The Civil Rights movement- Presentation research

THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

A growing group of Americans spoke out against inequality and injustice during the 1950s. African Americans had been fighting against racial discrimination for centuries; during the 1950s, however, the struggle against racism and segregation entered the mainstream of American life. For example, in 1954, in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, the Supreme Court declared that “separate educational facilities” for black children were “inherently unequal.” This ruling was the first nail in Jim Crow’s coffin.

Many Southern whites resisted the Brown ruling. They withdrew their children from public schools and enrolled them in all-white “segregation academies,” and they used violence and intimidation to prevent blacks from asserting their rights. In 1956, more than 100 Southern congressmen even signed a “Southern Manifesto” declaring that they would do all they could to defend segregation.

Despite these efforts, a new movement was born. In December 1955, a Montgomery activist named Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give her seat on a city bus to a white person. Her arrest sparked a 13-month boycott of the city’s buses by its black citizens, which only ended when the bus companies stopped discriminating against African American passengers. Acts of “nonviolent resistance” like the boycott helped shape the civil rights movement of the next decade.

I grew up in San Antonio at the end of institutionalized racism in America. I think what I understand now about racism then is how quiet it was. As a white boy in San Antonio, I did not really recognize "racism." Whites just didn't associate with Negroes (using terms of the day), certainly not young whites. I really didn't see many Negroes in San Antonio in 1958 since most of our lives revolved around school, and schools were segregated. People lived in segregated areas where their children's schools were. Whites and Mexicans were only beginning to associate beyond the normal role of white observer and yard worker or maid or cook or busboy, but at least we saw Mexicans on a regular basis.

That is just the way it was: Mexicans, Negroes and whites. The only place I personally knew about "white-only" was on the bus I took from my home on the near-West Side of San Antonio to the Downtown YMCA, aboard which Negroes and Mexicans could not sit up front, but I don't know if that was law or just custom. It was accepted. It was normal. It was quiet. Obliviousness.

By mid-1960, that changed. When my wife and I moved to Austin to go to the University of Texas, I discovered that Austin, the bastion of liberal thought here in Texas, had just been ordered to disband its tri-race school district. Austin had three school districts, one for whites, one for Afro-Americans (new term of the day) and one for Mexicans (still said Mexican, I'm not sure when it became Hispanic). As a college man, it seemed odd that you would call Mexicans a race different from whites since we are both Caucasian, but we did. I couldn't believe it! Austin and institutional racism? No! It didn't compute!

I have learned a little about how we got where we got to in the '50s: complacent, institutionalized racism. In 1896, there were 300,000-plus registered black voters in Louisiana. By 1925, there were 25. That was Jim Crow. Those laws that comprised Jim Crow revolved around voting and representation and ownership.

When you control the vote, you control what legal and enforcement remedies the "outs" have versus the "ins." It is an insidious power that can be used for good or ill. This power has already proved it can create a tri-ethnic racist world; that was Texas and the South in the first half of the 20th century, even after the horrific Civil War carnage that was supposed to provide some remedy. It can reap destruction again, maybe this time centered on class and religion.

The "ins," of course, don't mind it. I was part of the "ins" back then and didn't even know that that was a created world, not the natural order of things. I cannot imagine how an "out" must have felt. I suspect that many were really like me; they were part of the "natural order of things." They might rebel, but, because of the risk of physical injury, they probably accepted things to some extent. I, of course, didn't need to rebel.

Then Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement came forward. I look back on the television footage of the time, and, yes, there were white people involved in the movement. But there should have been more of us.

We collectively should never have let it get so far as to need the movement. Since those times after the dawn of the Voting Rights Act, the War on Poverty, King's assassination, school busing programs, race riots, Kent State and the Vietnam War, things have changed slowly and painfully at times, rapidly in other ways. We - collectively, as a people - are so lucky that God allowed us King, a man so eloquent, passionate and persuasive that his message of hope buoyed us through that turmoil. We needed it badly in the '60s. We need it again.

This thing we call the U.S.A. is very fragile. It is young, still in an experimental stage. We may not always have a figure such as King to draw us back from the precipice of hate and discord. The true danger to our way of life is not foreign or military, it is within our hearts.

Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was a 14-year-old African-American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after a white woman said she was offended by him in her family's grocery store. The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. Till posthumously became an icon of the Civil Rights Movement.