Why did it take nearly a century for African Americans to be able to exercise their Constitutional rights? Ultimate and Proximate factors are featured.

1. The Civil Rights
Movement
…beginnings

2. The Civil Rights
Movement
…beginnings

5. “I am an
“invisible man.
“No, I am not a spook like those who
“ haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I
“ one of your Hollywood ectoplasms.

7. I am a man of substance, of flesh and
bone, and liquids, and I might even be
said to possess a mind.
I am invisible, understand, simply
because people refuse to see me….
When they approach me they see only my
surroundings, themselves, or figments of
their imagination — indeed, everything
and anything except me.

9. Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of
biochemical accident to my epidermis.
That invisibility to which I refer occurs
because of a peculiar disposition of the
eyes of those with whom I come into
contact.
A matter of construction of their inner
eyes, those eyes with which they look
through their physical eyes upon reality.

11. I am not complaining, nor am I
protesting either.
It is sometimes advantageous to be
unseen, although it is most often rather
wearing on the nerves. Then, too, you’re
constantly being bumped against by
those of poor vision.
Or again, you often doubt
if you really exist.

13. You wonder whether you aren’t simply a
phantom in other people’s minds. Say, a
figure in a nightmare which the sleeper
tries with all his strength to destroy.

15. It’s when you feel like this that,
out of resentment,
you begin to
bump people
back.”

16. It’s when you feel like this that,
out of resentment,
you begin to
bump people
back.”

17. 2 Questions

18. Ultimate Causes?

19. Proximate Causes?

20. CRM ≠ MLK

21. Gallup Poll (AIPO) [February, 1965]
“How would you rate the job that...
Martin Luther King... has done in the
fight for Negro rights?”
94% Positive
3% Negative
3% Not sure

22. Gallup Poll (AIPO) [August, 1963]
“What are your feelings about [the]
proposed mass civil rights rally to be held
in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963?”
23% Favorable
60% Unfavorable
17% No opinion

23. <1>

24. Ultimate:
Preconditions
for Racial
Change

25. Ultimate:
Preconditions
for Racial
Change
1. Ideological shifts
2. Nazi ideology & the Double “V”
3. Cold War
4. Migration & Urban Power
5. Economic Growth & Education

26. Ultimate:
Preconditions
for Racial
Change
6. Protest Organizations
7. U.S. Military
8. Emmett Till
9. The Brown decision (SCOTUS)

27. Ideological shifts

28. Liberal
Environmentalism

29. Nazi ideology

33. Cold War Competition

34. Migration

35. > North, > cities

36. 1910: 89% (80% rural) S

38. 1970s >80% (urban)

39. Why?

40. 50%
1960

41. Urban power base

42. Af-Am Church

43. Af-Am Church

44. Economic Growth

45. United Negro
College Fund

46. Af-Am Colleges

47. Af-Am High Schools

48. Af-Am High Schools

49. Af-Am High Schools

50. Af-Am High Schools

51. Af-Am High Schools

52. 15,000
1930

53. 75,000
1950

54. Protest Organizations

55. National Association for
the Advancement of
Colored Peoples

56. Thurgood Marshall

57. 1948

58. Sgt. Isaac Woodard, 1946

60. Judge J. Waties Waring

61. Pres. Harry S Truman

62. “Segregation is per se inequality”

64. The Murder of
Emmett Till

65. Supreme Court
Brown v. Board of Education
of Topeka, Kansas (1954)

66. majority
Northerners

67. 20%

69. “[F]rom this Cradle of the Confederacy,
this very Heart of the Great Anglo-
Saxon Southland…we sound the drum
for freedom as have our generations of
forebears before us done, time and time
again through history…

70. “Let us…send our answer to the tyranny
that clanks its chains upon the South.
In the name of the greatest people that
have ever trod this earth, I draw the line
in the dust…and I say…segregation
today…segregation tomorrow…
segregation forever.”

71. “They [white
southerners] are
not bad people.
All they are
concerned about
is…that their
sweet little girls
are not required
to sit in school
alongside some
big overgrown
Negroes.”

72. </1>

73. <2>

74. Proximate:
Anti-
Segregation
Tactics

75. Proximate:
Anti-
Segregation
Tactics
1. Bus Boycott(s)
2. Freedom Rides
3. Sit-ins
4. Etc.

76. “I know the one thing we did right
Was the day we started to fight.
Keep your eyes on the prize,
Hold on, hold on.”

77. Montgomery
Bus Boycott

78. Rosa
Parks

80. Women’s
Political Council

81. Jo Ann Robinson

82. SCLC
Southern
Christian
Leadership
Council

83. 381 days

84. “unConstitutional”
Alabama, 1956

85. CORE
Congress of
Racial Equality

87. “Freedom Rides”

91. Gallup Poll (AIPO) [May, 1961]
“Do you approve or disapprove of what
the ‘Freedom Riders’ are doing?”
22% Approve
61% Disapprove
18% No opinion

92. SNCC:
Student Non-violent
Coordinating Committee

93. Gallup Poll (AIPO) [May, 1961]
“Do you think ‘sit-ins’ at lunch counters,
‘freedom buses’, and other
demonstrations by Negroes will hurt or
help the Negro’s chances of being
integrated in the South?”
57% Hurt
28% Help
16% No opinion

94. </2>

95. <3>

96. RESULTS:
Legislative Triumph

97. Civil Rights Act
1964

98. Voting Rights Act
1965

99. 36% registered
1964

100. 65% registered
1969

101. 300 black mayors
1965

102. 300 black mayors
1980

104. 72 black reps
1965

105. 4200 black reps
1987

106. </3>

110. “We had breakfast while we were waiting for
the rain to stop, and I [was] sitting with the
[Indianapolis] Clowns in a restaurant behind
Griffith Stadium and hearing them break all
the plates in the kitchen after we were
finished eating. What a horrible sound.

111. Even as a kid, the irony of it hit me: here we
were in the capital in the land of freedom
and equality, and they had to destroy the
plates that had touched the forks that had
been in the mouths of black men.
If dogs had eaten off those plates,
they’d have washed them.”

112. “There was often a hate letter or two in the
mail, and I was always concerned about
Barbara and the kids being abused when
they went to the ballpark….

113. “You can hit all dem
home runs over dem
short fences, but you
can’t take that
black off yo’ face.”

114. Returning to the South took some of the boy
from Mobile out of me, and replaced it with a
man who was weary of the way things were.

115. I was tired of being invisible.

116. “I was the equal of any
ballplayer in the
world, damn it, and if
nobody was going to
give me my due, it was
time to grab for it.”
– Henry Aaron

119. “[W]e shouldn’t have to
say black lives matter.
We should be able to take
it for granted. In the
1780s the British Society
for the Abolition of
Slavery adopted as its
official seal a woodcut of
a kneeling slave above a
banner that read,
‘Am I Not A Man
And A Brother?’

120. More than a hundred
years later, black
sanitation workers in
the Poor People’s
Campaign answered
the slave’s question
with signs worn
around their necks that
read: ‘I Am A Man.’”
– Michelle Alexander
December, 2015

121. February 24th, 2018

122. 0:25

123. 3:50

124. “Ain’t much
matter what
happens
tomorrow,
‘cause we men,
ain’t we?”

126. “I was a changed being after that
fight…I was nothing before;
I was a MAN NOW.”