The Civil Rights Movement: Beginnings

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

Transcript

1. …beginnings The Civil Rights Movement
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. It’s when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back.”
18. 2 Questions
19. Ultimate Causes?
20. Proximate Causes?
21. CRM ≠ MLK
22. 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
23. 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 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 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 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 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
24. <1>
25. Ultimate: Preconditions for Racial Change
26. Ideological shifts
27. Liberal Environmentalism
28. Nazi ideology
32. Cold War Competition
33. Migration From Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series (1940-41)
35. > North, > cities
36. 1910: 89% (80% rural) S
38. 1970s >80% (urban)
39. Why?
40. 50% 1960
41. Urban power base
42. Black Churches
43. Af-Am Church
44. Economic Growth
45. United Negro College Fund
46. Black Colleges
47. Black High Schools
48. Black High Schools
49. Af-Am High Schools Photos by James Karales, courtesy of the High Museum of Art, ATL
50. Af-Am High Schools
51. Af-Am High Schools
52. Af-Am High Schools
53. 15,000 1930
54. 75,000 1950
55. E.O. 9981 Desegregation of the Military
56. Sgt. Isaac Woodard, 1946 3:49
58. Judge J. Waties Waring
59. Pres. Harry S Truman
61. “Segregation is per se inequality”
63. The Murder of Emmett Till 1955
68. 4:00
73. Legal Defense
74. National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples
75. Thurgood Marshall
76. Supreme Court Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
77. “We consider the underlying fallacy of [Plessy’s] argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority…. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
78. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
79. Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954)
80. “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” as segregated schools are “inherently unequal.” Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954)
81. majority Northerners
82. 20%
84. “[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…
85. “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.”
86. June 11, 1963
88. “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.”
89. </1>
90. <2>
91. Proximate: Anti- Segregation Tactics
92. “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.”
93. Montgomery Bus Boycott 1955
94. Rosa Parks
96. Women’s Political Council
97. Jo Ann Robinson President, WPC
98. SCLC Southern Christian Leadership Council
99. 381 days
100. “unConstitutional” Alabama, 1956
101. “Freedom Rides”
102. CORE Congress of Racial Equality
107. SNCC: Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee
108. 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
109. 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
110. </2>
111. <3>
112. RESULTS: Legislative Triumph
113. Civil Rights Act 1964
114. Voting Rights Act 1965
115. 43% registered 1964
116. 62% registered 1969
118. 300 black mayors 1965
119. 300 black mayors 1980
122. 72 black reps 1965
123. 4200 black reps 1987
124. </3>
128. “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.
129. 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.”
130. “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….
131. “You can hit all dem home runs over dem short fences, but you can’t take that black off yo’ face.”
132. 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.
133. I was tired of being invisible.
134. “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
136. “[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?’
137. 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
138. 3:50
139. 0:25
141. “Ain’t much matter what happens tomorrow, ‘cause we men, ain’t we?”
143. “I was a changed being after that fight…I was nothing before; I was a MAN NOW.”
144. Hank Willis Thomas, I Am A Man, 2009 Liquitex on Canvas