home | 1945-21st century

The UNITED STATES and EQUAL RIGHTS, 1947-65 (2 of 5)

In 1956, Autherine Lucy became the first African-American allowed to attend the University of Alabama. In February, 1957, Martin Luther King Jr. was elected president of a newly formed group, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. That year, Ghana won its independence from British rule, which may have helped inspire some blacks in the United States. By September, enough support had arisen across the United States for human rights for blacks that Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. That act created a Civil Rights Commission, established a Civil Rights Division in the U.S. Department of Justice and gave the federal government the power to seek court injunctions against obstructions to voting rights. That September, Governor Orval Faubus was being televised as he made a show of trying to prevent school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas, and President Eisenhower reluctantly federalized the Arkansas National Guard. Public schools in Arkansas remained closed for the school year of 1958-59. Faubus' move proved to be show, and when schools reopened the following school year, Arkansas was ready to comply with the law regarding integration.

More efforts at integration were attempted. In 1960, some brave souls engaged in lunch-counter sit-ins at the Woolworth department store in Greensboro North Carolina. In 1961, Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes began their studies at the University of Georgia, without incidents of violence. Violence did appear in the spring of 1961 with "Freedom Rides" from Washington D.C. into the South -- busses filled with blacks and some whites -- their purpose being to challenge desegregated interstate bussing in the South. Local law enforcement in Alabama allowed people to attack the busses and people in the busses. In Montgomery, a crowd waiting for the bus targeted one of the white riders and crippled him for life. In Jackson, Mississippi, the "freedom riders" were imprisoned for forty to sixty days, but on the issue of civil rights, the rides were a success. In November, largely as a result of the Freedom Rides, the Interstate Commerce Commission banned segregation on interstate buses, trains and supporting facilities.

In December, Martin Luther King was in Albany, Georgia, helping to fight for integrated public facilities. And in 1962 came the well-publicized enrollment of James Meredith at the university called Ol' Miss. In 1963, the nation watched the struggle for civil rights shift back to Birmingham, Alabama. There, in May, school children joined the demonstrations, and the Police Commissioner, Eugene "Bull" Conner, used police dogs and fire hoses against the demonstrators -- all of it displayed for the world to see on television. Many people across the nation sided with the demonstrators. The segregationists in the South were losing the battle for hearts and minds. And, on May 20, the Supreme Court ruled that Birmingham's segregation ordinances were unconstitutional.

In June,1963, the leader of the Jackson, Mississippi chapter of the NAACP, Medgar Evers, was gunned down at his home, and that year four little girls were killed in the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1963 tensions existed across the United States. Blacks sat-in in California's capital, Sacramento, and they sat-in in Detroit's city hall. In New York they dumped garbage on City Hall Plaza. Blacks clashed with police in Chicago at a cemetery that refused to bury African Americans. In Philadelphia, African-Americans clashed with police at a construction site. The Department of Justice, headed by Robert Kennedy, was keeping track of the demonstrations, and that summer it counted 758 across the nation and the arrest of 13,786 demonstrators in seventy-five cities.

It was in late August, 1963, that King made his "I Have a Dream" speech before a great gathering at the nation's capital. And it was around this time that Governor George Wallace of Alabama stood at a schoolhouse door as he had promised in his political campaign the year before. He had declared "Segregation now, Segregation tomorrow and segregation forever." But it was just more show. Immediately after his demonstration he stepped aside and let federal marshals proceed with registration for classes.