Height no NAACP Legal Defense Fund efforts to overturn segregation laws (1 Jan 1930 Jahr – 31 Dez 1969 Jahr)

Beschreibung:

As it took shape during World War II and the early Cold War, the campaign against racial injustice proceeded along two tracks: at both grassroots and governmental levels. On the grassroots side, a loose network of organizations — churches, labor unions, and activist groups — inspired hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens to join the movement. On the government side, civil rights lawyers and sympathetic lawmakers worked within legislative and judicial bodies, from the local to the federal, to dismantle the legal apparatus of segregation, piece by piece. Legal activists were armed with the Bill of Rights and the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution, which guaranteed equal rights under the law to all U.S. citizens (Fourteenth Amendment) and the right to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” (Fifteenth Amendment). But those guarantees had been largely ignored or contradicted for African Americans since Reconstruction following the Civil War. In its most basic aims, the civil rights movement sought to restore force to those constitutional guarantees of racial equality.

At mid-century, a majority of the 15 million African Americans lived under a system of racial segregation and economic exploitation. African Americans made up roughly 10 percent of the overall population but comprised between 30 and 50 percent of the population of several southern states. A legal regime of social segregation and political suppression, commonly known as Jim Crow, prevailed in every aspect of life in the South, where two-thirds of all African Americans lived in 1950. Black southerners could not eat in restaurants patronized by whites or use the same waiting rooms at bus stations. Public transportation, parks, libraries, and schools were rigidly segregated by custom or by law. Even drinking fountains were labeled “White” and “Colored.”


Segregation in Virginia, 1962

As the law of the land in most southern states, racial segregation (known as Jim Crow) required the complete separation of blacks and whites in most public spaces. The “white only” sign on a restaurant door shown in this 1962 photograph in Hampton, Virginia, was typical. Everything from restaurants, drinking fountains, public waiting areas to libraries, public parks, schools, restrooms, and even cola vending machines was subject to strict racial segregation.


Underlying economic and political structures further marginalized black citizens. Virtually no African Americans could work in city or state government, and the best jobs in the private sector were reserved for whites. Black workers labored “in the back,” cleaning, cooking, stocking shelves, and loading trucks for the lowest wages. Rural African Americans largely labored as sharecroppers or tenant farmers, systems that kept them stuck in poverty without access to education or other means of improvement. Political participation was low, with less than 20 percent of otherwise eligible black citizens able to cast votes as a result of barriers such as poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation, fraud, and the “white primary” (intraparty elections in which only whites could vote). Black people made up more than a third of the population in states such as Mississippi, South Carolina, and Georgia but had no political voice. This near-total disfranchisement gave whites power that was disproportionate to their numbers — and disproportionate representation in the U.S. Congress as well.

In the North, racial segregation was less acute but just as real and routine. Segregation outside the South followed a geographic pattern: whites increasingly lived in suburbs or more affluent areas of cities, while African Americans were restricted to declining downtown neighborhoods. Often these crumbling districts were the only areas in which African Americans could find housing at all. The result was what many termed ghettos: all-black districts characterized by low wages, inadequate city services, and perversely high rents. Few jobs other than the most menial were open to African Americans. Journalists, accountants, engineers, and other highly educated graduates of all-black colleges and universities often labored as railroad porters or cooks because jobs commensurate with their skills remained for whites only. These conditions produced a self-perpetuating cycle that kept most black citizens trapped on the social and economic fringe.

African Americans did find a measure of freedom in the North and West compared to the South. They could vote, participate in politics, and more often access public accommodations. But systemic racial segregation was deeply entrenched in the country as a whole. In northern cities such as Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia, for instance, white homeowners used various tactics — from police harassment to thrown bricks, burning crosses, bombs, and mob violence — to keep African Americans from living near them. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and banks denied African Americans the easy credit that was funding the growth of suburbs, and federal urban renewal policies often demolished predominantly black neighborhoods (see “Two Societies: Urban and Suburban” in Chapter 25). Racial segregation was a national, not regional, problem.

Since racial injustice had been part of American life for hundreds of years, why did the civil rights movement arise when it did? The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909, had begun challenging racial segregation in a series of court cases in the 1930s. Other organizations, such as Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association in the 1920s, had attracted significant popular support generations before (see “Marcus Garvey and the UNIA” in Chapter 21). These forerunners were important, but several factors came together in the middle of the twentieth century to create a much larger movement.

Southern Democrats stonewalled any congressional action on civil rights throughout the 1950s, so activists turned to northern state legislatures and to the federal courts in search of a breakthrough. Outside the South, the foremost obstacle to black progress was persistent job and housing discrimination. The states with the largest African American populations, and hence the largest share of black Democratic Party voters, became testing grounds for legislation aimed at ending such discriminatory practices.

Success depended on coalition politics. African American activists forged alliances with trade unions and liberal organizations such as the American Friends Service Committee (a Quaker group), among many others. Progress was slow and often only came after long, unglamorous struggles to win votes in state capitals such as Albany, New York; Springfield, Illinois; and Lansing, Michigan. The first fair employment laws had come in New York and New Jersey in 1945, but a decade passed before other states with significant black populations passed similar legislation. Antidiscrimination laws in housing proved even more difficult to pass, with most progress not coming until the 1960s. These legislative campaigns in northern states received little national attention, but they were instrumental in laying the groundwork for legal equality outside the South.


The suppression of black voting rights in the South meant that the region’s state legislatures were closed to the kind of organized political pressure deployed in the North. Activists looked instead to federal courts for a foothold against Jim Crow. In the late 1930s, NAACP lawyers Thurgood Marshall, Charles Hamilton Houston, and William Hastie laid a strategic foundation for challenging racial discrimination. They pursued legal actions chosen to prod courts to use the Fourteenth Amendment’s “equal protection” clause, with the eventual goal of overturning the 1896 Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine.

Marshall was the great-grandson of slaves. Of modest origins, his parents instilled in him a faith in law and the Constitution. After his 1930 graduation from Lincoln University, a prestigious African American institution near Philadelphia, Marshall applied to the University of Maryland Law School. Denied admission because the school did not accept black applicants, he enrolled instead at the all-black Howard University School of Law. There Marshall was a student of Houston’s and Hastie’s, both of whom were professors, and the three forged an intellectual partnership that would change the face of American legal history. Marshall, with critical strategic input from Houston and Hastie, would argue most of the NAACP’s landmark cases.

Thurgood Marshall was one of the most influential legal thinkers of the twentieth century. As director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund during the 1940s and 1950s, he helped dismantle the legal underpinnings of racial discrimination and segregation — he argued the Brown case, among dozens of others, for the NAACP. In 1967, he was appointed by President Johnson to the U.S. Supreme Court. Daisy Bates was a journalist and black freedom activist whose reporting in the black press in the 1950s was widely read and influential. She headed the Arkansas NAACP and played a prominent role on the national NAACP board. Here, Marshall and Bates sit on the steps of the Supreme Court in 1958 with some of the “Little Rock Nine,” the young men and women who risked their lives to desegregate public schools in Arkansas.


Marshall, Houston, Hastie, and six other NAACP attorneys filed suit after suit, deliberately selecting their cases to bring before the courts only those most likely to produce a legal breakthrough. Slowly, with arduous effort, the strategy bore fruit. In 1936, Marshall and Houston won a state case that forced the University of Maryland Law School to admit qualified African Americans — a ruling of obvious significance to Marshall. Eight years later, in Smith v. Allwright (1944), Marshall convinced the U.S. Supreme Court that all-white primaries were unconstitutional. In 1950, with Marshall once again arguing the case, the high court ruled in McLaurin v. Oklahoma that universities could not segregate black students from others on campus. None of these cases produced swift changes in the daily lives of most African Americans, but each struck at the legal foundation of segregation. In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson would appoint Marshall to the Supreme Court — the first African American to achieve that honor.

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