Civil Rights: Segregation, Martin Luther King and the 1964 Act
A Country Two Americas
In 1954, around 90 years after the abolition of slavery, around 17 million African-Americans lived under Jim Crow — a system of state and local laws that segregated schools, drinking fountains, hospitals, swimming pools, restaurants, lavatories, buses and railway carriages. In southern states, fewer than 5% of eligible black voters were registered. Lynching had killed thousands of black Americans since Reconstruction. The Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v Ferguson had given the system legal cover under the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’. Civil-rights victories between 1954 and 1968 were not the work of one leader, one bus boycott or one act of Congress. They required mass struggle — and the willingness of ordinary black Americans to face arrest, beating and worse.
Under Jim Crow, schools, buses, restaurants and drinking fountains were segregated across southern states. Fewer than 5% of eligible black voters were registered in the South in 1954. Civil-rights victories between 1954 and 1968 came from mass action, not just key leaders.
Brown v Board and Little Rock
The first decisive break came on 17 May 1954. In Brown v Board of Education the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that segregated schools were unconstitutional, overturning Plessy v Ferguson. NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall argued the case using research showing that segregation harmed black children psychologically. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that ‘separate educational facilities are inherently unequal’.
Implementation was another matter. Southern states pursued ‘massive resistance’. In September 1957 nine African-American students attempted to enrol at Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas. Governor Orval Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to block them. Faced with images of bayonet-wielding soldiers turning back schoolchildren, President Eisenhower — reluctant to act — sent in 1,000 paratroopers from the 101st Airborne to escort the ‘Little Rock Nine’ into school for the year. Federal supremacy was established but in southern schools desegregation crawled: by 1964, only around 2% of southern black students were in formerly all-white schools.
Montgomery and the Rise of King
On 1 December 1955, Rosa Parks — a 42-year-old NAACP secretary in Montgomery, Alabama — refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white passenger. She was arrested. The local NAACP and a young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott. For 381 days, around 40,000 black residents of Montgomery walked, carpooled or rode mule-drawn carts rather than ride the buses. The boycott bankrupted the bus company. In November 1956 the Supreme Court ruled segregation on city buses unconstitutional.
King became the national face of peaceful protest. Drawing on Gandhi’s teaching and Christian theology, he founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957. Sit-ins began at a Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch counter in February 1960 and spread to 54 cities; around 70,000 students — black and white — took part. The Freedom Rides of May 1961 sent integrated busloads of activists into the Deep South to test the desegregation of inter-state bus terminals. They were attacked by white mobs in Anniston and Birmingham; the Kennedy administration eventually sent federal marshals to protect them.
In April 1963, King launched a campaign in Birmingham, Alabama — one of the most segregated cities in America. Police commissioner ‘Bull’ Connor used dogs and high-pressure fire hoses against teenage protestors in May. Television images of children being knocked off their feet by water cannon shocked the nation. King was arrested and wrote his ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ defending non-violent direct action. On 28 August 1963, around 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom; King delivered the ‘I have a dream’ speech. In March 1965 marchers at Selma, Alabama, were attacked by state troopers on Edmund Pettus Bridge in scenes broadcast on national television (‘Bloody Sunday’). The combination of mass non-violent protest and state-sponsored violence pushed Congress and President Johnson into action.
Malcolm X and the Black Power Movement
Not all African-Americans accepted King’s commitment to non-violence and integration. Malcolm Little, born 1925, became Malcolm X after joining the Nation of Islam in prison. As the Nation’s most powerful speaker through the 1950s and early 1960s, he attacked white supremacy directly, advocated black self-defence (‘by any means necessary’), and rejected integration with what he called ‘a burning house’. He left the Nation in 1964 after a falling-out with Elijah Muhammad, made the pilgrimage to Mecca and began moving towards a more orthodox Islam and a position closer to mainstream civil rights. He was assassinated in February 1965 by Nation of Islam gunmen.
After 1965, with the major civil-rights laws passed but urban black poverty unchanged, the Black Power Movement grew. Stokely Carmichael coined the slogan in 1966; the Black Panther Party, founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California, in October 1966, ran community programmes (free breakfasts for around 20,000 children) alongside armed patrols of police in black neighbourhoods. At the 1968 Mexico Olympics, sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised black-gloved fists during the medal ceremony. Riots tore through Watts (Los Angeles, 1965, 34 dead), Newark and Detroit (1967, 43 dead in Detroit) and 100 American cities after King’s assassination in April 1968.
The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968
The legislative breakthroughs came under President Johnson. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (signed 2 July) banned segregation in public places (hotels, restaurants, swimming pools, theatres) and discrimination in employment. The Voting Rights Act of August 1965 outlawed the literacy tests and intimidation that had kept southern black voters off electoral rolls; black voter registration in Mississippi rose from around 7% in 1964 to around 67% by 1969. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 (the Fair Housing Act, signed days after King’s death) banned racial discrimination in renting and selling housing — tackling the redlining that had locked black families out of suburbs. Together the three acts dismantled the legal structure of Jim Crow.
Implementation remained slow. Schools, despite Brown, remained largely segregated by neighbourhood. Police violence and economic inequality continued. By the early 1970s the formal civil-rights movement had won its central legal battles but new questions — affirmative action, busing, urban poverty — had taken its place.
A recurring weakness is collapsing civil rights into ‘Martin Luther King had a dream and signed the Civil Rights Act’. The legal victories required ordinary people to risk their lives. Around 40,000 walked in Montgomery for 381 days. Around 70,000 took part in the sit-ins. Tens of thousands of black voters in Mississippi faced beating and arrest to register. The leaders — King, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Stokely Carmichael — mattered but only because mass action made their leadership consequential. The 1964 Civil Rights Act would not have been signed without Birmingham’s televised police violence; the 1965 Voting Rights Act would not have passed without Selma. Federal action followed mass struggle, not the other way around.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act banned segregation in public places and employment discrimination, after Birmingham. The 1965 Voting Rights Act outlawed literacy tests, after Selma. The 1968 Fair Housing Act banned housing discrimination, after King’s assassination.