1. Chapter 29: Civil Rights and Uncivil Liberties1947 to 1969
U.S. A NARRATIVE HISTORY, EIGHTH EDITION
DAVIDSON • DELAY • HEYRMAN • LYTLE • STOFF
Civil Rights and Uncivil Liberties 1947 to 1969
“Largely excluded from the prosperity of the 1950s, African
Americans and Latinos undertook a series of grassroots efforts
to gain the legal and social freedoms denied them by racism
and, in the South, an entrenched system of segregation.”
What’s to Come
The Civil Rights Movement
A Movement Becomes a Crusade
Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society
Youth Movements
The Civil Rights Movement (1)
The Changing South and African AmericansLabor shortage
drove mechanized cotton pickingSouthern economy integrated
into the national economyDecline in job opportunities for black
southerners
The NAACP and Civil RightsThurgood Marshall
Initially, NAACP chose not to attack head-on the
Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” decision in Plessy v.
Ferguson
The Civil Rights Movement (2)
When the Illinois Central Railroad attempted to end segregation
by taking down “colored” and “white” signs in its waiting
rooms, the city of Jackson, Mississippi, jumped in, ordering
Robert Wheaton, a black city employee, to paint new signs, as
two white supervisors looked on. © AP Photo
The Civil Rights Movement (3)
The BrownDecisionBrown v. Board of Education of Topeka

2. (1954)
NAACP’s change in tactics in 1950
Directly confronted “separate but equal”
doctrinePlessy OverturnedDesegregation
carried out “with all deliberate speed”“Southern
Manifesto”
Issued by 19 U.S. senators and 81 representatives to
reestablish legalized segregation
The Civil Rights Movement (4)
Latino Civil RightsAmerican GI Forum and League of United
Latin American Citizens (LULAC)
Supported legal challenges to school
segregationDelgadoand segregated schools
Delgado et al. v. Bastrop et al.Southwest states
recognized just two races: black and whiteHernández v.
Texasand desegregation
“[Chief Justice Earl] Warren’s reasoning made it possible for
Latinos to seek redress as a group rather than as individuals.”
The Civil Rights Movement (5)
Attorney Gus Garcia was one of the key leaders of the American
GI Forum, founded by Mexican American veterans to pursue
their civil rights. He and his colleagues successfully appealed
the conviction of Pete Hernández before the Supreme Court in
1954. Photo: UTSA Special Collections –ITC © San Antonio
Express-News/ZUMA Press
The Civil Rights Movement (6)
A New Civil Rights StrategyRosa Parks
Bus boycottMartin Luther King Jr.Nonviolence as a
strategy
Little Rock and the White BacklashchoolintegrationNine black
students met by a mobEisenhower federalized the National
GuardGovernor closed schools in defiance

3. The Civil Rights Movement (7)
Governor Faubus of Arkansas called out the National Guard to
prevent African American students from integrating Little
Rock’s Central High School. Once President Eisenhower
federalized the Guard, soldiers stayed at the school to protect
the nine students who dared to cross the color line. © John
Bryson/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
A Movement Becomes a Crusade (1)
Sit-ins
Riding to FreedomNewer civil rights organizations
SCLC; CORE; SNCCFreedom riders attacked
Kennedy had hedged on the promise of civil rights
legislation
Civil Rights at High TideJames MeredithKing’s “Letter from
Birmingham Jail”March on Washington
A Movement Becomes a Crusade (2)
In May 1961, a mob in Montgomery, Alabama, surrounded the
Negro First Baptist Church where Martin Luther King Jr. was
leading an all-night vigil. King put in a call to Attorney General
Robert Kennedy, who sent 400 federal marshals to keep order.
©Bettmann/Getty Images
A Movement Becomes a Crusade (3)
In Birmingham, Alabama, firefighters used high-pressure hoses
to disperse civil rights demonstrators. The force of the hoses
was powerful enough to tear bark off trees. Photographs like
this one aroused widespread sympathy for the civil rights
movement. © Bettmann/Getty Images
A Movement Becomes a Crusade (4)
The Fire Next TimeTragedy in Dallas: JFK assassinated, Nov.
22, 1963LBJ and the Civil Rights Act of 1964Voting Rights Act
of 1965
Black Powerfacto segregationNation of Islam

4. Malcolm XBlack PowerBlack Panthers
A Movement Becomes a Crusade (5)
Malcolm X. ©AP Photo
A Movement Becomes a Crusade (6)
Violence in the StreetsRiots
Harlem; Rochester; Watts area of L.A.; Chicago;
Newark; Detroitwon because we made them pay attention to
us.”
MAP 29.1: CIVIL RIGHTS: PATTERNS OF PROTEST AND
UNREST
The first phase of the civil rights movement was confined
largely to the South, where the freedom riders of 1961
dramatized the issue of segregation. Beginning in the summer of
1964, urban riots brought the issue of race and politics home to
the entire nation. Severe rioting would again follow the murder
of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, after which the worst
violence subsided. (background photo): Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Division [LC-DIG-ppsca-08102]
Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society (1)
Johnson’s liberal faith
The Origins of the Great SocietyDiscovering poverty
Michael Harrington’s The Other
America(1962)Economic Opportunity Act, 1964
The Election of 1964Promised a “Great Society”
which poverty and racial injustice no longer
existedJohnson won by a landslide
Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society (2)
Lyndon Johnson’s powers of persuasion were legendary. He
applied the “Johnson treatment” (as here, in 1957, to Senator
TheodoreGreen) whenever he wanted people to see things his
way. Few could say no, as he freely violated their personal

5. space and reminded them who dominated the situation. ©George
Tames/The New York Times/Redux Pictures
Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society (3)
The Great SocietyPrograms in educationMedicare and
MedicaidImmigration reform
Immigration Act of 1965Prejudice toward Latin
AmericansEnvironment
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962)National
Wilderness Preservation System Act, 1964Evaluating the Great
Society
High-water mark of interventionist government
Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society (4)
"Powerful Insecticide, Harmless to Humans," reads the truck's
sign. Convinced that pesticides such as DDT posed no threat,
public health and agriculture officials sprayed lands with a
reckless abandon that spurred Rachel Carson to advocate curbs
on pesticide use. © Bettmann/Getty Images
GROWTH OF GOVERNMENT, 1955 to 1990
Government has been a major growth industry since World War
II. Most people think of “big government” as federal
government. But even during the Great Society, far more people
worked in state and local government. (background photo)
©DRB Images, LLC/iStockphoto RF
Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society (5)
The Reforms of the Warren CourtProtecting due process
Right to legal counselMiranda rightsReflections of
liberal social climate
Overturned ban on sale of contraceptives
(Griswold)Banning school prayerPrinciple of “one person, one
vote”
“Although Lyndon Johnson and Congress led the liberal crusade
in the 1960s, the Supreme Court played an equally significant

6. role.”
Youth Movements (1)
Activists on the New Left Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS)Free Speech MovementYoung Americans for Freedom
(YAF)
Vatican II and American CatholicsPope John XXIII and Vatican
II
Dealt with issues of social change, such as poverty,
nuclear war, atheism, and birth controlEcumenism
Catholics would seek understanding with other
Christians
Youth Movements (2)
Edie Black from Smith College was one of hundreds of middle-
class students who volunteered during Freedom Summer of
1964. Many students returned to their campuses in the fall
radicalized, ready to convince others to join them in finding
alternatives to “the system.” ©1976 Matt Heron/Take Stock/The
Image Works
Youth Movements (3)
Members of Young Americans for Freedom protest at the
offices of IBM in St. Louis, for trading with communist nations
in Eastern Europe. Though less prominent than student activists
on the left, members of the YAF proved to be the seedbed of a
generation of conservatives who would gain influence in the
1970s and 1980s. ©Bettmann/Getty Images
Youth Movements (4)
The Rise of the CountercultureSpiritual matters aroused secular
rebels
Timothy LearyCommunesUnconventional drugsKen
Kesey (One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest)Tom Wolfe (The
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)

7. Youth Movements (5)
The Rock RevolutionBob DylanThe BeatlesSoul music
The West Coast SceneWest Coast importance in counterculture
First “Be-In”Woodstock Music Festival (1969)
Youth Movements (6)
The Beatles had a major impact on men’s style as well as on
popular music. This 1963 photo shows their “mod” look popular
first in England. Later they adopted a hippie look.
©Bettmann/Getty Images
Youth Movements (7)
Some 400,000 people converged on the Woodstock Music
Festival in the summer of 1969. These two came with their
psychedelic VW Microbus. ©AP Photo
The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American
People, 6/e
Alan Brinkley, Columbia University, Copyright year: 2010
Debating the Past
Chapter Thirty-One: The Ordeal of Liberalism
Where Historians Disagree - the Civil Rights Movement
The civil rights movement was one of the most important events
in the modern history of
the United States. It helped force the dismantling of legalized

8. segregation and
disenfranchisement of African Americans, and also served as a
model for other groups
mobilizing to demand dignity and rights. And like all important
events in history, it has
produced scholarship that examines the movement in a number
of different ways.
The early histories established a view of the civil rights
movement that remains the most
widely accepted. They rest on a heroic narrative of moral
purpose and personal courage by
which great men and women inspired ordinary people to rise up
and struggle for their
rights. This narrative generally begins with the Brown decision
of 1954 and the Montgomery
Bus Boycott of 1955, continues through the civil rights
campaigns of the early 1960s, and
culminates in the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Among
the central events in this
narrative are the March on Washington of 1963, with Martin
Luther King, Jr.'s famous "I
Have a Dream Speech," and the assassination of King in 1968,
which has often symbolized
the end of the movement and the beginning of a different, more
complicated period of the

9. black freedom struggle. The key element of these narratives is
the central importance to the
movement of a few great leaders, most notably King himself.
Among the best examples of
this kind of narrative are Taylor Branch's powerful studies of
the life and struggles of King,
Parting the Waters (1988) and Pillar of Fire (1998), as well as
David Garrow's important
study, Bearing the Cross (1986).
Few historians would deny the importance of King and other
leaders to the successes of the
civil rights movement. But a number of scholars have argued
that the leader-centered
narrative obscures the vital contributions of ordinary people in
communities throughout the
South, and the nation, to the struggle. John Dittmer's Local
People: The Struggle for Civil-
Rights in Mississippi (1994) and Charles Payne's I've Got the
Light of Freedom (1995) both
examine the day-to-day work of the movement's rank and file in
the early 1960s and argue
that their efforts were at least as important as those of King and
other leaders. The national

10. leadership helped bring visibility to these struggles, but King
and his circle were usually
present only briefly, if at all, for the actual work of
communities in challenging segregation.
Only by understanding the local origins of the movement, these
and other scholars argue,
can we understand its true character.
Scholars also disagree about the time frame of the movement.
Rather than beginning the
story in 1954 or 1955 (as in Robert Weisbrot's excellent 1991
synthesis Freedom Bound or
William Chafe's remarkable 1981 local study Civilities and
Civil Rights, which examined the
Greensboro sit-ins of 1961), a number of scholars have tried to
move the story into both
earlier periods and later ones. Robin Kelly's Race Rebels (1994)
emphasizes the important
contributions of working-class African Americans, some of
them allied for a time with the
Communist Party, to the undermining of racist assumptions.
These activists, he shows,
organized some of the earliest civil rights demonstrations—sit-
ins, marches, and other
efforts to challenge segregation—well before the conventional
dates for the beginning of the

11. movement. Gail O'Brien's The Color of the Law (1999)
examines a 1946 "race riot" in
Columbia, Tennessee, arguing for its importance as a signal of
the early growth of African-
American militancy, and the movement of that militancy from
the streets into the legal
system.
Other scholars have looked beyond the 1960s and have
incorporated events outside the
orbit of the formal "movement" to explain the history of the
civil rights struggle. A growing
literature on northern, urban, and relatively radical activists has
suggested that focusing too
much on mainstream leaders and the celebrated efforts in the
South in the 1960s diverts
our view from the equally important challenges facing northern
African Americans and the
very different tactics and strategies that they often chose to
pursue their goals. The
enormous attention historians have given to the life and legacy
of Malcolm X—among them
Alex Haley's influential Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
and Michael Eric Dyson's Making

12. Malcolm (1996)—is one example of this, as is the increasing
attention scholars have given
to black radicalism in the late 1960s and beyond and to such
militant groups as the Black
Panthers. Other recent literature has extended the civil -rights
struggle even further, into the
1980s and beyond, and has brought into focus such issues as the
highly disproportionate
number of African Americans sentenced to death within the
criminal justice system. Randall
Kennedy's Race, Crime, and the Law (1997) is a particularly
important study of this issue.
Even Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the great landmark
of the legal challenge to
segregation, has been subject to re-examination. Richard
Kluger's narrative history of the
Brown decision, Simple Justice (1975), is a classic statement of
the traditional view of
Brown as a triumph over injustice. But others have been less
certain of the dramatic
success of the ruling. James T. Patterson's Brown v. Board of
Education: A Civil Rights
Milestone and its Troubled Legacy (2001) argues that the
Brown decision long preceded any

13. national consensus on the need to end segregation and that its
impact was far less decisive
than earlier scholars have suggested. Michael Klarman's From
Jim Crow to Civil Rights
(2004) examines the role of the Supreme Court in advancing
civil rights and suggests,
among other things, that the Brown decision may actually have
retarded racial progress in
the South for a time because of the enormous backlash it
created. Charles Ogletree's All
Deliberate Speed (2004) and Derrick Bell's Silent Covenants
(2004) both argue that the
court's decision did not provide an effective enforcement
mechanism for desegregation and
in many other ways failed to support measures that would have
made school desegregation
a reality. They note as evidence for this view that American
public schools are now more
segregated—even it not forcibly by law— than they were at the
time of the Brown decision.
As the literature on the African-American freedom struggles of
the twentieth century has
grown, historians have begun to speak of civil rights
movements, rather than a single,
cohesive movement. In this way, scholars recognize that

14. struggles of this kind take many
more forms, and endure through many more periods of history,
than the more traditional
accounts suggest.