Period 8 Topic 3: The Civil Rights Movement

Welcome everybody. Today we're going to talk about how a powerless group managed to use the innovative tactics and seize power in the United States. We're going to look at the Civil Rights Movement, Period A, Topic 3. Civil Rights Movement, most of the time in most textbook chapters in US history textbooks, we'll start the story with the Brown versus Board of Education decision in 1954 and then they'll usually take it out to 1968 when Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated and they'll usually try to point out that like 1965 there tends to be a turning point, a transition to evolution in the movement but I've just quickly listed a bunch of big events that happen here and we'll dive into these as we go further. So our first key question is trying to get us to look at some things that happened before Brown versus Board of Education and look at the momentum that the Civil Rights Movement is gaining in the 1940s and then the 1950s. So in the 1940s there's a lot of activity during World War II. There's a lot of black men who go off and fight in Europe and they are raising awareness about discrimination. They have the double v for victory campaign, victory at home, victory abroad, a fill up Randolph is leading a potential march on Washington. He gets to have a meeting with FDR. He advocates to end discrimination and federal defense contractor jobs which is successful there. The NAACP membership, that organization that W.E.B. Du Bois helped launch, it's membership skyrockets during World War II. It increases ninefold and they start to win some cases in the Supreme Court. They were challenging the grandfather clause a couple decades earlier and then they start to take on the white primary and then they start tackling the issue of segregation and education and they start actually at the graduate school level. They're challenging states to say if it's constitutional to create separate but equal facilities and you are, let's say, creating a law school for white people but then you're not having a law school for black people then that's not constitutional. So they start at challenging often colleges at the graduate school level and they're winning some victories there. A new group called the Congress of Racial Equality or Corps comes along during World War II. James Farmer helps launch that organization out of the North and Chicago and they're going to be a pioneer in the sit-in style of protests. They're going to help organize the freedom rides in 1961. And then President Truman will do something important for the Civil Rights Movement. He will desegregate the United States military. That was something that A.Philip Randolph asked for during World War II didn't quite happen until a couple years after World War II. Truman and the country was shocked by a vicious beating of a black veteran. His name is Isaac Woodard and you can see his picture on the left there. Isaac Woodard had his eyes gouged out by a police baton after he had a verbal conflict with a bus driver. And police were called to the scene and brutally beat him. Truman demanded a civil rights investigation and out of that he made the decision to desegregate the United States Armed Forces and that was in 1948. In the 1950s obviously the Brown vs. Board decision captures a lot of attention in 1954. It had overturned the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson decision in which the Supreme Court had said it is constitutional to create separate facilities and they created that phrase separate but equal. And so it gave a lot of legal backing to segregation. The Congress's board of 1954 overturned that and it said those separate facilities are unconstitutional. Martin Luther King Jr. rose at parks become famous in Montgomery, Alabama during this year long bus boycott in Montgomery. The Supreme Court also will step in in that case and rule in their favor. It also demonstrates the country the power of a boycott and how committed the African American community of Montgomery was. And WACP organizes an integration into Little Rock Arkansas High School and the nine black students that integrate that high school become known as the Little Rock Nine. And this was the first time I think that a civil rights organization had managed to capture the nation's attention through the power of the TV. And so a lot of television networks came and filmed these nine students in their attempts to integrate Little Rock High School. And people were shocked by how they were treated. There's these famous images of white parents yelling and shouting and harassing these students as they just tried to go to high school. And there's also the governor of Arkansas, Orville Fowlbus trying to block their attempted integration efforts. He calls up the National Guard and tries to stop them. And that forces the president to white eyes and how it act. He ends up calling up the 100th force airborne to escort these students into Little Rock High School. So those were the big civil rights things happening in the 1950s. But while the NAACP is winning battles in the courts, there's not a whole lot changing on the ground. There's just, you know, there's this picture I have on the right here has some commentary attached to it. And that Supreme Court had kind of laid the groundwork to end segregation, but segregation was not really ending. When Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King got married in the 1950s, they, you know, there was so many places that refused to do business with with African Americans. Hotels, very hard for black people to find hotels in the South. They ended up staying, they spent their wedding night in the back room of a funeral parlor. And you can see the picture picture of it there. So this was such a pervasive problem. There was actually publication. There's an infamous book called The Green Book where African Americans try to catalog information on, you know, where, if you're traveling through the South, where can you actually go to get gas? Where can you find hotels that will allow you to stay there? Where can you find restaurants that will serve you? You know, because these things were so rare and people needed, needed this information. So just two examples there. There's also the literacy test, you know, voter disenfranchisement was widespread. Here's a, here's an image of a literacy test. In this case, this was an example of like an impossible literacy test, you know, where you would be told we're going to ask you questions about the US Constitution. And it would be the most, like finite details about the US Constitution imaginable, almost impossible to pass. Whereas this version of a literacy test, maybe a white person comes in a registered vote. This one would be much easier to pass. Now, we're going to look at how did, you know, there was, there was a Supreme Court decisions that said segregation should be ending, but not a whole lot seemed to change. Why was that? There's the label we give to how the South resisted this change. And then the name we give it we call it massive resistance. So massive resistance is the name given to the South's efforts to block integration to maintain segregation, to hold on to white supremacy and white power and to block black voter registration efforts. Collectively all of this activity we call it massive resistance because it was so massive and because it was so effective. And the group, when often, when people often think of like resistance to civil rights, they often think of like the Ku Klux Klan. The most probably visible group, the one with the most members, the one that had the most power in this time period was called the white citizens councils. And they did not hide in hoods and they did not, they were not anonymous organization. They were very proud of who they were. They published their names and newspapers. They were often the members of it were often some of the most prominent business leaders in various Southern communities. And what they did is a resisted integration. And they tried to punish people for trying to black people for trying to register to vote. So the, you know, state legislatures and lawmakers help this out, help this process out to the massive resistance process by resisting desegregation or resisting integration. And how they would do that was, was end compulsive education laws in a state. And they would also just shut down schools. So little rock high school in response to the little rock nine just shuts down high school. They would also shift tax dollars to private schools or give the tax dollars to the parents and then have the parents take the white kids to a private school. And then the private school would be still be free to discriminate because it was a private institution. And it would not be affected by the brown versus board decision. They're also districts who would adopt, they would say sure we're going to integrate, but we're going to, you know, we're going to come up with our own plan to do it. And we're just going to integrate one great a year. So we'll start with like kindergarten year one. And then year two, we'll do kindergarten first grade. And then year three will do kindergarten first grade and second grade. And so it would take forever. They just drag their feet. They also, what you saw is a lot of southern states go after the end of the ACP because that's the organization that launched the brown versus board decision. In Alabama, the attorney general files some kind of in the context of the Cold War, manages to file, get some court orders issued against them in that they were labeling them as subversive organization and allowed them to pursue their membership roles. And essentially knocked them out of the state, tied them up in court, made it very expensive for them, pursued all this litigation, sued the living snot out of them so that they exhausted their bank account. And they were inactive in Alabama for the 10 year window of time after the brown versus board of education decision. You also saw anytime a family would integrate a school or a person would try to go to register to vote, oftentimes newspapers would publish the names of those activists. So I have a picture of Ruby Bridges up there on the top left. She's famous for being a very young elementary age student who's integrating school in New Orleans. And we often, Ruby gets a lot of attention, but most of us don't know anything about what happened over that year. So what the parents did at her school is all of the white parents think they're children from those classrooms. So when Ruby bridges integrated her little New Orleans elementary school, she was the only student in her classroom. All of the white kids left. And it was just her and her teacher. And then her parents and her grandparents were punished in a lot of ways. Her family members, if they were employed by a white person with loser jobs, or if they were renting property, if they were sharecropping, they'd be evicted. So that's what happened to Ruby Bridget's family in response to just her going to a white school. And some newspapers have published names with people doing this, and then there would be a backlash. And often led by the white citizens council. So they would try to do everything that could cut off any services to anybody who was engaging in activism. If you were employed by a white person, you would probably get fired. If you got a white landlord, you'd probably get evicted. If you did business with a white banker, they might call in your loans, demand full repayment, force you in a bankruptcy. If you had a white insurance agent, they might withdraw your insurance policy, and then you're out of those insurance protections. And then the other thing that the data is black people started to register to vote, is they try to make it harder for them to run for office. They made it expensive. And so if set of, let's say, a $50 filing fee to run for office, they'd make it a $500 filing fee to run for office. So anything they could do to block these advancements, that's, we're calling this massive resistance. And I think we often forget about the challenges that the civil rights movement would have to encounter. This is what they're up against, right? So they're gonna have to come up with some pretty creative tactics here to address this. So we're gonna look at some various organizations. By the way, when you're looking at the reading guide, I did update the guided notes, document a little bit, and I moved some boxes around. So you might wanna take a look at the updated version of that when you're taking notes here on this one. So let's start with the NAACP. They're the oldest one. They're started in the early 1900s. They are an integrated organization, so they're a mix of white and black members. They're primarily, within the African American community, NAACP members would mostly be middle to upper class African Americans. Pretty good mix of southerners and northerners. Martin Luther King, Jr., his family, members of the NAACP, Rosa Parks, was very active in the NAACP. And then, a lot of activity in the north too. The organization that has the most funding. So when SCLC gets in trouble early on, NAACP is often paying for a lot of their courtroom costs. They're interested in challenging segregation. They lay out kind of a long gradual game plan for how they're gonna do that in the court system, taking on one case at a time, cherry picking, their cases looking for low hanging fruit, looking for cases that are a sure thing. So really focusing on the judicial branch, staying out of the streets, no mass marches, no mass protests, just staying in the courtroom, trying to win legal challenges. So they opposed mass demonstrations. They didn't really like what Martin Luther King, Jr. was doing. Their big victories are the Brown vs. Board decision and they gain a lot of publicity, excuse me, with a little rock. Nine. Roy Wilkins is their leader. He is the figure there holding the stamp on Mississippi ism. That would be him right there. Thurgood Marshall is this person that you see on the right. Thurgood Marshall would argue a lot of the cases in front of the Supreme Court. He would also be important because later on, he is the first African American who gets to be a justice on the US Supreme Court. If you've ever heard of Medgar Evers, Medgar Evers is gonna be the president of the Mississippi NAACP and he will be assassinated during the Civil Rights Movement. So he would be a World War II veteran another famous name in the NAACP. Southern Christian Leadership Conference. So if you're thinking about like possible short answer questions, a likely short answer question is gonna ask you to do some comparisons between these groups. And so try to think about when I'm talking about the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, what do they have in common with the NAACP? What could you write for a similarity? And then how are they different than the NAACP? So the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in their name, Christian, the church is really important to them. There's a lot of their activities through the Black Church. So a lot of their leaders are ministers in Black churches and their membership and the people that are doing the marches are very active in the churches, predominantly the Baptist church in the South. was the face of this group. He's the leader of this group. He does all the fundraising for this group. He travels the country. He's flying around the country. He's giving like four speeches a week in the early 1960s to help raise money for this group. They're fighting for social and political and economic equality. Mostly social and political equality early on, like integration and voting rights. The integration would be social equality, voting rights would be political equality. That's kind of their focus early on. And then after 1965, after the Selma campaign, they shift their movement into the North. They move up to Chicago in 1966. And they try to raise awareness about economic inequality. And so for the last few years, when Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in 1968, he's in the process of organizing up poor persons campaign in Washington, DC. So that was an evolution of this group. They are not gradualists. Like the NAACP. They want change immediately. They want change now. And King is often-- this is one of the ways he's often criticized-- is like people will say, "I agree with you in your goals. You have the right idea, but I just don't like the speed with what you're doing it. I don't like the fact that you're demanding this change to happen so soon." They're tactics. They definitely took it to the streets. They engaged in nonviolent direct action campaigns, planned well in advance. So they would often-- they wouldn't just show up in a town and start doing mass marches within a day. So they would pick their towns carefully, where they were going to do their campaigns. They would do meetings and meetings and trainings. For weeks and weeks and often months, before they would ever do like a march in the streets. So they would engage in boycotts. They would engage in mass marches. They would engage in sit-ins. They embraced getting imprisoned and thrown in jail and encouraged people to not get bailed out of jail to make things expensive on the city that they were doing their campaign in. And all of these things were in the hopes of gathering media attention. So one of the goals of a nonviolent mass march was to see if they could provoke some reaction from the police. And if that were to occur, then often the television would news media would show up. And this would capture the nation's attention. They would be able to expose the hypocrisy and the true nature of hate as it existed in the South. In these rural places, where television cameras usually didn't go, where it was hard to get to. But if they could create the drama, then the television networks would show up. And if all of the nation's eyes were on these places, then lawmakers would act. And they learned this most successfully in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. They-- you see the children marching down there. This was something the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was heavily criticized for was leading children into marches. And these children were willingly going off to jail. And the also famous imagery of like the police of Birmingham turning the fire engine hoses on the protesters. A lot of them, young children, powerful fire engine hoses there. They-- excuse me. But the television footage of that shocked the country. It shocked John F. Kennedy, the president at the time. And it encouraged him to submit civil rights legislation to Congress in 1963. That would go on to become the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They do the same thing in Selma, Alabama in 1965. And their activities there will help lead to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. So two really important pieces of legislation there. Quick side note. is kind of the face of this organization, the person on the far left over there is Ralph Abernathy, that was his right-hand man. He was wherever Martin Luther King Jr. was. Abernathy was often right there with him. And the figure on the right is a little under the radar under appreciated civil rights figure. His name is Byard Rustin. And Byard Rustin had been a mentee of A. Philip Randolph, the person I mentioned earlier from World War II. Byard Rustin was kind of a mentor to Martin Luther King Jr. And Todd Martin Luther King Jr. a lot of things about nonviolence and about Gandhi. And Byard Rustin did most of the planning for the 1963 march on Washington. But he was not the face of that march because Byard Rustin was openly gay. And he had this at a time where the gay people in the United States often did not feel comfortable being openly gay. Byard Rustin was. And he knew that that would-- he could never really be the face of the movement because of that-- his willingness to be openly gay. For example, Roy Wilkins, the leader of N. W. A. C. P. when all these organizations were come together to organize a Martian Washington said we're not going to participate in in the Martian Washington, if Biod Rustin's gonna be the face of this movement. So he did all the planning for the Martian Washington, but got really none of the notoriety or credit for it. Let everybody else kind of take the spotlight while he did all the work in the background. But once you, if you can recognize him, look for him and when you're seeing old civil rights pictures, civil rights marches and photographs, often you're gonna see him right behind Martin Luther King Jr. Like if you ever watch his Martin Luther King Jr. as I have a dream speech, look for Biod Rustin, he's often just a few people away from Martin Luther King Jr. there on the steps of the Lincoln Monument. All right, so I am jumping around a little bit on the reading guide. So make sure you have the updated reading guide there. Wanna talk a little bit about another under the radar group and that is the role that women played in the civil rights movement. When we look at these civil rights groups, we often talk about the men. We talk about Roy Wilkins and the NAACP Martin Luther King Jr. Stovely Carmichael, John Lewis, the men at Malcolm X. Men get all these attention and the women don't. And I think we need to pause and recognize that women played a leading role in the civil rights movement. Women made up a majority of the church membership. Think about Southern Christian Leadership Conference and who they're talking to at these mass meetings. It's mostly women. They provide nearly all of the regular church functions for these mass meetings. They provide the music, they provide the meal, they provide the political affairs committees, they do a lot of work on those committees. Women are essentially the bulletin boards at the churches. And this is at a time, remember the 1960s, African Americans in the South often do not own or control media outlets. They don't own radio stations, they don't own newspapers. So the way you organize a community and the way you distribute information to a community, you can do it in these mass meetings verbally, but you often need to get information out to people's homes too and you do that by typing and printing leaflets. Churches tended to be one of the few black known institutions that had access to printers could do all this mass printing. And it's women who are doing all that work. Important to remember that. The mass meetings are mostly female meetings. A lot of the marches, if you look at the crowds and the marches, they might be men up front where the cameras are, but look to the background, it's gonna be a lot of women, mostly women. So the Selmon and Montgomery March, that 50 mile march, a third of the group is women in that march. Women are, when these groups engage in voter registration efforts, women are the ones often running a lot of the voter education workshops to help people pass the literacy test before the literacy test have done away with. And most of the people arrested and thrown in jail during the movement are women. So this is something I think that is unharbleded. We have a lot of really important figures. I've included their pictures on the left. Joanne Robinson is the main organizer of Montgomery Busboycott. Martin Luther King, Jr. Rosa Parks, get a lot of the attention, but she did a lot of the behind the scenes work. Daisy Bates is the woman who is leading the Little Rock Nine. Septima Clark is the one who does a lot of the voter education programs and helps people get registered to vote. Ella Baker is up there on the top right. She was a big time leader in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and encouraged them to help launch SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and was a chief advisor to SNCC for most of their existence. The woman on the right middle is Diane Nash. She was one of the early leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and also brainchild of the Birmingham campaign and Selma campaign. Often a lot of the activities of that campaign, the Children's March, she helped organize in the Birmingham campaign and helped start the Selma campaign too. And then Fannie Lou Hamer on the lower right, active in SNCC gave powerful testimony at a Democratic Convention in 1964 and helped launch the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, tried to get the Democratic Party to reform and become less of a controlled by Southern racist. So she played a really important role there, unheralded women. All right, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, another group, another possible short answer question, comparing this group to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They fight for very similar things. They're fighting for integration, they're fighting for voter registration, they're using a lot of the same tactics in their names, nonviolent, so they're using nonviolent sit-ins, marches. They're not the ones who start the freedom rides, but they finish them. Course, Congress of Racial Equality launched the freedom rides and when most of the participants in that, they're either thrown in jail or thrown in the hospital from being beat up, so severely the SNCC students from Nashville rushed in and picked up where the freedom rides left off. They embraced jail, they brought humanity into an inhumane institution. And they recognize the fact that these are students who are African-American who are living in the apartheid South and they've had almost everything taken away from them. And they recognize how powerful they become when they figured out there's nothing left to really that can be taken away from me. So they're students, so they're often not employed by white people. So a white person can't get angry at them and fire them. They are, so then if the white power structure says, well, we're gonna throw you in jail and if the students say, you know what, not a big deal, it doesn't bother me. My criminal record, who cares? Maybe my economic prospects weren't that good anyway. So by recognizing that, they brought, they kind of managed to capture power in a unique way. They're different than the Southern Christian leadership conference in that they specifically do not want to be controlled by a charismatic leader. They don't want to be defined by one individual. They don't want one person to grab all the spotlight in their organization. So they do have leaders like John Lewis, you see him getting carried away in the top left there and Diane Nash leading the march on the lower left are big names in the group, but they really tried to divert the spotlight. And what they did, they called it grassroots organization. So they started with the bottom and they organized with common people and they wanted a broad base movement that wasn't controlled by anyone individual. They often made fun of the Southern Christian leadership conference for being so driven by one celebrity in their group. They would often embed themselves in communities for long periods of time and then criticize the Southern Christian leadership conference for like showing up after they'd been in a community for over a year. This is what happens in Selma. They had been organizing in Selma for way longer than the Southern Christian leadership conference had been. And so this causes some tension between these groups. One of their most successful campaigns is in Mississippi in 1964, Bob Moses leads something called the Freedom Summer Campaign, where they attempt to register people in a place where they've been terrorized away from registering to vote for a long period of time. So those are the heroic activities of the Southern, or excuse me, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. They would engage in a lot of nonviolent training before they would go out and do sit-ins or marches. Where this is probably captured best in Hollywood cinema is in this movie called Freedom Song. I'll link to the video clip for this so that you can watch it if you want to see how what their nonviolent workshops might have been like, how they were trained to sit there and take a beating during these demonstrations. The Butler movie also has a scene of the sit-ins, so I'll link to that also. I wanna just do a quick off ramp here, a side note on making connections between the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Lives Matter Movement. I have a screenshot here of Mike Huckabee. He's a conservative commentator who, he stated a sentiment in 2015 that I think is something you hear quite commonly today, and that like Martin Luther King Jr. or SNCC, or any of the nonviolent protesters of the Civil Rights Movement would be appalled by the Black Lives Matter Movement today. They would disagree with the Black Lives Matter Movement today. I have a screenshot of a Mancato Free Press ran a poll around the same time as that Mike Huckabee comment. I think it was shortly after the Fulando Castile killing in St. Paul. And after the Fulando Castile was killed, there was protesters who marched onto Interstate 94 and just blocked traffic, just to raise awareness about the Fulando Castile killing. And when Mancato Free Press readers were asked, you know, what do you think of occupying the Interstate as a tactic? 520 people took the survey. 484 of them or 93% of them said they don't think it was a good, a reasonable tactic. So only 6% of the survey respondents thought it was a reasonable tactic. So that gives you some sense for what people think in our area think today of Black Lives Matter protest tactics. But I do want to show you that the Civil Rights Movement during their time never really engaged in a popular tactic themselves. When the freedom writers were doing the freedom rights, 61% of the country disapproved. The sit-ins, 57% of the country thought those were a bad idea. 1963, this is during the Birmingham campaign. Do you think the mass demonstrations, like the Birmingham campaign, are more likely to help, more likely to hurt, the cost for racial equality, 60% of the country said more likely to hurt. The march on Washington, that I have a dream speech, [BLANK_AUDIO] people are asked what were their feelings about that. You saw, let's see, let's see if I can do some quick math here, 35 plus 18. It's going to be 45 plus eight is going to be 53. So 60% of the country had unfavorable opinions about the March on Washington. And I have the dream speech in 1963. In 1964, this is after Birmingham. This is after the March on Washington. The country has asked, you know, should African Americans continue to demonstrate? Remember, we don't have a voting rights act yet. So the voter discrimination is still and carried away in the South. 73% of the country said black people should stop demonstrating. And when they continue to demonstrate, when they launched the Selma campaign and later took the movement up to Chicago, 85% of the country said, these demonstrations are not good. They're hurting the cause for racial equality. 1966 in October, again, 85%, not a good movement. What's your opinion of Martin Luther King Jr. in December of 1966? Only 36% of the survey respondents thought he was helpful. And then at the time of his assassination, 31% of the country felt like he brought his assassination on himself. So it's a pretty disturbing survey results. Here's what his most famous source is-- one of his most famous sources is this letter from a Birmingham jail. And my favorite line of it is when he talks about who his biggest enemy is. So when he wrote that letter, he was very frustrated. There had been a group of ministers who had said to him, what you're doing here in Birmingham, like raising awareness about police brutality and segregation and discrimination, it's good. Your goals are good. We agree with your goals. We just don't like the methods in which you're doing it. And we don't like the timeline that you've laid out. And so he says, over the past few years, I've been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the white citizens counselor or the Ku Klux Klaner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to order than to justice, who prefers a negative peace, which is the absence of tension to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice, who constantly says, I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action. Who paternalistically believes he can see it's-- he can set the timetable for another man's freedom, who lives by a mythical concept of time, and who constantly advises the Negro to wait. For a more convenient season, can't you just wait for a more convenient time to launch this protest? He was sick of hearing that. He was very frustrated. And here's this again in Chicago. And people are asking, why are you leading these protests? You're just going to create hostility amongst the white community. And don't you realize you're just generating hatred? And he says, you fail to realize that the hatred and the hostilities were already there. They were of latent. They were subconsciously present. Our marches merely brought them to the surface. How strange it would be to condemn a physician who, through persistent work in the ingenuity of his medical skills, discovered cancer in a patient. Would anyone be so ignorant as to say that the physician caused the cancer? No, he just made it no longer was it latent or subconscious. He brought it to the surface. That's what Martin Luther King Jr. would have to say. So this method of protest, of Black Lives Matter protests-- like we have to remember that the point of often a protest or a march or a demonstration is to draw attention to something. It's to inconvenience people in some way. As this cartoon says, can't you do this in a more polite way that I can completely ignore? If people always protested in very polite ways, it was super easy to ignore. A change would very rarely come. So I think back and up to Mike Huckabee's statement about what would Martin Luther King Jr. think of Black Lives Matter protests. I don't think he would be appalled. I think that's what the historical record would show. Let's look at some other groups. The Nation of Islam, most famously, the spokesperson of this organization is Malcolm X. But the leader is a guy by the name of Elijah Muhammad. And Elijah Muhammad, the followers of the Nation of Islam, thought of him as a prophet. This group is quite a bit more radical than the Southern Christian leadership conference. So they're recruiting their members mostly from urban areas in the north and the west, often out of ghettos, often a lot of people who were caught up in crime. Malcolm X converted to the Nation of Islam when he was serving a prison sentence himself. They advocated they were not interested in integration like Martin Luther King Jr. was. They often advocated for a total separation of white and black people. Elijah Muhammad was famous for calling the white man the devil. You can see the quote from Malcolm X on the top left there. We don't go for segregation. We go for separation. Separation is when you have your own. You control your own economy. You control your own politics. You control your own society. You control your own everything. So they are famous for criticizing a lot of Martin Luther King's goals and strategies. Malcolm X will get assassinated by people within the Nation of Islam. He was beginning to get a lot of a very critical of Elijah Muhammad. Elijah Muhammad had a lot of children on a wedlock. He was not acknowledging them. Malcolm X was concerned about this. Malcolm X also wanted to get involved in politics. And Elijah Muhammad was telling him no. So there started to be some increasing clashes between these two and members of the Nation of Islam assassinated Malcolm X as a result of that. But before he died, he managed to publish an autobiography. And that blew up after his assassination. And a lot of people involved in the Civil Rights Movement started reading his autobiography and became inspired by that. So when you hear about the Black Power Movement later, a lot of the people involved in that got involved in that because they were reading Malcolm X or they got involved in it were encouraged to read Malcolm X. So it definitely inspired that. And it also inspired a lot of the people involved in the Black Panther Party. The Black Power Movement comes out of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in their later years. So we talked about early SNCC. And now we're going to talk about later SNCC, post-1965 SNCC. They shift their focus away from integration as a goal. And they start to talk more about this phrase Black Power. And Stokely Carmichael is the originator of that phrase. You see him pictured up there on the top left. So what does Black Power mean? The goal is to have Black communities control their own resources and their own communities. So to take political power of their own communities, to be in charge of their own law enforcement, to have full control over their own housing, to have full control over the businesses in that community, and on the land, and that community. That would be the ideal goal of Black Power. So you see a little bit of a connection to some of the things that like Malcolm X was talking about. And Malcolm X would call this Black nationalism. Stokely Carmichael would call it Black Power. Stokely Carmichael would also say that Black Power also encourages Black Pride. People should take pride in being Black. African-American should take pride in being Black. The word that was most commonly used before 1965 was Negro to describe an African-American. And that fell out of favor after the Black Power Movement. Black was actually a derogatory term prior to the Black Power Movement co-opting that term and embracing pride in it. There was a group of students in Ohio in 1963 who organized a walkout of their high school because the assistant principal used the word Black to refer to them over the intercom. So they were not OK with that. That's a good example of how people thought of it as a derogatory term. I have a chart over there on the left that shows you how the usage of the term Black or Black person to refer to an African-American, you see it really increase after in the mid-1960s is where it really starts to shoot up. And it's because of this Black Power Movement who encouraged people to embrace that word to describe African-Americans. So take pride in their heritage, in their ancestry, in their clothing, and grow their hair out and embrace the afro. And so this was all part of the embracing of that culture. They also shifted away from trying to organize power within the Democratic Party, which was a strategy that you started to see more and more people adopt in the South. And instead, they encouraged people to launch their own independent political organization, Stokely Carmichael embedded himself in Lounds County, which is just east of Selma, Alabama. After the Selma campaign, he stayed there for about a year almost, organizing, organizing, organizing, encouraging people to register to vote, getting them registered to vote, and the hopes that they outnumbered white people in their county. And what he wanted them to do is take control over that county, take control of that community. And after embedding themselves there for a long time, they did manage to get a lot of people registered to vote and started to win some elections there. And so they wanted to take that model and spread it. And this is the first place that adopts a black panther as a symbol of the Lounds County Party. It was the group that adopted that. So Stokely was not so interested in segregation, because-- or excuse me, not so interested in the integration. He wasn't going to challenge segregation so much, because he was thinking African Americans should capitalize on it. The fact that they've been packed in the ghettos. means that they outnumber whites in those places and then during elections they should be able to outvote those people and then take political power of those communities. So that was kind of the idea behind Black Power. Another group that is inspired by some of Malcolm X's ideas is the Black Panthers and they're famous often for their imagery. They come out of Oakland, California. The first thing that they're doing there is monitoring police brutality. They're driving around in cars following police officers and wherever police officer pulled into a black community or attempted to arrest a black person. The Black Panthers would roll out of their vehicles. They'd all be holding guns. If it was a shotgun they'd get the chamber ready and so they'd make all this noise. And then they would read off the US Constitution and California Constitution codes that applied to whatever they were doing to show to the police what what we're doing is legal. So they were practicing arm self defense in a legal manner, scaring the heck out of the police in California. They really come out of the scene in 1967. California is debating a gun control bill because of the activities of the Black Panther Party in Oakland. They show up at the California State Assembly with their guns and they march right into the California State House with their guns and shock the country in 1967. That's what they're most famous for. I don't think a lot of people realize they also did a lot of community organization wherever they were. If they were in Oakland or Chicago, whatever town they went in they often tried to organize free breakfast programs for children. This was not a thing like most schools today offer free breakfast. That was not a thing in 1967. They also tried to start community health clinics for a lot of people who didn't have access to health care in a lot of these urban areas. So that's the activities of the Black Panther Party. But definitely more radical than the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I mean arm self defense practicing that open carrying of guns. Like these guys have no interest in the nonviolent demonstrations of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference here. Let's turn our attention to how do the federal government react to these civil rights groups? The judicial branch gets the attention first because that's who the NAACP focus their attention on. And they got lucky with Chief Justice Earl Warren. He's pictured there on the left. So he is appointed to the Supreme Court during Dwight Eisenhower's presidency. And he turns out to be a very liberal progressive Supreme Court justice. So he issues the verdict in the Brown versus Board decision. And it's a unanimous decision. He rules and helps rule in favor of the Montgomery bus boycott. There's a later decision called Reynolds versus Sims, which establishes a very important precedent called one person one vote. And what a lot of Southern states were doing would they would do their connoir, excuse me, congressional apportionment of their districts. So let's say like Minnesota, just think about minutes over for a second. We have eight congressional districts. We have eight congressmen that we get to send to the US House. What if we put one congressional district covering all of Minneapolis St. Paul, and then we split the other seven up across the rest of the state. Like that would be kind of weird because all those other districts like Minneapolis St. Paul would have 10 times the amount of people in it, then maybe the Southern Minnesota district would have. And one person one vote means what the Reynolds versus Sims decision says is if you if your state is awarded five congressional districts, those congressional districts should have roughly the same amount of people in each district. You can't just have one district covering urban area where most of the black people live and then have four or five other districts throughout the rest of your state, which have way less people living in them, but are way more white. That's what a lot of Southern states were doing. So the judicial branch helps fix that on the downside. The judicial branch not necessarily Supreme Court, but other judges definitely at the at the state level and then some federal judges to would issue injunctions and that would hamper the civil rights movement. It would often make it very difficult for them to march. It would make it easy for law enforcement to arrest them if they were engaging in any demonstration, a sit in a march, a boycott, you know, the car pools and the Montgomery bus boycott. So those were those were hurdles. The executive branch should get credit for sending troops in to help protect activists during some key moments in the movement, the little rock nine demonstration Eisenhower sends troops in the Freedom Rides in 1961 JFK sends troops in old Miss where James Meredith integrated. He's the first black college student there. JFK sends troops in the Selma campaign, the Selman among Montgomery marches, LBJ sends troops. There's a little known Justice Department lawyer named John door who eventually become the assistant attorney general very under the radar. Super important in the civil rights movement. He works hand in hand with like Bob Moses in Mississippi. He's pursuing a lot of litigation. He's challenging a lot of the registrars in the south were blocking black voting rights legislation. He leads the investigation into some of the clan murders in the south. He's the lawyer who often will argue the cases to convict those clan members. So he's really important. The Justice Department is part of the executive branch. John of Kennedy will introduce the civil rights act that will go on to become the 1964 civil rights act. It'll be passed after he dies. He's assassinated in 63. Lyndon Baines Johnson or LBJ is probably the most important president in terms of civil rights. He does way more than Eisenhower or JFK had done. So after JFK gets assassinated LBJ says the only way to honor it, John of Kennedy's legacy is the past the civil rights act. And then he doesn't give up there. He pushes for the voting rights act in 1965 and will also push for the fair housing law in 1968. When there are urban riots in 1965 and 1966, he will order a commission to investigate the cause of these riots. It's called the Kerner Commission report. The investigation finds that the riots are mainly caused by white people for creating the slums. If creating the conditions in the slums, not doing anything to improve the slums and that all of these riots are originating in the slums and people who are frustrated with the ghetto and the conditions and the lack of economic opportunities and the dilapidated housing. And the Kerner Commission says we can trace all this stuff to the actions of white leaders. So that was something interesting to come out of the executive department. What are the executive department that didn't hurt the didn't help out so much Eisenhower and JFK were not the greatest advocates of civil rights. They definitely drug their feet on a lot of issues. found LBJ way more helpful than JFK in order working on civil rights type stuff. LBJ, though, the downside to him is he totally turned against the civil rights leaders when they started speaking out on the Vietnam War. When they started criticizing the Vietnam War, he really did not help them out very much after that. And the president, excuse me, the FBI is part of the Justice Department which is under the executive branch. So we're going to put the FBI in here too. Jager Hoover ran a pretty shady operation in the 1960s. So he did everything he could to undermine a lot of the civil rights leaders and organizations, wiretapped them, disrupt them, discredit them, do anything subversive. Okay, and then when Richard Nixon comes along, Richard Nixon, not not as much of an ally of the civil rights movement as LBJ is. Nixon capitalizes on those riots and says we need to kind of re institute law and order. And so we don't see a whole lot of civil rights momentum during the Nixon presidency in the legislative branch. Some really important legislation passed during the civil rights movement in 1964 Civil Rights Act, which effectively will combat segregation in the South. Then 1965 voting rights act, which effectively does away with the literacy test, the 1968 Fair Housing Act, not as effective at ending housing discrimination, but it was an attempt. But so the 64 and the 65 those two laws are very, very important, probably the two crowning achievements of the civil rights movement. They also the Congress capitalizes that they recognize the Selma campaign in 1965 has captured the nation's attention. And they recognize that LBJ might want to do something about this and and get a law pass or Congress they do invite him to deliver a joint address that is televised 70 million people watch that. But on the downside, it's not like all the congressmen in Congress at this time were helpful for civil rights. There was a lot of them blocking civil rights legislation, especially Southern congressmen mostly from the Democratic Party, but but also any any essentially any white Southern congressman was not going to support civil rights legislation. And they would do anything they could to block it and often the tactic that they use was the filibuster. All right, there's a chart showing you the impact of the voting rights act how that you saw. Registration of African Americans really increased most noticeably in Alabama and Mississippi the two states that were doing the most voter discrimination and using those literacy tests the most. Okay, the last question asked why the civil rights movement loses momentum in the late 1960s and then the early 1970s. There's a lot of reasons. Number one, there's a lot of divisions within the movement. And so, you know, there's battles between the NAACP and SCLC and between SCLC and SNCC. And disagreements on how effective was non violence as a tactic, how, how ideal was integration as a the goal, should the groups turn their focus on economics, or they continue focusing on politics. There was a lot of disagreement about that. Criticizing the Vietnam War, which is something a lot of groups and leaders did, lost cooperation with Lyndon Johnson, the president, urban riots in 1965, '66, Richard Nixon took advantage of that and a lot of other conservative politicians took advantage of those and said, hey, if you don't like these riots, vote for us, we're gonna demand law and order and that zapped a lot of energy out of the civil rights movement. The funding dried up in the late 1960s, the economy wasn't the best, stock market was declining, and so lack of funds is gonna lead to a lack of activity. The movement would turn its attention to the North, Martin Luther King Jr. would move his family up to Chicago in 1966 to launch the Chicago campaign, try to raise awareness about economic issues and housing conditions. And a lot of the solutions they were demanding there were not like inexpensive solutions. Integration and voter legislation, a lot of those solutions are not very expensive, but economic issues would require some pretty expensive solutions and there just wasn't as much cooperation on those issues. And the media coverage was also not so favorable. The media, mostly northern media organizations, were happy to turn their cameras on the South and expose the hypocrisy of the South and the hatred of the South. But when Martin Luther King Jr. was exposing hatred in the North, he did not get as favorable of media coverage. The federal government also not as helpful to the civil rights movement after 1968 and the FBI did everything they could to subvert the civil rights often through their counter-in-challenge programs or what's called Cointel Pro. Those were effective at taking the wind out of the sales of civil rights groups. And then Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination should also get added in here. He was a big player in the movement, a big fundraiser for the movement, the face of the movement, the celebrity of the movement and his assassination will definitely take a lot of energy out of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Very hard for them to organize their poor people's campaign after his assassination. So going back to that timeline, I do want to point out that a lot of the time the AP multiple choice questions will try to get you to think about timeline and dates. And so just remember 1965, '66 is, there's a turning point there. So the movement shifts out of the South, into the North with the Chicago campaign. And the movement shifts from focusing mostly on social and political issues towards economic issues. And there's also more arguing about nonviolence as a tactic after 1965. So just remember that, always look for the date on a primary source when you're checking out multiple choice questions. And as always, don't forget to check out possible short answer questions. All right, hopefully that review helped. Good luck.