March: Books 2 & 3

Historians generally identify the civil rights movement as beginning in 1954 with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and ending in 1968 with the passing of the Fair Housing Act, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. This era is best understood as a high point after nearly a century of activism. After the Civil War, the federal government initiated a project known as Reconstruction, which sought to rebuild the South and ensure the rights of so-called “freedmen,” or enslaved people who were recently emancipated. For several years, this effort showed promise, as Black men held political office (including two Senate seats) and President Ulysses S. Grant signed the first Civil Rights Act in 1871 to defend freedmen against the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist groups. By 1877, Reconstruction mostly fell apart as Rutherford Hayes promised to withdraw federal troops from the South in exchange for their support in the contested 1876 election. In the ensuing decades, many Southern states passed “Jim Crow laws” that separated the races in the public sphere and relegated Black Americans to second-class citizenship. There were challenges to Jim Crow legislation from the beginning, most notably Homer Plessy’s deliberate travel on a “whites-only” train in New Orleans, but the Supreme Court upheld segregation on the principle of “separate but equal.”

The early 20th century saw two dominant civil rights figures emerge. The first, Booker T. Washington, counseled education and business acumen as a way for Black people to escape the ills of segregation. The second, W. E. B. Du Bois, cofounded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to organize challenges against segregation and disenfranchisement and called national attention to the epidemic of lynching, or vigilante murders that disproportionately targeted Black men. Early civil rights efforts met with a brutal backlash, including the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s as a mass movement with millions of members. It was around this time that Elijah Muhammad and his Nation of Islam, which would later have Malcolm X as its greatest orator and advocate, denounced the United States as irredeemably racist and called for Black separatism.

World War II had a profound impact on civil rights, as more than 1 million Black Americans served, albeit in segregated units usually under white officers, to defend America against a white supremacist state. One of these soldiers was Joe Louis, the heavyweight boxing champion who became a national hero for knocking out the German Max Schmeling in 1938. As the Cold War dawned, Soviet propagandists routinely cited segregation as proof that the United States was hypocritical in its commitment to democracy and equality. The decisive turn came with the Brown decision in 1954, when Thurgood Marshall (later the first Black Supreme Court justice) successfully argued that segregation exacted a psychological toll on Black people, and that “separate” would never be “equal.” With a unanimous ruling to integrate public schools, the federal government opened the door to a much more comprehensive challenge to segregation. Those efforts took off the following year in Montgomery, Alabama, when Rosa Parks’s refusal to leave a “whites-only” seat on the city bus drew the attention of a local preacher named Martin Luther King Jr.