypes through photography, theater, and oral histories to illuminate the realities of black life in the United States. By 1940, African Americans now wielded an arsenal of protest tactics and were marching on a path toward full citizenship rights, which remains an always evolving process.

• African American history
• cultural history
• labor history
• political history
• women’s history

Last Hired, First Fired: The Crisis of the Great Depression

On the eve of the Great Depression, African Americans across the country already occupied a fragile position in the economy. 1 In the late 1920s, the vast majority of African Americans toiled as domestic servants, farmers, or service workers, jobs marked by low wages, weak job security, and fraught labor conditions. 2 Approximately eleven million African Americans lived in the American South, where they principally labored as sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and wage workers. Approximately 10 percent of black southerners owned land, but most cultivated crops on white-owned land and received a small share of the harvest. 3 Many regions of the South were already suffering from an economic downtown, and most black southerners were locked in an endless cycle of poverty, exploitation, and malnutrition. Disfranchisement and violence—especially the dangers of lynching and sexual assault—created a culture of fear for -black southerners. 4

Between 1915 and 1930 , approximately 1.5 million black southerners had migrated to northern and midwestern cities, such as Baltimore, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia. Not only did New York attract southern migrants, but thirty thousand immigrants from the West Indies also settled in the city, which made the Harlem neighborhood a very cosmopolitan place. 5 African Americans also streamed into western cities, such as Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco. 6 Black migrants had aspired to improve their economic and political standing in their new cities. But most discovered that Jim Crow was ever present beyond the Mason-Dixon line, marked by racial segregation, interracial police violence, and labor segmentation. Some black men were able to secure low-level positions in industry, while most black women labored as servants, cooks, and laundresses. However, southern migrants were able to vote in elections, which created black political constituencies to be courted by politicians. The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 enabled most migrant women to vote, and they participated enthusiastically in politics. 7

In October 1929 , the US stock market crashed, which precipitated the most serious economic crisis in the nation’s history. Banks began to fail, businesses closed, and workers across the nation lost their jobs. The Great Depression triggered immediate suffering in black communities. Economic conditions had been poor in the South since the early 1920s, but the Great Depression marked a new low. Between 1929 and 1933 , the price of cotton dropped from eighteen cents to six cents, which only exacerbated black southerners’ precarious economic position. With a decline in cotton prices, the number of black sharecroppers fell. 8 In northern and midwestern cities, white unemployment reached as much as 25 percent, but for black workers in Chicago, New York, and Pittsburgh, 50 percent were out of work, and that number climbed to 60 percent for black workers in Philadelphia and Detroit. 9 African American workers were often the last hired, and thus, the first fired. The Great Depression initially slowed the pace of migration, but black African Americans continued to stream out of the South throughout the 1930s. 10

With the crisis of the Great Depression, African Americans struggled to receive adequate relief from the crushing impact of unemployment and poverty. White officials distributed relief in the form of food, money, or work programs, but many reasoned that African Americans did not need as many resources as white Americans. 11 At the federal level, President Herbert Hoover’s administration responded to the crisis of the Great Depression by creating the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which offered loan payments to large corporations in order to restart the economy, but very few of these dollars reached suffering workers in the United States. 12

African Americans turned toward their community institutions to alleviate the worst effects of poverty and suffering. Middle-class African Americans spearheaded relief efforts by working with their churches, fraternal orders, and social and political organizations to assist unemployed workers. 13 As the chief purchasers for their families, black women were keenly aware of the cost of living and used the power of their pocketbooks to cope with the Depression. In 1930 , Fannie Peck formed the Housewives’ League of Detroit, asking members to patronize black-owned businesses as a way to protect these establishments and keep money in the black community. By 1934 , the organization had ten thousand members. These organizations mushroomed in other cities, such as Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Pittsburgh, underscoring the importance of black women’s organizing at the grassroots level. Women also banded together to clothe, feed, and house their families. In New York, Detroit, and St. Louis, black women staged meat boycotts and protested rent evictions, while in Cleveland, they protested electricity shut offs. 14 Some African Americans joined the Communist Party (CP) during the Great Depression, finding that this organization was an important vehicle to achieve economic survival for their families. Across the country, black activists united with the CP to fight against interracial police brutality, press for an economic redistribution in society, or protest the unjust criminalization of the thirteen men falsely accused of raping two white women in Scottsboro, Alabama. 15 As black citizens struggled to survive during the Great Depression, they pondered whether they should remain loyal to the Republican Party or cast their lot with Democratic candidate FDR and his vision for a New Deal in American society.

The New Deal and Racial Discrimination

African Americans supported President Hoover by a two-to-one margin in the 1932 election. While most African Americans still associated the Grand Old Party with Abraham Lincoln and civil rights, Hoover had an uneven record on racial justice. 16 He made black equality a plank in his campaign platform and appointed black men to serve in patronage positions and tapped black women to sit on government advisory committees. But other practices in his administration distressed African Americans. In 1930 , he permitted the War Department to segregate black and white gold star mothers on separate ships; gold star mothers were women whose sons had been killed in World War I. 17 That same year, Hoover nominated John J. Parker to the US Supreme Court. A former governor of North Carolina and Republican, Parker had once declared that African Americans should not participate in politics and publicly supported disfranchisement laws. In response, African Americans in the nation’s two largest civil rights organizations—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Association of Colored Women (NACW)—banded together to thwart Parker’s confirmation. In response to this robust lobbying, the senate narrowly voted not to confirm Justice Parker, and many scholars point to this victory as a new era in black politics. 18

Hoover’s opponent in the 1932 election, FDR, bore the burden of the Democratic Party’s long support for racial segregation and intolerance. 19 Between 1913 and 1920 , the last Democratic President, Woodrow Wilson, had installed racial segregation in the federal government and thwarted opportunities for black government workers. 20 On the surface, FDR seemed little better. A northerner who served as governor of New York, he also maintained a home in Warm Springs, Georgia, where he received therapeutic treatments for polio and seemed comfortable in the white South, a crucial region in the Democratic coalition. 21 Furthermore, FDR’s running mate was the Texas politician John Nance Garner—further evidence that FDR would likely embody the worst impulses of the Jim Crow South as a Democratic president. Although some African Americans supported FDR, most black voters remained loyal to the Republican Party. 22

Even before FDR’s inauguration, his administration began to take a different path from his predecessors on race relations. Over half of the servants who were hired to work in the White House were African American, which was the largest number in recent years. Two of the most notable were a married couple from Georgia who had met FDR in Warm Springs; Irvin McDuffie worked as FDR’s valet and his wife, Elizabeth, labored as a maid in the White House. Both Irvin and Elizabeth McDuffie became active in Washington’s black community, and they helped to humanize the Roosevelt administration to African Americans in the early 1930s by giving interviews in the press and attending White House events with black performers. However, while FDR was willing to bring black servants into the White House, he appointed no African Americans to the cabinet or other administrative positions. 23

Once FDR was inaugurated as America’s thirty-second president in March 1933 , he pursued an ambitious agenda to bring relief to unemployed persons and set the economy on a path of economic recovery. In his first hundred days, FDR created five sweeping programs, including the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which created the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). White administrators oversaw all of these programs, and most were not attuned to racial discrimination, which meant that very few black workers experienced immediate relief. For example, both the TVA and AAA were aimed at the South, and without vigilance, it was easy to deny benefits to African Americans. The AAA evicted black sharecroppers and tenant farmers off of the land they were cultivating. The CCC hired unemployed young men to labor on public works projects and its white director, a native of Tennessee, believed that young black men did not need these jobs as much as their white men. As a result, the CCC admitted fewer black men, housed them in segregated dormitories, and barred black CCC workers from most administrative positions. The TVA tried to bring rural electrification and economic development to the South, but its strict practices of racial segregation thwarted black participation. 24

The National Recovery Administration’s (NRA) program of regulated wage codes underscored how the federal government based their programs on the needs of white men and women. In theory, the NRA was intended to provide a minimum wage for worker in various industries. But in practice, the NRA did not recognize the ways that race intersected class and sex. The NRA’s cotton industry hours regulation excluded the central positions where black male workers labored, while the southern lumber industry’s wages were far lower than those wages paid in the North. Even when black workers were eligible for higher wages, employers preferred to pay this money to white workers. 25 The NRA also sought to regulate the hours and wages for hairdressers. Most white hairdressers had white clients who received their treatments during regular working hours. But black domestics who worked during the day and received their treatments in the evening comprised the clientele of most black hairdressers. Across the country, black hairdressers banded together to protest this exclusionary legislation, pointing out that black women did not have identical interests as white women. One black hairdresser in Washington, DC, even declared that the New Deal was “a white man’s law.” 26

The Social Security Act epitomized the New Deal’s negligence toward race and sex. Social Security was a revolutionary piece of legislation that granted unemployment insurance and retirement benefits to workers in the United States. It was designed to mitigate the worst effects of the Great Depression by providing income to unemployed workers and preventing poverty among the elderly. But, southern white men who were determined to preserve the South’s racial order served these on congressional committees and inserted a provision in the proposed Social Security legislation that excluded farmers and domestic workers. 27 Representatives from two major black organizations—Charles Hamilton Houston from the NAACP and George E. Haynes from the National Urban League (NUL)—testified in Congress, stressing the importance of including all black workers. 28 But when FDR signed the Social Security Act into law in 1935 , it deemed farmers and domestics ineligible, which meant that 87 percent of all-black women and 55 percent of all African American workers were excluded. 29 A broad swath of African Americans protested these exclusions, ranging from individual black workers to the NACW and the Grand Order of the Elks, but this legislation was not broadened until the 1950s. 30

During the early 1930s, the one New Deal agency that took decisive action against racial discrimination was the Public Works Administration (PWA), a massive program of construction projects. During the 1930s, the PWA spent $6 billion and built thousands of projects across the country, including airports, schools, hospitals, libraries, and public housing (see figure 1 ). 31 Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, a former president of the Chicago branch of the NAACP, headed the PWA, which was created as part of the NIRA. To express sensitivity toward race, Ickes announced that he would hire a “Special Advisor on the Status of Negroes” for the PWA and selected Clark Foreman, a white southerner. The appointment of a white man, especially when there were hundreds of qualified black men and women for this position, upset African Americans, causing them to express profound concern whether the New Deal would provide substantive change in black communities. 32 However, Ickes also sought the advice of black advisors, who counseled him on the ways that African Americans could benefit from the PWA. He tapped two black graduates of Harvard University—economist Robert Weaver and attorney William Hastie—to serve in the PWA. 33

Figure 1. Through their residency in these PWA housing complexes, African Americans were able to save money and plan for their future. “ PWA (Public Works Administration) housing project for Negroes .” Omaha, Nebraska, November 1938.

One of the most important programs that the PWA spearheaded was the construction of fifty-one public housing projects, which marked the very first time that the US government erected housing for its low-income citizens. Since segregation was rampant in the 1930s, Ickes did not propose integrated housing projects. But he designated nineteen, or one-third, of these housing projects, for African American occupancy. In cities with large black populations, such as Atlanta, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, African American families moved into affordable, new housing that was designed to be transitional and life changing. 34 In September 1933 , the NAACP lobbied Ickes to issue a non-discrimination clause in the PWA, stating that construction projects could not discriminate on the basis of race. Ickes’s advisors, including Clark Foreman, William Hastie, and Robert Weaver, supplemented this clause with a quota system, stating that all construction crews had to employ a number of black workers that was proportional to their population. They also recruited black architects to design some of these public housing complexes. 35 The success of the PWA in assisting African Americans in such a concrete way demonstrated that black advisors could make a significant difference in New Deal programs, and prompted other government agencies to hire black consultants.

Activism in the Black Cabinet

By the mid-1930s, white administrators had begun to tap black advisors for government programs with more regularity. This shift can be traced to the PWA’s success in addressing racial discrimination, as well as growing black support for New Deal programs and the Democratic Party. In 1935 , the National Youth Administration (NYA), an agency focused on finding work opportunities for young people, appointed prominent clubwoman and school president, Mary McLeod Bethune, to become the Negro Advisor, and later chair, of its Division of Negro Affairs (see figure 2 ). In taking this position, Bethune became the first black woman to head a government division. A native of South Carolina, she was the founder of the Bethune-Cookman School in Florida, a former president of the NACW, and an activist with deep networks in black women’s politics. In 1935 , Bethune founded a new civil rights organization, the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). 36 In the NYA, Bethune lobbied for African Americans to serve in leadership positions at the federal, state, and local levels. Under her watchful eye, more African Americans served in administrative positions in the NYA than any other New Deal program. And by the early 1940s, as many as 20 percent of black youth participated in NYA programs. 37 Mary McLeod Bethune also cultivated a public friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and educated her about the particular problems that African Americans faced in the United States. Through this friendship, Eleanor Roosevelt elevated her standing with African Americans and became an ally of black civil rights causes. Eleanor Roosevelt supported a federal anti-lynching bill, an end to the poll tax, and increased funding for black schools. 38

Figure 2. Mary McLeod Bethune was able to use her appointment in the New Deal to form the Black Cabinet and the NCNW. “ Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, founder and former president and director of the NYA (National Youth Administration) Negro Relations .” Bethune-Cookman College, Daytona Beach, Florida, January 1943.

Not only did Bethune assume a prominent position in the NYA and inform the First Lady about racial justice, but she also used her new status in Washington, DC, to gather a group of black consultants into the Federal Council of Negro Affairs, which became known as the Black Cabinet. Composed of lawyers, politicians, and journalists, members of the Black Cabinet advised President Roosevelt on matters related to African Americans. Some members of the Black Cabinet included the economist Robert Weaver, lawyer Charles Hastie, Pittsburgh Courier editor Robert L. Vann, who was in the Office of the Attorney General, social worker Lawrence Oxley, and CCC advisor Edgar Brown. The black press covered the Black Cabinet extensively, thereby introducing African American readers to the cohort of black professionals who advised the Roosevelt administration. By 1940 , one hundred African Americans served in administrative positions in the New Deal. But the Black Cabinet was not a formal government institution and Bethune convened its meetings in her office or apartment. 39

Members of the Black Cabinet worked in concert with civil rights organizations to pressure New Deal agencies and programs to end racial bias. For example, in 1933 , the CCC had enrolled a paltry number of young black men. But, after the NAACP put pressure on the CCC, two hundred thousand African American men participated in the program by 1940 , and one-fifth of them learned to read and write while enrolled. 40 In 1935 , Congress passed the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which took over some of the work from the PWA. The WPA’s administrator, Harry Hopkins, built on Ickes’s example by appointing a series of black advisors to design programs that would assist African Americans. 41 In the first year alone, two hundred thousand African Americans joined WPA programs, and that number climbed steadily each year. 42 The WPA constructed black schools and community centers, opened domestic service training centers, conducted adult education classes, and oversaw a myriad of arts projects (see section on “ Black Stories in the New Deal Era ”). In the rural South, African American men and women flocked to literacy classes, which enabled them to learn to read and supplement the poor education they had received in deeply underfunded schools, or even attend school for the first time in their lives (see figure 3 ). By the end of the 1930s, black illiteracy fell by 10 percent. 43

Figure 3. Older African Americans flocked to the WPA adult literacy programs. Pictured is an 82-year-old woman who is the “star pupil” in Gee’s Bend, Alabama. “ Star pupil, eighty-two years old, reading her lesson in adult class. Gee’s Bend, Alabama .” May 1939.

Despite the presence of racial advisors, however, many New Deal programs failed to address the black structural inequalities that lay at the root of American society. For example, the WPA limited black women’s employment opportunities to domestic service training programs and sewing programs, both of which paid low wages, while it enabled white women to seek opportunities in other industries, such as clerical work, gardening, and nursing. 44 Similarly, when the PWA constructed black housing projects, they engaged in slum clearance by razing black neighborhoods. This practice actually created a housing shortage for African Americans in segregated cities and paved the way for urban renewal programs in the postwar era. When Congress created the United States Housing Authority in 1937 , the bureau did not issue mortgages to African Americans in racially integrated neighborhoods. In all of these instances, New Deal programs did not touch America’s landscape of racial segregation and labor segmentation. 45

New Deal programs were especially challenged to improve the lives of rural black southerners, which was a source of continual frustration. A significant number of FDR’s economic advisors were native to the South and determined to use the New Deal as an instrument to tackle poverty in the region. The Agricultural Adjustment Act tried to increase crop prices by paying farmers to decrease their acreage. But the AAA lacked programs to assist black sharecroppers, who could not receive these payments because they were not landowners. Moreover, prominent white men who served on the AAA’s local committees crafted policies that favored white farmers over black farmers, which sometimes forced black landowners off their land and squeezed sharecroppers out of their jobs. The Resettlement Administration tried to relocate southerners to planned communities, but ultimately, only 1,393 black families were able to benefit from this program. 46 Cumulatively, the New Deal assisted black southerners by allocating money to African American schools, funding public health programs, and improving black housing. 47 While black participation in New Deal programs was uneven, there was no question that it marked a new era for African Americans and enabled them to recast their ideas about citizenship and belonging in the United States. By 1935 , 30 percent of African Americans were recipients of New Deal relief programs and many turned their political allegiances in these shifting times. 48

The 1936 election marked a major test for black politics. In his bid for a second term in office, FDR actively courted the black vote, envisioning African Americans as a part of his expanding electoral coalition that included workers, European immigrants, and white southerners. President Roosevelt was very delicate on the race question. Without supporting anti-lynching legislation publicly, he appealed to black voters by touting his record of black appointments and government programs that assisted African Americans. By the mid-1930s, black voter registration was at an all-time high in cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago, and Detroit. In southern cities, some African Americans had managed to escape the barriers of disfranchisement and formed Democratic political clubs. 49 At the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in June 1936 , thirty African Americans served as delegates, which was a first for the party. Furthermore, the black press received seats in the press box, a black minister, Marshall L. Shepard, delivered the invocation, and black politicians delivered addresses. 50 And, in the weeks before the election, FDR sent his maid, Elizabeth McDuffie, on the campaign trail to offer personal testimony about the Democratic Party’s commitment to African Americans. McDuffie traveled to midwestern cities where she held rallies and spoke to a total of fifty thousand black citizens. As the child of former slaves, McDuffie argued that the New Deal represented a second emancipation for African Americans. 51 This outreach worked and FDR was reelected in a landslide victory in 1936 . He captured 61 percent of the total vote, but he won 76 percent of the black vote. In this election, he cemented the relationship between African Americans and the Democratic Party. 52 Not all African Americans switched to the Democratic Party, however, and some black voters lamented that neither party offered a robust response to black poverty and civil rights. 53

Militant Black Protest Politics in the 1930s

While African Americans caused a major political realignment by switching from the Republican to the Democratic Parties, they also formed new protest organizations and deployed strategies of mass action in order to achieve racial justice. Early 21st-century historians point to these activities in the 1930s as evidence of a “long” civil rights movement in the United States, which helped to pave the way for the postwar black freedom struggle. 54 During the 1930s, the NAACP and NUL paid close attention to New Deal programs and put pressure on administrators to end racial bias. African Americans frequently reached out to their local branches or the national organization, and the NAACP was swift to conduct investigations and assisted thousands of African Americans across the country. 55 The NAACP had brilliant lawyers in Charles Hamilton Houston and his student at Howard University Law School, Thurgood Marshall. This legal team won landmark cases: Murray v. Maryland in 1936 and Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada in 1938 , which both whittled away at racial segregation in professional and graduate schools. 56 They also scored a victory in the Supreme Court in Hale v. Kentucky in 1938 which opened jury service to African Americans. And the national NAACP, along with local branches, aligned with the CP, despite worries about the party’s radicalism, to secure justice for the Scottsboro Nine, black teenagers who had been accused of raping two white women on a train in Alabama in 1931 . All but the youngest were given a death sentence by electrocution in Alabama courts. Ada Wright, mother of two of the accused, traveled with the CP’s International Labor Defense throughout Europe in the early 1930s to spread awareness about the case, and her speaking engagements helped to educate a global audience about the injustices of the legal system for African Americans. 57 Through mass marches, newspaper exposes, and a massive fundraising campaign, the defendants were ultimately exonerated and released from jail. 58

African Americans also formed new organizations to fight for their economic rights and political interests in the 1930s. In 1931 , black sharecroppers in Alabama established the Alabama Sharecroppers Union in connection with the CP and by 1934 , it had four thousand members. Black women evaluated the strength of their organizations and tested new strategies. In 1935 , Mary McLeod Bethune founded the NCNW, to serve as a civil rights organization for black women. The NCNW gathered members from the NACW, but also federated with sororities, church groups, and professional organizations. Seeking to distance herself from the NACW’s respectability politics, Bethune designed the NCNW to lobby for black women’s interests with a special emphasis on employment opportunities. However, the NCNW was largely a middle-class organization that did not directly assist working-class women. In 1936 , John P. Davis and Howard Professor Ralph Bunche formed the National Negro Congress (NNC) and its youth organization, the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC). The NNC and SNYC reached down below to the grassroots level, recruiting activists, students, and workers to fight for black rights. By the late 1930s, the NNC established seventy-five local chapters across the country. 59

Men, women, and especially, young people, banded together with these new protest organizations to stage militant campaigns across the country. Activists in the NNC fought to broaden New Deal programs, improve living conditions for African Americans, organize black workers into industrial labor unions, protest disfranchisement, and protect all African Americans from interracial violence, especially lynching and police brutality. 60 In Baltimore, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Washington, DC, black women and men staged Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work campaigns. Citizens picketed the white-owned stores and restaurants in black neighborhoods that did not hire black workers. 61 They also withheld their patronage from these establishments and intimidated black customers. These protests were largely successful and resulted in hundreds of jobs for unemployed and underemployed men and women, including teenagers who needed to supplement their family’s income. 62 African Americans also celebrated a major success when the Supreme Court upheld their right to picket in New Negro Alliance v. Sanitary Grocery in 1938 . These grassroots protests in the 1930s demonstrated the power of mass action and would help to inspire protests in the postwar era. 63

Not only did African Americans fight for jobs, but they also formed labor unions within different industries. In 1935 , Congress passed the Wagner Act, which upheld the right of workers to organize labor unions, participate in collective bargaining, and stage strikes, which nurtured a more supportive climate for industrial black workers. The largest black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), negotiated a contract with the Pullman Company to reduce their hours and increase their wages. 64 White labor leaders formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which organized black and white workers in mining, automobile, meatpacking, and steel industries. The CIO made racial equality central to its organization by fighting against pay scales and hiring black organizers in all of its unions. 65 The CIO also became a civil rights ally by lobbying against the poll tax, supporting a federal anti-lynching law, and fighting against labor discrimination. 66 Black tobacco workers and Red Caps both joined CIO-affiliated unions to fight for economic justice during the 1930s. 67 While black women joined some of these labor unions, they overwhelmingly assisted male workers. 68 In the 1930s, with the backing of the NNC, some black women formed a domestic workers union in New York City. But the union proved unable to improve their circumstances significantly during the Great Depression and New Deal eras, and domestic workers remained one of the nation’s most exploited groups, as they still are. 69

During the New Deal era, domestic workers suffered from abject poverty. Not only were they excluded from the Social Security Act, but white families reeling from the Depression fired servants or slashed wages. In 1935 , activists Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke wrote a landmark piece that was published in the NAACP’s organ, the Crisis , entitled “The Bronx Slave Market.” 70 This piece chronicled the desperate black servants who crowded the streets of the Bronx and the white housewives who would hire them for day wages. By terming this a “slave market,” Baker and Cooke underscored the severity of black women’s economic predicaments and the intersections of race, class, and gender during the Depression. 71 One job coveted by Washington, DC, domestic workers was to become a federal “charwoman,” a worker who cleaned government offices. The positions paid higher wages than domestic service and offered retirement benefits, and when the federal government announced it was accepting applications for these positions, between ten thousand and twenty thousand black women showed up to apply for these jobs. Many had spent the night at the station in order to obtain a good place in line. Their numbers were so large that officials had to stop distributing applications and turn toward crowd control. When women learned that they could not receive job applications, they began to express anger and frustration as white police officers were dispatched to contain the crowds of rioting women. The episode illustrated the dire economic circumstances experienced by black women and black families, the women articulating their collective desire to leave domestic service in white women’s houses and their exclusion from many New Deal programs, especially Social Security. 72

Black women and men who had suffered disproportionately from unemployment sometimes turned to the underground economy for survival. African Americans held rent parties, played numbers games, joined economic cooperatives, engaged in petty theft, and traded in sex to survive the effects of the Depression. 73 Yet these activities also made black women and men vulnerable targets for interracial police violence in cities such as Chicago, New York, and Washington, DC. 74

The visibility of African Americans in this era—whether they were marching in picket lines, staging boycotts, or rioting for jobs—underscored a new era in their culture of protest. Simultaneously, art, photography, writing, and oral history offered African Americans bountiful opportunities to recast their image in American culture and speak some of their truths.

Black Stories in the New Deal Era

Through the New Deal, the federal government first began to finance arts projects that, in turn, involved significant black engagement. Not only were writers, actors, photographers, and painters suffering from higher rates of unemployment than other categories of workers, but New Deal administrators also argued that the arts were a crucial part of the nation’s vitality. Largely through the WPA, the federal government organized the Federal Theater Project (FTP) and the Federal Writers Project (FWP), which employed writers and playwrights. The FWP also dispatched interviewers to travel to the South and interview thousands of former slaves in the United States, which became an invaluable resource for historians of slavery. Finally, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) hired photographers to travel across the country and document the lives of ordinary Americans. Not only did the FSA recruit black photographers, but white photographers also snapped searing and indelible images of African Americans. Collectively, all of these initiatives enabled African Americans to defy some of the pernicious racial stereotypes that were perpetuated against them throughout American culture. 75

African Americans participated enthusiastically in both the FWP and the FTP. During the 1920s, cities such as Chicago, New York, and Washington, DC, had witnessed the flourishing of black arts through literature, poetry, painting, film, and playwriting. These artistic communities laid the groundwork for black participation in New Deal artistic programs. 76 Both the FWP and the FTP had Negro divisions that oversaw black projects. The FTP’s Negro Division staged plays, hired black actors and directors, and took black stories seriously. Prior to the FTP, most black actors were limited to artistic opportunities related to minstrelsy. In rare cases, black actors were able to perform in the early phase of black film with auteurs, such as Oscar Micheaux. 77 The FTP’s Negro Division traveled to twenty-two cities across the country, which enabled African Americans to interact with this new, innovative type of theater. Black performers not only acted in plays with themes rooted in African American history and culture, such as racial prejudice, the Haitian Revolution, and lynching, but they also performed all-black productions of Macbeth and Swing Mikado , which reset expectations about black actors portraying historical white and Asian characters. 78

The FWP hired luminaries in black culture, including the writers Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, the scholars St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, and the poet Sterling Brown. These writers documented the contributions of African Americans to United States history and culture. 79

The gathering of ex-slave narratives may have been the most important aspect of the FWP’s work. In the mid-1930s, the last generation of enslaved men and women were about to die. Members of the FWP recognized that this project represented a transformative opportunity for interviewers to speak with the men and women who had survived the trauma of racial slavery and narrate their experiences. Prior to the ex-slave narrative project, the vast majority of historiography about racial slavery was written from the viewpoint of white masters and mistresses. By inviting former slaves to share their recollections and offer their personal testimony, the nation would be able to reckon with its traumatic past.

Between 1936 and 1938 , dozens of black and white researchers traveled to the American South to interview over two thousand former slaves. When the project had concluded, they had amassed ten thousand typed pages and thousands of hours of testimony. These interviews proved invaluable in illuminating some of the hidden worlds of slavery, including sexual violence, physical brutality, and black survival strategies. The vast majority of these former slaves had regional accents, or in some cases, spoke in black dialect. Since white interviewers conducted the majority of the interviews, power relations were imbalanced and former slaves were not as direct as they would be with black researchers, especially around issues of trauma and sexual violence. Moreover, the interviews starkly illuminated the abject poverty that former slaves experienced. 80 The ex-slave narratives offered invaluable information to future historians, who continue to use the narratives as major sources for understanding both American slavery and the disappointment of Reconstruction.

In addition to listening to African Americans through testimony, the FSA hired a series of black and white photographers, who traveled across the country to visualize African Americans and black culture in the 1930s (see figure 4 ). Photography was a revolutionary instrument that could be wielded for social change. In this era, mass culture, such as advertisements, cartoons, and films, depicted African Americans in derogatory stereotypes as lazy, immature, childlike, and dangerous. These stereotypes were not simply abstract images, but rather, evidence that fueled a social, cultural, and political narrative about who African Americans were. 81 A documentary photograph that depicted a person hard at work, then, made it that much more difficult to deny basic human rights and dignities. These photographs helped to give a human face to African Americans who were suffering as ordinary Americans. White FSA photographers, such as Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, traveled across the country and snapped indelible photographs of African Americans. These images revealed the complexities of black life across the country. 82 Gordon Parks, one of the most notable black FSA photographers, used his camera as a weapon and captured images of thousands of African Americans throughout the country. His image of Ella Watson, a charwoman in the federal government, dramatically portrayed her between an American flag and a broom, meditating on a black woman who literally mopped the floors of the federal government yet was denied access to major government programs. It is now known as the black American gothic (see figure 5 ). 83

Figure 4. In this photograph, Dorothea Lange depicts a 13-year-old sharecropper boy in Americus, Georgia, in an image that defies racial stereotypes. “ Thirteen-year old sharecropper boy near Americus, Georgia .” July 1937.

Figure 5. In his photograph of government charwoman Ella Watson, Gordon Parks meditates on a black woman who cleans government offices, yet is excluded from government programs. “ Washington, D.C. Government charwoman .” August 1942.

Marian Anderson’s 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial became one of the most significant cultural moments for African Americans during the New Deal era. Anderson was a classically trained opera singer popular among both black and white audiences. It had been customary for Anderson to perform a concert with the Howard University Music School each year in Washington, DC. But organizers struggled to find a venue that was large enough to accommodate the audience as Anderson’s fame grew. In 1939 , the Daughters of the American Revolution lent their concert space, but then rescinded the invitation, explicitly because of Anderson’s race. After a protracted battle to find a place where Anderson could perform, a coalition contacted Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, who had been an important white ally for African Americans in the New Deal. Ickes arranged for Marian Anderson to perform her concert on Easter Sunday in 1939 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where Anderson’s stunning voice sang the sweet words, “America (My Country Tis’ of Thee).” Only dedicated in 1922 , Anderson’s concert marked the first time when Americans would use the Lincoln Memorial as a site of protest. Her concert foreshadowed future civil rights demonstrations, most notably the iconic March on Washington in 1963 . 84

The Great Depression and New Deal represented a watershed moment for African Americans throughout the country and reshaped the 20th-century trajectory of black life in the United States. By 1940 , black politics had undergone a radical change. The majority of voters now identified with the Democratic Party and used the party as a vehicle for civil rights and economic justice. Through the Black Cabinet and racial advisors, the federal government now turned toward African Americans for advice on the distribution of programs. African Americans scored important legal victories in the United States with the right to serve on juries, stage pickets, and integrate some graduate and professional schools. These legal triumphs were crucial ingredients for the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. the Board of Education and the postwar black freedom struggle. Leaders such as Robert Weaver and William Hastie had experimented with non-discrimination clauses and quota systems that would pave the way for this implementation on a national level as well as the rise of affirmative action in the United States in the 1960s. At the grassroots level, black women and men formed local organizations, staged economic boycotts, picketed businesses, joined labor unions, and engaged in strikes and riots for better jobs. Black women brought their deep organizational networks to all of these campaigns and played a transformative role in the struggle for racial equality and justice. Culturally, African Americans were able to defy racial stereotypes and illuminate the beautiful complexities and contradictions of the black experience in the United States.

Discussion of the Literature

Since the institutionalization of African American History in the 1960s, scholars have devoted significant attention toward the periods of the Great Depression and New Deal eras, and this historiographical literature reflects a rich and complex body of work. Early historians focused on the relationship between African Americans and the New Deal, especially as it related to region. Raymond Wolters’s essay—“The New Deal and the Negro,” in the edited volume, The New Deal: The National Level —and Harvard Sitkoff’s important essay—“The Impact of the New Deal on Black Southerners,” in another edited volume, The New Deal and the South —both offer an excellent overview about each New Deal program and the precise ways that African Americans did and did not benefit from these government initiatives. 85 Nancy Grant’s TVA and Black Americans: Planning for the Status Quo and Owen Cole’s The African-American Experience in the Civilian Conservation Corps , both followed in this vein by centering on specific government programs. 86 In several important works—such as Harvard Sitkoff’s A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue ; John Kirby’s Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era: Liberalism and Race ; and Nancy Weiss’s Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR —historians have debated the reasons for black political realignment in the 1930s, with some pointing to the New Deal’s economic benefits and others emphasizing the Democratic Party’s (slow) embrace of civil rights. 87 Scholars in this period also highlighted the white allies in the New Deal who spoke out for racial equality, including Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, FSA administrator Will Alexander, and especially, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Patricia Sullivan’s Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era added complexities and nuance to this literature. 88 Finally, in the 1980s and 1990s, historians explored the black alliance with the CP, with Mark Naison’s Communists in Harlem during the Depression and Robin D. G. Kelley’s brilliant Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Depression . 89

In the early 21st century , historians have focused less on electoral realignment and interracial alliances, and more on the ways that African Americans worked at the grassroots level to wage an early civil rights movement in the United States. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s seminal article, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” credits leftist black protest during the Depression and the New Deal with the success of the postwar black freedom struggle even as it struggled to survive during the Cold War and rise of the New Right. 90 In Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights , Erik Gellman builds on Robin Kelley’s work to chronicle the grassroots organizing of the NNC and SYNC in cities such as Richmond, Virginia, Washington, DC, and Chicago. 91

In this turn toward the flourishing of black activism in this period, historians have particularly emphasized women’s participation, stretching from their leadership in organizations and government programs to their grassroots advocacy for social change. In Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta , Karen Ferguson puts gender at the center of her analysis of the Great Depression and New Deal, while in For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois , Lisa G. Materson analyzes the political activism of both migrant women and clubwomen. 92 In “Running with the Reds: African American Women and the Communist Party during the Great Depression,” LaShawn Harris analyzes the complex ways that black women forged relationships with the CP. 93 Other historians have chronicled black women’s widespread participation in housewife boycotts, labor riots, and underground economies. Finally, cultural historians have analyzed black participation in New Deal arts programs. Lauren Rebecca Skarloff’s Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era analyzes the relationship between black participation in arts programs and visions of democracy. 94

Primary Sources

Government sources.

For African American experiences with the New Deal, the National Archives’ trove of records are a good place to start. The majority of these collections are housed at the National Archives II in College Park, Maryland, and many have finding aids that list the Negro division for each branch and contain a wealth of materials. Additionally, New Deal Agencies and Black Americans offers a curated set of documents that can be a helpful entry point for further research. 95 These documents are available on microfilm or on LexisNexis. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Censuses can illuminate information about the lives of ordinary Americans and whether they were the beneficiary of government programs. These census records are available at any branch of the National Archives or through ancestry.com.

Manuscript Collections

Organizational records from the NAACP, the NCNW, the NUL, the NNC, and the BSCP, all offer information about black activities in this era and all are available in the manuscript reading room at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. The George Meany Memorial Archive at the University of Maryland, College Park, has collections related to the American Federation of Labor-CIO unions. The Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, has the papers of the Housewives’ League of Detroit. Additionally, many of the leaders of this era—including Nannie Helen Burroughs, Charles Hamilton Houston, Irvin and Elizabeth McDuffie, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Robert Weaver—have personal papers that are rich with information. The Houston papers are at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University in Washington, DC; the Burroughs papers at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC; the Bethune papers at the Amistad Research Center at Tulane in New Orleans; the Irvin and Elizabeth McDuffie papers at Robert W. Woodruff Library at Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia; and the Robert Weaver papers at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library in New York City. Finally, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York, has an immense amount of materials related to African American participation in New Deal programs, as well Eleanor Roosevelt’s correspondence with a range of black individuals and organizations.

Newspapers & Periodicals

The 1920s and 1930s were a golden age in the black press. To chronicle some of the political activities as well as everyday experiences, newspapers such as the Baltimore Afro-American , the Chicago Defender , the New York Amsterdam News , the Norfolk Journal and Guide , and the Pittsburgh Courier are all excellent resources, and they are digitized through ProQuest. Additionally, the Crisis and Opportunity were two periodicals that offered updates about black life and activism in the 1930s.

Photographs

The FSA photographs are outstanding sources for gathering information on African Americans. The Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress have all of the FSA photographs, and the digital website Photogrammar from Yale has digitized the photographs in an excellent database that is searchable by region, photographer, and subject. Finally, the WPA Slave Narratives at the Library of Congress offer an important assessment of some of the material circumstances of African Americans in this era.

Further Reading

• Kirby, John B. Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era: Liberalism and Race . Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980.
• Ferguson, Karen . Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
• Gellman, Erik S. Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
• Grant, Nancy . TVA and Black Americans: Planning for the Status Quo . Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.
• Greenberg, Cheryl . “Or Does It Explode?” Black Harlem in the Great Depression . New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
• Kelley, Robin D. G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.
• Materson, Lisa G. For the Freedom of Her Race: African American Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
• McMahon, Kevin . Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
• Murphy, Mary-Elizabeth B. Jim Crow Capital: Women and Black Freedom Struggles in Washington, D.C., 1920-1945 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Naison, Mark . Communists in Harlem during the Depression . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.
• Sitkoff, Harvard . A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue . New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
• Skarloff, Lauren Rebecca . Black Culture in the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
• Sullivan, Patricia . Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
• Watts, Jill . The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics during the Age of Roosevelt . New York: Grove Atlantic, 2020.
• Weiss, Nancy . Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.
• Wolcott, Victoria . Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

1. Major historiographical works on African Americans in the Great Depression and New Deal include: Raymond Wolters, Negroes and the Great Depression: The Problem of Economic Recovery (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970); Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) ; John B. Kirby, Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era: Liberalism and Race (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980) ; Nancy J. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983) ; Nancy Grant, TVA and Black Americans: Planning for the Status Quo (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990) ; Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists in the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Cheryl Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?” Black Harlem in the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) ; Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996) ; Karen Ferguson, Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002) ; Lauren Rebecca Skarloff, Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); and Jill Watts, The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics during the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Grove Atlantic, 2020) .

2. US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Population , Vol. IV, Occupations by States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1933), 25–34.

3. Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks , 35; Kelley, Hammer and Hoe , 35–36; and Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liverlight, 2013), 163.

4. Greta de Jong, A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900–1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 90–91; Joe William Trotter Jr., “From a Raw Deal to a New Deal?, 1929–1945,” in To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans , eds. Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 417.

5. Irma Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900–1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).

6. Definitive works on the first Great Migration include James Grossman, Land of Hope: Black Southerners and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Joe William Trotter Jr., ed., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Milton C. Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Kimberly L. Philips, Alabama North: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Victoria Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Douglas Flaming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America (Berkeley, CA: University Press of California, 2005); Davarian L. Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); and Beth Tompkins Bates, The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

7. Grossman, Land of Hope ; Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “Discontented Black Feminists: Prelude and Postscript to the Passage of the Nineteenth Amendment,” in We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible: A Reader in Black Women’s History , eds. Darlene Clark Hine, Wilma King, and Linda Reed (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1995), 487–504; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “In Politics to Stay: Black Women Leaders and Party Politics in the 1920s,” in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History , eds. Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol Dubois (New York: Routledge, 2000), 292–306; Nikki J. Brown, Private Politics and Public Voices: Black Women’s Activism from World War I to the New Deal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); and Lisa G. Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 60–184.

8. Trotter, “From a Raw Deal to a New Deal?,” 409.

9. Wolcott, Remaking Respectability , 170; Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?,” 65–66; and Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, To Ask for an Equal Chance: African Americans in the Great Depression (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 27; and Shawn Leigh Alexander, W. E. B. DuBois: An American Intellectual and Activist (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 93.

10. Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks , 34–39.

11. Ferguson, Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta , 51; and Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?,” 47–56.

12. Trotter, “From a Raw Deal to a New Deal?,” 412.

13. Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land ; Ferguson, Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta , 48–54; and Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy, Jim Crow Capital: Women and Black Freedom Struggles in Washington, DC, 1920–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 113–117 .

14. Darlene Clark Hine, “The Housewives’ League of Detroit: Black Women and Economic Nationalism,” in Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism , eds. Nancy A. Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 223–241; Annelise Orleck, “‘We Are That Mythical Thing Called Public’: Militant Housewives during the Great Depression,” Feminist Studies 19, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 147–172; Wolcott, Remaking Respectability , 181–183; and Bettye Collier-Thomas, Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion (New York: Knopf Press, 2000), 303–305; and Keona Ervin, Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2017), 39–42.

15. Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983) ; Kelley, Hammer and Hoe ; LaShawn Harris, “Running with the Reds: African American Women in the Communist Party during the Great Depression,” Journal of African American History 94, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 21–43; Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Gellman, Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012) ; and Murphy, Jim Crow Capital , 75–109.

16. Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks , 19–30; and Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln , 22–25.

17. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln , 16–17.

18. Kenneth J. Goings, “ The NAACP Comes of Age”: The Defeat of Judge John J. Parker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Free Press, 2009), 138–142; and Murphy, Jim Crow Capital , 37–38.

19. Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks , 19–30; and Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln , 22–25.

20. For information on Woodrow Wilson’s segregation of the federal government, see Eric S. Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson’s America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

21. Kaye Lannings Minchew, A President in Our Midst: Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Georgia (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2016).

22. Kirby, Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era , 16–18; Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks , 19–30; and Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln , 22–25.

23. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln , 38, 104; Adrian Miller, The President’s Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families, from the Washingtons to the Obamas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 133–136; and Mary-Elizabeth Murphy, “‘The Servant Campaigns’: African American Women and the Politics of Economic Justice in Washington, D.C. in the 1930s,” Journal of Urban History 44, no. 2 (March 2018): 189–190.

24. Raymond Wolters, “The New Deal and the Negro,” in The New Deal: The National Level , eds. John Braeman, Robert H. Bremmer, and David Brody (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1975), 170–178; Harvard Sitkoff, “The Impact of the New Deal on Black Southerners,” in The New Deal and the South , eds. James C. Cobb and Michael Namorato (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984), 117–124; Grant, TVA and Black Americans ; Owen Cole, The African-American Experience in the Civilian Conservation Corps (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999); Trotter, “From a Raw Deal to a New Deal?,” 411–416; and Neil M. Maher, Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 109–110.

25. Sitkoff, “Impact of the New Deal on Black Southerners,” 120–121; and Wolters, “The New Deal and the Negro,” 180–185.

26. Tiffany Gill, Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 70; and Murphy, Jim Crow Capital , 119–121.

27. Mary Poole, The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Katznelson, Fear Itself , 163–174; Murphy, Jim Crow Capital , 122–123.

28. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln , 166–168.

29. US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States , 25–34.

30. Murphy, “The Servant Campaigns,” 190–191.

31. Wolters, “The New Deal and the Negro,” 186–187; and Kirby, Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era , 17–18.

32. Sullivan, Days of Hope , 24–40.

33. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln , 67–68.

34. For a discussion of the PWA housing projects, see Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 85–110, 147–176; Ferguson, Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta , 186–220; and Richard Rothenstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liverlight, 2017), 20–23.

35. Marc W. Kruman, “Quotas for Blacks: The Public Works Administration and the Black Construction Worker,” Labor History 16 (Winter 1975): 37–51; Paul D. Moreno, From Direct Action to Affirmative Action: Fair Employment Law and Policy in America, 1937–1997 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997); Sigmund Shipp, “Building Bricks without Straw: Robert C. Weaver and Negro Industrial Employment, 1934–1944,” in Historical Roots of the Urban Crisis: African Americans in the Industrial City, 1900–1950 , eds. Henry Louis Taylor Jr. and Walter Hill (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), 209–226; and Wendell E. Pritchett, Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City: The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

36. Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 148–154; and Rebecca Tuuri, Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 15–18.

37. Wolters, “The New Deal and the Negro,” 193.

38. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln , 143–145; Kirby, Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era , 76–105; and Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 2: The Defining Years, 1933–1938 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1999).

39. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln , 136–156; Kirby, Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era , 106–151; and Watts, The Black Cabinet .

40. Sitkoff, “Impact of the New Deal on Black Southerners,” 124.

41. Trotter, “From a Raw Deal to a New Deal?,” 418–419.

42. Wolters, “The New Deal and the Negro,” 189.

43. de Jong, A Different Day , 90–91; Trotter, “From a Raw Deal to a New Deal?,” 417.

44. Ferguson, Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta , 121–128; and Murphy, “The Servant Campaigns,” 194–198.

45. Trotter, “From a Raw Deal to a New Deal?,” 415; and Ferguson, New Deal Politics in Black Atlanta , 165–185.

46. Sitkoff, “Impact of the New Deal on Black Southerners,” 127.

47. Sullivan, Days of Hope , 41–69; and Ferguson, Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta .

48. Wolters, “The New Deal and the Negro,” 189.

49. Trotter, “From a Raw Deal to a New Deal?,” 431; and Elizabeth Gritter, River of Hope: Black Politics and the Memphis Freedom Movement, 1865–1954 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014).

50. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln , 184–193.

51. Murphy, “The Servant Campaigns,” 191–193.

52. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln , 204–208.

53. Leigh Wright Rigueur, The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 13–51.

54. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1233–1263.

55. Sullivan, Lift Every Voice , 145–206.

56. Mark V. Tushnet, The NAACP’s Strategy against Segregated Education, 1925–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 49–81; and Sullivan, Lift Every Voice , 207–211.

57. James A. Miller, Susan D. Pennybacker, and Eve Rosenhaft, “Mother Ada Wright and the International Campaign to Free the Scottsboro Boys, 1931–1934,” American Historical Review 106, no. 2 (April 2001): 387–430.

58. Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969); Kelley, Hammer and Hoe ; James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994); and Sullivan, Lift Every Voice , 145–151.

59. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe ; Trotter, “From a Raw Deal to a New Deal?,” 151–155; White, Too Heavy a Load , 157–165; Tuuri, Strategic Sisterhood , 16–20; and Gellman, Death Blow to Jim Crow .

60. Gellman, Death Blow to Jim Crow .

61. In Harlem, the movement was known as the “Jobs for Negroes” movement. For the historiography on the Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work campaigns, see Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode,” 114–139; Michele F. Pacifico, “‘Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work’: The New Negro Alliance of Washington,” Washington History 6, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 1994): 66–88; Ervin, Gateway to Equality , 79–96; and Traci Parker, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and the Civil Rights Movement from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 61–65; I fixed it to be 61-65

62. Marcia Chatelain, South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 96–129.

63. Pacifico, “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work,” 82.

64. Beth Tompkins Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 126–147.

65. Robert H. Ziegler, The CIO: 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and Michael Goldfield, “Race and the CIO: The Possibilities for Racial Egalitarianism during the 1930s and 1940s,” International Labor and Working-Class History 44 (Fall 1993): 1–32.

66. Trotter, “From A Raw Deal to a New Deal?,” 422–424.

67. Robert Rodgers Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); and Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

68. Melinda Chateauvert, Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998).

69. Danielle Phillips, “Cleaning Race: Irish Immigrant and Southern Black Domestic Workers in the Northeast United States, 1865–1930,” in U.S. Women’s History: Untangling the Threads of Sisterhood , eds. Leslie Brown, Jacqueline Castledine, and Ann Valk (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017), 36–27; and Vanessa May, Unprotected Labor: Household Workers, Politics, and Middle-Class Reform in New York, 1870–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 146–173.

70. Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke, “The Bronx Slave Market,” Crisis 42, November 1935.

71. Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 76–77; and LaShawn Harris, “Marvel Cooke: Investigative Journalist, Communist, and Black Radical Subject,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 6, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 91–126.

72. Murphy, Jim Crow Capital , 133–138.

73. Wolcott, Remaking Respectability ; and LaShawn Harris, Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 123–166.

74. Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 82; Murphy, Jim Crow Capital ; and Clarence Taylor, Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 51–58.

75. Skarloff, Black Culture in the New Deal , 1–14.

76. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Random House, 1981); Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes ; and Treva B. Lindsey, Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C . (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017).

77. Jacqueline Jajuma Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005); and Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes , 91–154.

78. Skarloff, Black Culture in the New Deal , 33–80.

79. Trotter, “From a Raw Deal to a New Deal,” 419; and Skarloff, Black Culture in the New Deal , 81–122.

80. William F. McDonald, Federal Relief Administration and the Arts: The Origins and Administrative History of the Arts Projects of the Works Progress Administration (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1969); Stephanie J. Shaw, “Using the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives to Study the Impact of the Great Depression,” Journal of Southern History 69, no. 3 (August 2003): 623–658; and Skarloff, Black Culture in the New Deal , 81–122.

81. Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); and Skarloff, Black Culture in the New Deal .

82. Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange: A Life beyond Limits (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 259–278.

83. Gordon Parks, A Choice of Weapons (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1965); Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992); Deborah Willis, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); and Richard J. Powell, Maurice Berger, and Deborah Willis, Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work, 1940–1950 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2018).

84. Scott Sandage, “A Marble House Divided: The Lincoln Memorial, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Politics of Memory,” Journal of American History 80, no. 1 (June 1993): 135–167; and Raymond Arsenault, The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009).

85. Wolters, “The New Deal and the Negro”; and Sitkoff, “Impact of the New Deal on Black Southerners.”

86. Grant, TVA and Black Americans ; and Cole, African-American Experience .

87. Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks ; Kirby, Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era ; and Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln .

88. Sullivan, Days of Hope .

89. Naison, Communists in Harlem .

90. Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement.”

91. Gellman, Death Blow to Jim Crow .

92. Ferguson, Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta ; and Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race .

93. LaShawn, “Running with the Reds.”

94. Skarloff, Black Culture and the New Deal .

95. John B. Kirby, ed., New Deal Agencies and Black Americans (Arlington, VA: University Publications of America, 1984).

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Writing Between Worlds: Navigating My African and American Identities on the Page

Itoro bassey on the gift of being understood.

If you had known me when I was much younger, and asked how I identified, I would have told you that I was Black. This would have been my way to acknowledge my Blackness in America, being that I was born and raised in this country, while simultaneously acknowledging that I was born to Nigerian immigrants, which usually meant that my particular experience as a Black person in America was markedly different from most of my African American peers. I was not from one of those families that traveled back home every year like some cousins I knew, which further solidified my distance from my parents’ homeland and cultural practices.

Though I couldn’t fully claim the experience of African Americans whose people had been enslaved and brought to this country, their collective struggles and triumphs had taught me a lot about how I wanted to show up in the world. I had a great respect for what they had been through as a collective, and the beauty they had produced in the face of such odds, and, for me, the particular reality of navigating the US while Black was more resonant in my consciousness than my Nigerian identity.

In high school I was introduced to authors like Toni Morrison and Richard Wright. I read Jazz in a literature class as the token BIPOC book that had made its way into the syllabus, and Native Son in an Intro to Law class, where the teacher used the character of Bigger Thomas as a case study into the mind of a criminal. It would be years later, when I was training to become a teacher myself, that it would hit me how cruel this particular teacher had been in her final assessment of the main character. I’d break down in tears over this revelation, and say a word of gratitude for the struggles fought to make it possible for me to have access to authors like Morrison and Wright, even if in such a limited manner.

I suspect the teacher’s hope was to plant a seed that would make me criminalize Blackness, but instead, I developed a curiosity about my personal connection to a larger Black experience within an interconnected—and at times fraught—tapestry of understandings. Perhaps I could not fully claim the experiences of African Americans who had produced prolific writers like Morrison and Wright; and neither could I fully claim the stories told by Nigerian writers like Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Adichie. But at the very least I could be in conversation with these writers from my particular vantage point.

I’ve been asked quite a few times: Who do you write for? Usually I’m asked this question in reference to identifying who in the marketplace would be interested in reading my work. It’s become a complex question to answer, because usually, I’m mining decades of absence, dispersion and grief within characters who are trying to find the language to say the unsayable across space and time. And sometimes, if they could say that which could be said, they may choose to not say it at all, because the people they’re speaking to already have the scaffolding to understand their experience. If the scaffolding doesn’t exist, then this gap becomes a part of the story, a tension within the relationship.

When I lived in Nigeria for three years, there was a saying many people would use to convey this sentiment of what is intrinsically understood because one has been steeped in a particular experience shared among those who have lived it.

We know ourselves.

I was speaking to a friend about the teacher who introduced me to Native Son in high school. I’ll call this friend Naimah. She was born in the US to an immigrant Nigerian mother and an African American father.

“This teacher asked every Black kid in that class—and you know there were only two of us—did we ever feel bad about being Black.” I said, enraged. “And of course we say yes, because we think she cares about what’s happening to us. And then the next day she draws a Venn diagram on the chalkboard breaking down Bigger Thomas’ mind, making the case that he was primed to become a criminal. And then she wanted a fifteen-hundred-word essay on how one becomes a criminal using Bigger Thomas as the example. That was the only Black book we ever read in her class! Can you believe?”

Naimah, who usually had an answer for everything, shook her head and said,

“Girl, I know. These people… God will deal with them.”

“God will deal with them,” is what many Nigerians said to express powerlessness in the face of an impossible situation. They simply give it over to a higher power and move on.

From Naimah’s response, it was clear she had her own set of grievances that she had moved on from. I felt great relief in knowing that I was understood in this friendship. The type of pain I was still holding was known, and it didn’t require further explanation.

What steers my writing, is a quest to find the we . My experience straddling both Blackness in America and alienation from my parents’ homeland has made me crave literature where those of us living within the African Diaspora, and those on the outside, can learn about and from each other. It isn’t about writing in a way that only humanizes Black people to white people and non-Black people eager to learn about different experiences—it’s also about telling stories where Black people, no matter where we find ourselves, can be witnessed by each other.

It’s my hope to show the intimacy of how one shifts between worlds and different understandings. This is the experience for those of us who exist in that place Chicana feminist and writer Gloria Anzaldúa called the third space. Anzaldúa was describing the growing consciousness emerging within Latinx communities finding themselves between two homelands; grappling with being from neither here, nor there.

“I am participating in the creation of yet another culture,” she writes in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza , “a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and the planet.”

Anzaldúa’s tremendous groundwork has helped me become a writer unafraid of writing worlds within worlds while recognizing how I exist in all of them.

When someone reads my work, the most exciting thing a reader can tell me suggests understanding, and being understood: “Say less.”

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Civil rights activist Sybil Morial, wife of New Orleans’ first Black mayor, dead at 91

FILE - Attorney Ernest Morial, right, gets a hug from his wife, Sybil, after apparently winning an outright victory in his race for a House seat in the Louisiana Legislature, Nov. 5, 1967, in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Jack Thornell, File)[ASSOCIATED PRESS/Jack Thornell]

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Sybil Haydel Morial, a civil rights activist, widow of New Orleans’ first Black mayor, Ernest “Dutch” Morial, and mother to former Mayor, Marc Morial, has died at age 91.

Her family announced her death Wednesday in a statement issued by the National Urban League, which Marc Morial serves as president and CEO. Details on the time and cause of death were not released.

“She confronted the hard realities of Jim Crow with unwavering courage and faith, which she instilled not only in her own children but in every life she touched,” the statement said.

Morial was born Nov. 26, 1932, and raised by her physician father and schoolteacher mother in a deeply segregated New Orleans. She later met the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Boston and returned home inspired to do her part in the civil rights movement.

In her 2015 memoir, “Witness to Change: From Jim Crow to Empowerment,” Morial described how she and her friends, including the future mayor of Atlanta, Andrew Young, were chased out of New Orleans’ City Park by a police officer because of their skin color.

Attorney Ernest Morial, right, speaks on the telephone as his wife, Sybil, looks on after he won an outright victory in his race for a House seat in the Louisiana Legislature, in New Orleans, Nov. 5, 1967. (AP Photo/Jack Thornell)

Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS/Jack Thornell

She attended Xavier University, one of the city’s historically Black higher learning institutions, before transferring to Boston University, where King was pursuing a divinity degree and guest-preaching at churches.

Later, while traveling home, she and other Black passengers had to move to the baggage car when the train crossed the Mason-Dixon line.

“The barricade that kept us out of schools, jobs, restaurants, hotels, and even restrooms would have to be dismantled brick by brick, law by law,” she wrote.

She was in Boston in 1954, the year the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision overturning racial segregation in schools.

“Those of us from the South … We wanted to go back home because we wanted to be a part of change. We knew change was coming,” she said during a 2018 interview with Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

That summer, she tried to integrate New Orleans’ other leading universities — Tulane and Loyola. She signed up for summer sessions at both, and attended classes for nearly a week at Tulane while they waited for her transcript to arrive from Boston, but was eventually told that she could not enroll because of her race.

At Loyola, she was told that “according to state law, Negroes cannot attend the same school as whites.”

Her return home in 1954 also brought her face-to-face with the man she would marry: Ernest Nathan “Dutch” Morial. The two fell into an intense discussion about the court’s recent desegregation decision during a summer vacation book club.

They wed the next year and she supported her husband thereafter, raising five children and teaching school while he ran for the state Legislature in 1968 and for mayor in 1978.

She was often the one who had to shield their children from the resulting racist threats, racing for the phone to answer it first.

During Morial’s first mayoral term, National Guard troops were stationed at their house to protect the family during the 1979 police strike that led to the cancellation of Mardi Gras parades.

Sybil Morial also became a city power player in her own right.

She founded the Louisiana League of Good Government, which helped Black people register to vote at a time when they still had to pass tests such as memorizing the Preamble to the Constitution. She also was a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging a Louisiana law that barred public school teachers from being involved in groups fighting segregation, according to the LSU Women’s Center.

She held various administrative positions over 28 years at Xavier and served on numerous boards and advisory committees across the city.

“Few women have played such an outsized role in the recent history of New Orleans,” former Mayor Mitch Landrieu said in a social media post. Current Mayor LaToya Cantrell called Morial “a New Orleans treasure and trailblazer” and said the city’s flag would fly at half-staff in her honor.

As part of the 1984 World’s Fair in New Orleans, she championed the building of a pavilion dedicated to African American contributions and experiences in American history, and in 1987 she was the executive producer of “A House Divided,” a documentary about desegregation in New Orleans.

After her husband died unexpectedly in 1989 at age 60, Morial wrote that she briefly flirted with the idea of running for mayor in 1994. Instead, her son Marc, then 35, ran and won, launching a second generation of Morial mayors.

Funeral plans have not been announced. Sybil Morial is survived by her five children, seven grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.

Associated Press Writer Kevin McGill contributed to this story.

Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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Collection Civil Rights History Project

Voting rights.

When Reconstruction ended in 1877, states across the South implemented new laws to restrict the voting rights of African Americans. These included onerous requirements of owning property, paying poll taxes, and passing literacy or civics exams. Many African Americans who attempted to vote were also threatened physically or feared losing their jobs. One of the major goals of the Civil Rights Movement was to register voters across the South in order for African Americans to gain political power. Most of the interviewees in the Civil Rights History Project were involved in voter registration drives, driving voters to the polls, teaching literacy classes for the purposes of voter registration, or encouraging local African Americans to run as candidates.

Robert G. Clark, Jr. , explained the retaliation against those who dared to register voters in his interview. When Clark worked as a teacher in Belzoni, Mississippi, a local minister named Reverend Lee was shot and killed for registering voters in the mid-1950s. He also remembered the difficulties his father faced in his career for taking the same risk: “My father was a schoolteacher. He was fired in Holmes County because he was teaching voter registration classes… he could not get another job in Mississippi. See, what they would do, they would take your name and give your name to the Sovereignty Commission. That Sovereignty Commission would send those names to all of the superintendents of education.” The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was created by an act of the Mississippi State Legislature in 1955 as a backlash against the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case and the perceived encroachment of the federal government’s power. The commission investigated activists across the state, using a network of informants, economic reprisals, and threats. Clark was later elected as the first black Representative elected to the Mississippi State House after Reconstruction, a result of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Rosie Head remembers her attempt to register to vote in Mississippi in 1964, when the local clerk used police dogs to try to intimidate her and other women. She says, “The chancellor clerk had said to me, ‘Now, I know you know better!’ He knew my grandparents. ‘I’ve known your people for years and years, and I know you know better. What are you doing out here anyway?’ And so, I told him what I wanted. And he said, ‘You go home and do like your mama and your grandmama did. You don’t need to come out here. This ain’t for black folk.’” The clerk would not approve her test and it was not until the Voting Rights Act passed the following year that federal registrars found her records and allowed her to vote.

Voter registration drives also brought African American communities together to work for a common cause. John Churchville was registering voters when he came across two rival teenage gangs fighting in Americus, Georgia. He stepped into the fight to stop it and recalls, “And they just stopped.  I said, ‘This is what white folks want you to do!  Why are you doing this?!  We’re here to help you to register so you can get some power for real and stop fighting each other.’ They stopped gang warring.  We were able to recruit them to first register themselves, and then to negotiate a peace treaty and help us go out and recruit people to register and vote.”

Voting was a lifelong dream for many older African Americans in the South. Charles Siler worked on a voter registration project in Baton Rouge in 1962. He remembers an elderly Mrs. Williams, whom he took to register, her third attempt. He took a gun with him, under his coat, for protection.  He remembers, “I was prepared to shoot somebody if they had decided to go that far. They didn’t, because when she walked in, she was in charge. They moved aside. She walked—and when she walked into the Registrar of Voters office, I was told, ‘You can’t go in there.’ I said, ‘No problem.’  I stood back against the wall… I was waiting. And I was standing there like this and I was pressing that little Beretta because I wanted—when she came out she had this smile on her face. Okay? That made all of it worth it. It was, you know, as good as it could get at that moment, because she got what she wanted and she got to vote before she died. And, you know, you think about being eighty-four in 1962. Her parents had been slaves… to her, it was important.”

The long struggle for African American voting rights was part of a centuries-old effort to ensure that the United States Constitution applied to all citizens, not just white male landowners. Despite the passage of many constitutional amendments, federal and state laws, and Supreme Court cases, the full participation of every American citizen in elections is an ideal that has never been reached. John Rosenberg worked in the 1960s as an attorney for the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, primarily investigating voting rights violations and abuses in the South. He laments the 2013 Supreme Court case that repealed section IV of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which provided special protections for voters in states in the South with a history of violations. He advises, “Now whether it is congressional work or lawsuits that are going to be filed in some of the cases, you saw in a number of these states that they immediately started coming out with voter ID laws or other kinds of statutes, other laws that are obviously intended to turn the clock back and make it more difficult for people, minorities, to register to vote and that kind of thing. … I think the decision is wrong, but … that’s our system and we don’t go into the streets, we start working on trying to change it.”