10.3: Civil Rights Movement in the USA - TEACH -

• History
• Middelbare school
• havo
• Leerjaar 3

 The Time of Television and Computers

10.3. The Civil Rights Movement in the USA

The three Allied leaders at the Yalta Conference. From left to right: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. 9th February 1945.

A bus station in the State of North Carolina in 1940

people in this lesson

Dr Martin Luther King

Malcolm X

Rosa Parks

President

Eisenhower

A poster announcing a show of a white artist performing as a black person in 1900. The act usually consisted of funny dances.

Jim Crow Laws:

Racist laws that gave colored people less rights than white people in the southern states.

pro- and anti segregation protests, 1954.

pro- and anti segregation protests, 1954.

Students shouting at African American student Elizabeth Eckford, as she tries to pass through the lines of National Guardsmen in an effort to gain entrance to Little Rock's (Ark.) Central High School.

Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division escort the Little Rock Nine students into the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Ark.

However, it was a great break-through. After 1954, many more people started movements that strived towards more equality for African Americans. Together these movements were called the Civil Rights Movement. In the 1950s and ‘60s, their actions were mostly non-violent, based on non-cooperation, as Gandhi had done in India. After Rosa Parks was arrested because she refused to stand in the back of a bus, a bus boycott was organised. Others organised sit-ins and marches.

Segregation in the bus: white people in the front , black people in the back.

If the front of the bus was crowded, black people had to give up their seats for white passengers

During the Bus Boycott, black people refused to take the bus, to force the bus company to lift the racist rules.

This was successful. The bus company almost went bankrupt and eventually changed the rules, allowing free choice of seats for everybody.

This is the bus company's website today..

Rosa Parks was arrested for not giving up her seat to a white passenger in the bus.

The march on Washington, whre Martin Luther King gave his famous speech.

The most famous leader of this non-violent movement was Reverend Martin Luther King. In 1963, he organised a large march on Washington to demand ‘jobs and freedom’. He ended this mass meeting with his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech, which made a huge impression on the world.

In 1964, President L.B. Johnson passed a Civil Rights Act (initiated by J.F. Kennedy), which made discrimination against African Americans (and everybody else) illegal and guaranteed the same employment rights and equal access to facilities for everybody. Equal voting rights and equal rights to housing were not yet guaranteed. It took until 1968 before African Americans had full civil rights.

White extremism

The rise of the Civil Rights Movement also caused a rise in white extremism. Many white people in the Jim Crow Laws-states saw their way of life threatened by the rise of the African American community. Groups emerged that intimidated, assaulted and sometimes killed supporters of the Civil Rights Movement. Such an extremist organisation was the Ku Klux Klan. The ‘KKK’ was originally founded in 1865, right after the abolition of slavery, but disappeared again a few years later. However, in 1915, a second Klan was founded: during the 1920s and early ‘30s, the KKK used extreme violence – such as public lynchings - against African Americans, Jews and other people who in their view did not belong within American society. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Klan was less openly active, mainly because the organisation fragmented into several smaller groups. Nevertheless they still played a big role in the violence against supporters - black as well as white - of the Civil Rights Movement.

A group of Ku Klux Klan members burning a cross in Knoxville, Tennessee. September 4, 1948.

The white suits, the pointy hats and a burning cross were the Klan’s trademarks.

The KKK feels very connected to the racial theories of the Nazis.

Here two children of KKK members bring the nazi salute.

The Confederate flag was the flag of the southern (slave) states during the American Civil War. Today it stands as a symbol of white supremism in the USA.

The Civil Rights Movement had a lot of supporters, but some people thought that change should happen faster. This group increased after the murders of President Kennedy in 1963, African American activist Malcolm X in 1965 and Martin Luther King in 1968. 

New movements, such as the Black Panthers and Black Power, not only wanted to change laws, but also change the minds of people. They wanted to make African Americans proud of what they were and to force white people to acknowledge them. Some groups, such as the Black Panthers, believed that it was legitimate to use violence to achieve these goals.

Black Panther members hold a news conference in Oakland after the shooting of one of their members, 17-year old Bobby Hutton, in 1968. Hutton was shot by Oakland police when he and Panther Eldridge Cleaver were evolved in a shootout with police. At microphones is Bobby Seale, and behind his left shoulder is William Lee Brent. 

The activist Stokely Carmichael, pictured here at a 1966 rally in Berkeley, Calif., took a stand against white oppression and helped popularize the term black power

Slow change

Demonstrations and violent clashes went on, even after the Civil Rights Act had been passed, and most African Americans remained economically disadvantaged. In the 1980s and ‘90s, the matter gradually got less and less attention until in 2008, when African American Barack Obama was elected president. For many Americans, this was a very special occasion. It showed that there had been progress in the struggle for equality. However, by the end of his term, there was new unrest, when it became clear that white policemen still use more - and sometimes unnecessary - violence against African Americans than against white people. This triggered a movement with the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’.

Protestors carrying placards at a Black Lives Matter demonstration in New York City

28 November 2014

A group of demonstrators yell in front of police officers during a protest march on West Florissant Avenue in Ferguson, Mo. on August 9, 2015. 

Protesters took part in a Black Lives Matter rally in Seattle on Apr. 15, 2017

The title of the song is "They Don't Care About Us". Based on the video and the lyrics, who do you think "They" are, and who are "Us"?
1. "They" could be:

The title of the song is "They Don't Care About Us". Based on the video and the lyrics, who do you think "They" are, and who are "Us"?
2. "Us" could be:

Listen to the lyrics or look them up online.
Write down ONE sentence from the song that you think is very powerful. Explain briefly why your group chose this line.

congratulations

congratulations