Montgomery Bus Research Articles

Black Leadership and Civil Rights: Transforming the Curriculum, Inspiring Student Activism

Evelyn M. Simien is assistant professor in the department of political science at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Her current research interests include African American public opinion ancl political behavior, black feminist thought andcritical race theory, survey research, and quantitative methodoloqy. She can be reached at simien@uconn.e7u. African American women have a long history of political activism, starting with anti-slavery networks, civil rights organizations, and black feminist collectives (Collins 2000). Overcoming racism and sexism has had a profound impact on African American women's political activism by inspiring them to actively participate in social movements, political parties, campaigns, elections, and, ultimately, run for public office. Nonetheless, efforts to transform the curriculum and integrate the perspectives of African American women have met with varying degrees of success. African American women's political activism within the civil rights movement has not been accurately documented but rather conveniently forgotten. African American women were instrumental to the movement in their roles as organizers, fundraisers, and leaders in orchestrating tremendously successful grassroots campaigns that advanced black liberation and attested to their leadership capabilities. It is this writer's view that African American women of the civil rights movement should not to be presented as victims or celebrated as mainstream heroines from a contributionist approach. Perhaps Rosa Parks is the easiest for instructors to use in this way, considering the frequent trivialization of her role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It is in this regard that Cedric the Entertainer's comedic performance in the film, Barbershop, becomes illustrative. He insists that all Rosa Parks did was sit down because she was tired, which minimizes her role as an important civil rights activist. Obviously, this message is problematic. However, it is indicative of an educational system that treats black history month as cultural enrichment. During the month of February, students learn about black firsts and their achievements to develop tolerance for difference as opposed to challenge basic assumptions about cultural stereotypes (Higginbotham 1990; Omolade 1993; Banks 2003). An alternative or transformative approach to the curriculum enables students to critically evaluate political processes. Such an approach allows students to consider why, for example, African American women are conspicuously absent from the curriculum on black leadership and civil rights. Students can begin to question and understand how race, sexuality, class, and gender dynamics operate within the context of the movement. They come to appreciate multiple perspectives and realities as they relate to the unequal distribution of power and privilege in the United States, thereby creating a new framework by which students view key concepts, issues, themes, and problems inherent to the movement that counter mainstream perspectives. African American women are then integrated into the curriculum as leaders, performing roles similar to those of black men without privileging one experience over the other. Therefore, black liberation is not equated with black masculinity or manhood. My course on the civil rights movement is designed to introduce students to black leadership, specifically the principles, goals, and strategies used by African American men and women to secure basic citizenship rights. It provides a fairly broad, yet comprehensive account of the civil rights movement so students can develop a critical perspective of historical and contemporary trends in African American political life. An in-depth analysis of the civil rights movement often inspires students to become more informed and politically active citizens. Through critical examination of the major philosophical and theoretical arguments contesting interlocking systems of oppression, students arrive at some understanding of how African American men and women influenced the political process via public persuasion, litigation, grassroots mobilization, and direct action despite different movement experiences determined by race, sexuality, class, and gender dynamics (Weber 2001). This course is unique in that it expands the curriculum on black leadership and civil rights to include African American women thereby offering students an alternative vision that recognizes African American

Patterns of Student Activism at Historically Black Universities in the United States and South Africa, 1960-1977

In the ongoing campaigns to abolish legalized racial segregation in the United States, the nonviolent direct action protest strategy adopted by students at black and white colleges and universities in the South, referred to as the sit-ins, is considered an historically significant innovation. This act of resistance and civil disobedience had been practiced by previous generations of social and political activists. However, when the four black students at North Carolina A&T College in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960, who were heirs to a black and white radical tradition, decided to sit-in at the lunch counter at the Woolworth store, a new phase in the black freedom struggle in the United States was initiated. The southern college campuses spawned hundreds of willing to put their lives on the line in the cause of social justice. The sit-ins and the formation of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) represented a turning point and historical marker in the evolution of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. (1) In the black freedom struggles in the Republic of South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, launching of protests by black students also marked a turning point and the onset of a new phase of the larger anti-apartheid movement. The Soweto protests in 1976 demonstrated the degree of political consciousness even among elementary and secondary school children and signaled a renewed level of resistance to South Africa's white minority government. But even earlier in the late 1960s student activists in South Africa launched a new phase in the black freedom struggle in South Africa with the formation of the Black Consciousness Movement and South African Students Organization (SASO). Under the leadership of Stephen Biko and Barney Pityana, SASO mobilized black African, Coloured, and Indian students and, according to Gail Gerhart, raised the level of political education and ideological diffusion never before achieved by any black [South African] political organization. (2) In the black freedom struggles in the United States and South Africa in the 1960s, black activism played a significant role and made distinctive contributions to the larger campaigns for social and political change. In this essay I will examine black activism at three historically black, public universities in the 1960s and 1970s--Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the University of the North and the University of the Western Cape in South Africa--focusing on the patterns of protests and the responses of university and government officials to activism. THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA While the launching of Montgomery Bus Boycott organized in December 1955 was generally considered the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement (CRM) in the United States, sociologist Aldon Morris in his book The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change, published in 1984, argued that the bus boycott organized in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1953, and led by Baptist minister Rev. T. J. Jemison, served as the model for the protest launched in Montgomery almost two years later. In Baton Rouge, the mobilization of the black community through church leadership, the formation of alternative means of transportation, and the filing of lawsuits to challenge segregation on public transit in the state and federal courts in Louisiana served as the model for activities that would take place in Montgomery, Alabama. Rev. Jemison became an important advisor to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the leaders of the Montgomery Improvement Association during their year-long bus protest. (3) According to Rev. T.J. Jemison, in the period between 1953 and 1960, African Americans in Baton Rouge made some attempts to desegregate eating establishments in the downtown areas, and these efforts were often led by students from Southern University. …

Civil Rights Made Harder

I have always enjoyed teaching the civil rights movement to undergraduate students. The central stories from 1955 to 1965 are remarkably rich, since so many tell the struggles of ordinary citizens trying to change injustices against difficult odds. For students who have grown jaded about American politicsGeneration X-Files, I sometimes call them-there are plenty of heroes within the stories, those who see morality and political change as inseparable. Consider Robert Moses, the young and soft-spoken philosophy student who read Camus and worked out his moral philosophy in voter registration drives and organizing. Or study Martin Luther King who widened the meaning of politics beyond interest group bartering. For King, politics was about citizens toughening themselves with a spiritual discipline against resentment (Reinhold Niebuhr's term) and creating a beloved community through a participatory ethic of non-violent change. Politics and morality, for King and Moses, were always intertwined: a lesson that challenges the presumptions of so many young people today.1 At the same time, the civil rights movement was not just about moral clarity and idealism. After all, Rosa Parks did not refuse to get off that famous Montgomery bus just because she was tired and wanted change but because she had been trained within institutions pursuing a political victory. King's life and activism make this even clearer. We need not explore the lurid details about his extra-marital affairs to see he was no saint. He let politics trump

“You've Struck a Rock”

In the Montgomery bus boycott and the South African anti-pass campaign, women's autonomous organizations initiated actions that catalyzed the mass movements for racial justice and national liberation. The activism of women and their organizations sprang from their particular positioning within systems of multiple oppressions simultaneously experiencing racial/ethnic, class, and gender oppression. In both the United States and South Africa, the particular structural location and autonomous resistance of women of African descent was an important aspect of the political opportunity structure and served as a catalyst that catapulted their respective movements for racial justice and/or national liberation to higher levels. This study employs a gendered and comparative approach to these two resistance campaigns to understand better the effects of interactive and multiplicative inequalities on movement processes and the gendered nature of political opportunities.

Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia

Long before the Montgomery bus boycott ushered in the modern civil rights movement, black and white southerners struggled to forge interracial democracy in America. This innovative book examines the most successful interracial coalition in the nineteenth-century South, Virginia's Readjuster Party, and uncovers a surprising degree of fluidity in postemancipation southern politics. Melding social, cultural, and political history, Jane Dailey chronicles the Readjusters' efforts to foster political cooperation across the color line. She demonstrates that the power of racial rhetoric, and the divisiveness of racial politics, derived from the everyday experiences of individual Virginians--from their local encounters on the sidewalk, before the magistrate's bench, in the schoolroom. In the process, she reveals the power of black and white southerners to both create and resist new systems of racial discrimination. The story of the Readjusters shows how hard white southerners had to work to establish racial domination after emancipation, and how passionately black southerners fought each and every infringement of their rights as Americans. |This innovative book examines the most successful interracial coalition in the nineteenth-century South, Virginia's Readjuster Party, and uncovers a surprising degree of fluidity in postemancipation southern politics.

Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia

Long before the Montgomery bus boycott ushered in the modern civil rights movement, black and white southerners struggled to forge interracial democracy in America. This innovative book examines the most successful interracial coalition in the nineteenth-century South, Virginia's Readjuster Party, and uncovers a surprising degree of fluidity in postemancipation southern politics. Melding social, cultural, and political history, Jane Dailey chronicles the Readjusters' efforts to foster political cooperation across the color line. She demonstrates that the power of racial rhetoric, and the divisiveness of racial politics, derived from the everyday experiences of individual Virginians--from their local encounters on the sidewalk, before the magistrate's bench, in the schoolroom. In the process, she reveals the power of black and white southerners to both create and resist new systems of racial discrimination. The story of the Readjusters shows how hard white southerners had to work to establish racial domination after emancipation, and how passionately black southerners fought each and every infringement of their rights as Americans. |This innovative book examines the most successful interracial coalition in the nineteenth-century South, Virginia's Readjuster Party, and uncovers a surprising degree of fluidity in postemancipation southern politics.

Porgy and Miles

Miles Davis traced his rising fame in the 1950s to changes taking place in society. “There was a new mood coming into the country,” he stated in his autobiography. “Black and white people were starting to get together, and in the music world Uncle Tom images were on their way out.” Describing himself as a “nonconformist”-“cool and hip and angry and sophisticated and ultra clean”-Davis identified with others in that period who were breaking barriers and challenging authority: Martin Luther King leading the Montgomery bus boycott, Marian Anderson appearing as the first black singer at the Metropolitan Opera, Marlon Brando and James Dean gaining popularity as actors by portraying rebels (Davis 1989:197-98). Davis’s bold, brash persona earned him a special degree of respect from black Americans. Writer Amiri Baraka considered the trumpeter his “ultimate culture hero,” someone who embodied “a black attitude that had grown steadily more ubiquitous in the 1950s-defiance” (Baraka 1996:41, 48). Given Davis’s affiliation, first with a group of postwar jazz musicians carving out a new identity for black artists, then with a larger movement engaged in transforming the nation’s cultural and political landscape (including the Beats, Civil Rights activists, Abstract Expressionists, and others), it is remarkable that in 1958 he teamed up with arranger Gil Evans to record an album devoted to Porgy and Bess. Ever since its premiere, the opera by the Gershwins and Heyward had sparked controversy and caused Mrican Americans to speak out in protest.

When the Church Bell Rang Racist: The Methodist Church and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama (review)

When the Church Bell Rang Racist: The Methodist Church and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama. By Donald Collins. (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press. 1998. Pp. xi, 177. $29.95.) When the Church Bell Rang Racist is the story of the Alabama-West Florida Methodist Conference and its activities during the civil-rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's. It is also the personal memoir of the author, who was a Methodist minister between 1952 and 1969, holding pastorates in this particular conference. From the very beginning of his study, Collins, now a retired banker in Seattle,Washington, makes it clear that the Methodist Church did not respond the civil-rights movement. In fact, anyone who did show any sympathy, especially among its ministers, was punished, threatened, transferred, or intimidated by his own white congregation and by pro-segregationist groups within the Methodist Church. Collins argues that the Methodist Church limited its welcome to its own kind and supported the segregated status quo (p. ix). Realizing the gravity of what he is telling, Collins takes the reader through a very meticulous, almost year-by-year portrayal of what actually happened in the Alabama-West Florida Conference, what specific civil-rights incidents occurred, how specific ministers reacted, and the results of their support of black activists. After explaining the make-up of the Methodist conference and the role of bishops within any given conference, the author explains that forty-two ministers left their callings as a result of what happened during these turbulent years. Without question, Collins points out that many Methodist ministers actually supported the White Citizens Councils in Alabama, the pro-segregation Association of Methodist Ministers and Laymen, and even the annual conferences and its bishops. As early as the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, the Methodist Church opposed the civil-rights leaders' calls for integration, whether it was in the Tuskegee boycott of white merchants or the Mobile bus desegregation petition. Ministers who showed any support or sympathy for the plight of black people were harassed by their congregations as in the case of John Parker, A. S.Turnipseed, Bob Zellner, or Charles Prestwood. More distressing for Collins was the Methodist Church's actually voting support sustain segregation or the growing influence of the pro-segregationist Methodist Layman's Union. Collins also details how the bishops of the Alabama-West Florida Conference supported these activities by their refusal do or say anything stop the barring of black people from Methodist services of worship. Here, the author singles out Bishop Bachman G. …

Transnational Diffusion and The African American Reinvention of Gandhian Repertoire

Why did American civil rights activists fail to fully implement the Gandhian repertoire before the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and 1956? How did transnational diffusion of the Gandhian repertoire proceed over time? Classical diffusion theory provides a useful starting point for answering these questions, but it does not fully capture the twists and turns occurring in the transnational diffusion of a collective action repertoire. To account for the non-linear and contingent aspects of transnational diffusion between social movements, this article proposes an alternative theoretical framework and applies it to the case of diffusion between the independence movement in India and the civil rights movement in the United States. The historical case study emphasizes collective reinvention of the Gandhian repertoire by American civil rights networks, instead of critical mass or individual thresholds; and the intergenerational transfer of relevant knowledge and experience from these implementation pioneers to the new generation of civil rights movement activists. Finally, the article examines whether its alternative theoretical framework only applies to this particular instance of transnational diffusion or whether it has more general relevance for social movement theory.

Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters

The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was the first national trade union for African Americans. Standard BSCP histories focus on the men who built the union: few acknowledge the important role of the Ladies' Auxiliary in shaping public debates over black manhood and unionization, setting political agendas for the black community, and crafting effective strategies to win racial and economic justice. In this first book-length history of the women of the BSCP, Melinda Chateauvert brings to life an entire group of women ignored in previous histories of the Brotherhood and of working-class women, situating them in the debates among women's historians over the ways that race and class shape women's roles and gender relations. Chateauvert's work shows how the auxiliary, made up of the wives, daughters, and sisters of Pullman porters, used the Brotherhood to claim respectability and citizenship. Pullman maids, relegated to the auxiliary, found their problems as working women neglected in favor of the rhetoric of racial solidarity. The auxiliary actively educated other women and children about the labor movement, staged consumer protests, and organized local and national civil rights campaigns ranging from the 1941 March on Washington to school integration to the Montgomery bus boycott.

Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century.

Capitalism and slavery stand as the two economic phenomena that have most clearly defined the United States. Yet, despite African Americans' nearly $500 billion annual spending power, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the ways U.S. businesses have courted black dollars in post-slavery America. Robert E. Weems, Jr., presents the first fully integrated history of black consumerism over the course of the last century. The World War I era Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to northern and southern cities stimulated initial corporate interest in blacks as consumers. A generation later, as black urbanization intensified during World War II and its aftermath, the notion of a distinct, profitable African American consumer market gained greater currency. Moreover, black socioeconomic gains resulting from the Civil Rights movement which itself featured such consumer justice protests as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, further enhanced the status and influence of African American shoppers. Unwilling to settle for facile answers, Weems explores the role of black entrepreneurs who promoted the importance of the African American consumer market to U.S. corporations. Their actions, ironically, set the stage for the ongoing destruction of black-owned business. While the extent of educational, employment, and residential desegregation remains debatable, African American consumer dollars have, by any standard, been fully incorporated into the U.S. economy. Desegregating the Dollar takes us through the blaxploitation film industry, the vast market for black personal care products, and the insidious exploitation of black urban misery by liquor and cigarette advertisers. Robert E. Weems, Jr., has given us the definitive account of the complicated relationship between African Americans, capitalism, and consumerism.

Monk Meets SNCC

Thelonious Monk--the enigma, the man who could compose with the radio blaring, wore unusual hats, danced around onstage, had periods of acute disconnectedness, and showed particular gifts in mathematics as a high school student--has long been a potent symbol of the jazz musician as artist. Monk's reluctance to verbalize--to interviewers, musicians seeking instruction, and even friends and family members--provides further evidence that music was his true language. Monk spoke the unspeakable through music and took the listener to another level through his utterly original compositions and improvisation.(1) By adopting and cultivating this quintessentially romantic concept of art, bebop musicians in the 1940s demanded that their music be taken seriously. The trappings of art brought dignity and prestige to African-American musicians struggling to overturn the legacy of minstrelsy and its demands for smiling buffoonery. In the context of a racially segregated society, the demand by black musicians of the 1940s to be acknowledged as artists was a rebellious political act.(2) Yet the notion of absolute music to which the romantic aesthetic subscribed held that true art was above politics. Consequently, musicians of the 1940s and 1950s found themselves in the ironic position of actively cultivating the image of the apolitical artist in order to assert the underlying political challenge posed by the obvious excellence of African-American music. This stance was particularly attractive to white intellectuals, bohemians, and progressives who could find common cause with African-American musicians in art. As the Civil Rights movement became a dominating presence in the public consciousness, however, particularly after the year-long Montgomery bus boycott (1955--56), the African-American community increasingly expected black musicians, entertainers, and celebrities to do their part in the struggle. In the midst of the Montgomery boycott, for example, Nat was beaten by whites while performing in Birmingham with a racially mixed band. Instead of earning the support of the African-American press, he was roundly denounced for having agreed to an engagement in a segregated theater. If the ordinary people of Montgomery could walk in protest day after day, they argued, the least someone like Nat could do was to refuse to play for segregated audiences. The idea of art divorced from politics, in other words, was placed under scrutiny by the burgeoning Civil Rights movement (A King Is Uncrowned 1956; Cole Leaves Us 1956).(3) Viewed against the backdrop of bebop's militancy and the battle waged for racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s, Monk's image has been decidedly apolitical. Unlike his contemporaries Max Roach and Charles Mingus, he did not speak out on politics through his words or music. In a well-known interview with Valerie Wilmer (1965, 22), Monk emphasized that he was not particularly interested in politics. I hardly know anything about it.... I never was interested in those Muslims. If you want to know, you should ask Art Blakey. I didn't have to change my name--it's always been weird enough! I haven't done one of those freedom suites, and I don't intend to. I mean, I don't see the point. I'm not thinking that race thing now; it's not on my mind. Everybody's trying to get me to think it, though, but it doesn't bother me. It only bugs the people who're trying to get me to think it. In 1958, Monk emphatically denied a social subtext for his music: My music is not a social comment on discrimination or poverty or the like. I would have written the same way even if I had not been a Negro (quoted in Brown 1958, 45).(4) SNCC's Salute to Southern Students On February 1, 1963, Thelonious Monk nevertheless performed at a gala fund-raising concert at Carnegie Hall for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). …

The Foot Soldiers of the Montgomery Bus Boycott

The Foot Soldiers of the Montgomery Bus Boycott

Closing Ranks: Montgomery Jews and Civil Rights, 1954–1960

The arrest of Rosa Parks on 1 December 1955 provided the spark which ignited the long smouldering resentments of black Montgomerians. For 381 days they waged a boycott of the city bus lines, frustrating the opposition of white authorities and financially crippling the local transit company. More profoundly it resulted in a Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on public transportation. Equally momentous was the emergence of the man who would serve as the spiritual figurehead of the civil rights movement: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.In the wake of the Montgomery bus boycott, one national black newspaper acclaimed King as “Alabama's Modern Moses.” Since the darkest days of slavery African-Americans had sought spiritual salvation by comparing their own condition to that of God's Chosen People, the Israelites of the Old Testament. Throughout their years of enslavement they prayed for the Moses who would deliver them from their suffering unto the Promised Land. During the boycott, the black citizens of Montgomery had similarly sustained their morale by singing the old slave spirituals, raising their voices at the nightly mass meetings in rousing renditions of “Go Down Moses, Way Down in Egypt Land.” “As sure as Moses got the children of Israel across the Red Sea,” King exhorted the black community, “we can stick together and win.” Others too drew the analogy between the historical experience of Jews and the contemporary predicament of African-Americans. Looking back on the boycott, white liberal activist Virginia Durr evoked the spectre of Nazi Germany in describing the strength of racist opposition.

"My Mind Set on Freedom": A History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954- 1968.

Part 1 Preface ix Part 2 THE GATHERING STORM 3 Chapter 3 First legal challenges. The New Deal. Regional protest groups. Local organizations. The Emmett Till case. The Brown decision announced. Part 4 THE SCHOOLHOUSE DOOR 27 Chapter 5 Reaction to the Brown decision. Autherine Lucy. Crisis at Little Rock. Massive resistance. James Meredith at Ole Miss. George Wallace and the University of Alabama. Part 6 I HAVE A DREAM 51 Chapter 7 The Montgomery Bus Boycott. The rise of martin Luther King, Jr. King's philosophy. The formation of SCLC. Failure at Albany. The Birmingham Kennedy's involvement. The March on Washington. Part 8 SITTING-IN FOR JUSTICE, RIDING FOR FREEDOM 81 Chapter 9 The Greensboro movement. The movement spreads. Rides. Origins of SNCC. The Voting Rights Freedom Summer. Malcolm X. Part 10 THE NATIONAL RESPONSE 106 Chapter 11 The Eisenhower administration. The election of 1960. Kennedy and civil rights. The Civil Rights Act of 1964. White backlash. The Mississippi Democratic party. The election of 1964. Part 12 THE END OF THE MOVEMENT 127 13 The Selma The Voting Rights Act of 1965. The end of school segregation. Collapse of the movement. power. King's Chicago sojourn. The Poor People's campaign. The death of Martin Luther King. Part 14 THE NEW SOUTH 149 Chapter 15 Effect of the Voting Rights Act. Black political participation. School desegregation and its effects. Southern justice. The wealth disparity. King's legacy. Part 16 A Note on Sources 165 Part 17 Index 169

Daybreak of freedom: the Montgomery bus boycott

Daybreak of freedom: the Montgomery bus boycott

"To Redeem the Soul of America": Public Relations and The Civil Rights Movement

The purpose of this research is to describe and analyze the public relations elements of the civil rights movement from 1955 to 1968. The focus is the communications strategies and programs of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), headed by Martin Luther King, Jr. A descriptive section outlines the situation that led to the Montgomery bus boycott, the birth of the SCLC, the goals of the SCLC, and the SCLC's public relations department. The SCLC's public relations strategies and programs are then analyzed by examining rhetorical communication, situational use of one- and two-way models of public relations, alliance building, political advocacy, consumer boycotts, and grassroots communication, including political and citizenship education, voter registration, and King's people to people tours. The author concludes that the SCLC's communication programs and strategies did help the organization achieve its basic goal of eradicating state-supported segregation and discrimination. However, the SCLC's ultimate mission—full equality for African Americans in all aspects of society—remains unaccomplished. Public relations is a very necessary part of any protest of civil disobedience.... The public at large must be aware of the inequities involved in such a system [of segregation]. In effect, in the absence of justice in the established courts of the region, nonviolent protesters are asking for a hearing in the court of world opinion. Martin Luther King, Jr. (quoted in Garrow, 1986, p. 172)

International Pressure and the U.S. Government's Response to Little Rock

SEGREGATION RECEIVED MORE INTERNATIONAL CRITICISM than any other area of U.S. race relations in the post-World War II period. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations' racial reforms were a response not only to an increasingly effective civil rights movement in the U.S. South but also to international politics. Segregation hindered appeals to potential allies in competition with the Soviet bloc. So in its famous 1947 report President Truman's committee on civil rights concluded: Our position in the postwar world is so vital to the future that our smallest actions have far-reaching effects. . . . [T]he treatment which our Negroes receive is taken as a reflection of our attitudes toward all dark-skinned peoples. . . . We cannot escape the fact that our civil rights record has been an issue in world politics. . . . The United States is not so strong, the final triumph of the democratic ideal is not so inevitable that we can ignore what the world thinks of us or our record.1 Truman's secretary of state, Dean Acheson, cared little about black rights per se, but he was acutely conscious of the same connection. School segregation has been singled out for hostile foreign comment in the United Nations and elsewhere, he warned the attorney general in 1952.2 The State Department used particularly strong language in its amicus brief for the Brown case, argued in December 1952. During the past six years, the damage to our foreign relations attributable to [race discrimination] has become progressively greater. The United States is under constant attack in the foreign press, over the foreign radio, and in such international bodies as the United Nations. . . . [T]he undeniable existence of racial discrimination gives unfriendly governments the most effective kind of ammunition for their propaganda warfare. . . . [T]he view is expressed that the United States is hypocritical in claiming to be the champion of democracy while permitting practices of racial discrimination here in this country. . . . Other peoples cannot understand how [school segregation] can exist in a country which professes to be a staunch supporter of freedom, justice, and democracy. . . . [R]acial discrimination remains a source of embarrassment to this government in the day-to-day conduct of its foreign relations. . . . [I]t jeopardizes the effective maintenance of our moral leadership of the free and democratic nations of the world.3 The president's statements also bear the imprint of international pressure. As historian Richard Dalfiume notes, just about every speech . . . [Harry Truman] made on the civil rights issue . . . always brings up this point: The rest of the world is watching us. We must put our own house in order. The Truman administration's efforts to desegregate the armed forces and commit the Democratic party to black rights in 1948 must in part be understood as serving Cold War motives.4 The Eisenhower administration moved reluctantly in its first term. But in the second term, the 1955 murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, widely publicized discriminatory sentences by southern state courts, the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott, and, most dramatically, southern defiance of federal school desegregation orders all generated negative international publicity.5 At the Bandung Conference of 1955, representatives from Africa and Asia denounced western racism. During the Hungarian crisis of 1956, when the U.S. delegation to the United Nations pushed for sanctions against the Soviet Union, several foreign governments responded that the American government violated the civil and human rights of its own colored citizens.6 A similar response greeted U.S. efforts during the Berlin crisis of 1948-1949. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles even suggested at one point that the U.S. government's refusal to take a firm stand against South Africa's apartheid policy grew out of a fear of being charged with hypocrisy.7 While the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision helped improve America's image abroad, defiance of the decision attracted world-wide attention and resulted in a new round of criticism. …

Making civil rights law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936-1961

From the 1930s to the early 1960s civil rights law was made primarily through constitutional litigation. Before Rosa Parks could ignite a Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Supreme Court had to strike down the Alabama law which made segregated bus service required by law; before Martin Luther King could march on Selma to register voters, the Supreme Court had to find unconstitutional the Southern Democratic Party's exclusion of African-Americans; and before the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Supreme Court had to strike down the laws allowing for the segregation of public graduate schools, colleges, high schools, and grade schools. Making Civil Rights Law provides a chronological narrative history of the legal struggle, led by Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, that preceded the political battles for civil rights. Drawing on interviews with Thurgood Marshall and other NAACP lawyers, as well as new information about the private deliberations of the Supreme Court, Tushnet tells the dramatic story of how the NAACP Legal Defense Fund led the Court to use the Constitution as an instrument of liberty and justice for all African-Americans. He also offers new insights into how the justices argued among themselves about the historic changes they were to make in American society. Making Civil Rights Law provides an overall picture of the forces involved in civil rights litigation, bringing clarity to the legal reasoning that animated this Constitutional revolution, and showing how the slow development of doctrine and precedent reflected the overall legal strategy of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP.

Free at Last? The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It.

In this account, the author traces the progress of the Civil Rights Movement, from its beginnings - the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision, the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins - through the growth of consciousness and confidence, all the way to Selma and beyond.