The Disadvantages that Black Americans faced in the early 1950's.

Civil Rights Coursework

1a The Disadvantages that Black Americans faced in the early 1950’s

Today, looking back only fifty years to 1950’s USA it is difficult to believe the racial discrimination that existed. This was extreme in many areas. Before focusing on the situation in the early 1950’s, it is essential that the historical context is outlined in order to understand the background to these issues. The disadvantages were not new but were deeply entrenched in American society.

The American Colonization Society was established in 1816 by Robert Finley as an attempt to satisfy two groups in America. Ironically, these groups were on opposite ends of the spectrum involving slavery in the early 1800’s. One group consisted of philanthropists, clergy, and abolitionist who wanted to free African slaves and their descendants and provide them with the opportunity to return to Africa. The other group was the slave owners who feared free people of colour and wanted to expel them from America.

Both of these groups felt that free blacks would be unable to assimilate into the white society of this country. John Randolph, one famous slave owner called free blacks ‘promoters of mischief.’ At this time, about 2 million blacks lived in America of which 200,000 were free persons of colour. Henry Clay, a southern congressman and sympathizer of the plight of free blacks, believed that because of ‘unconquerable prejudice resulting from their colour, they never could amalgamate with the free whites of this country.’

Slavery was an idea that European settlers brought with them to the New World, so it existed in America from the very beginning. By the mid-1700s, slavery had become necessary to run the huge plantations in the Southern colonies, and the sale of human beings as property was booming.

Prisoners of war were sold to European and American shippers on the coasts of Africa and transported like cargo across the Atlantic on a three-month voyage called “The Middle Passage.” Although slavers tried to keep their cargo in relatively good condition so that they would sell for a higher price, many Africans died from starvation and beatings during the trip.

Those that lived were sold at auctions when they arrived in America, with no consideration for keeping family groups together. Although some slaves worked as domestic servants in towns and plantation households, most were field hands. They planted, cared for, and harvested many crops, especially cotton, doing the work that huge farm machinery does today. Children born to slaves were considered the property of their masters, and were put to work by the age of five. They could be sold to other masters away from their families at any time.

Farmers became dependent upon the use of slave labour to ensure their profitability. Many Southern states relied heavily on the sale of these plantation crops, and they saw attempts to slavery as threats to their economy and way of life.

Since the Southern economy depended on , they felt that their way of life was being threatened by Northern abolitionist attitudes. Several Southern states decided to secede from the Union about the same time that Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as president. He was determined to keep the Union together, and went to war to do so. With the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, however, he made it clear that the war wasn’t just about keeping the Union together; it was also about abolishing slavery.

Slavery wasn’t truly made illegal until after the Civil War in 1865, when the 13th amendment was added to the Constitution. The change in the law didn’t change people’s attitudes, however. Although the government did make some efforts to help the South rebuild, and to help freed slaves to join society, it was to be many decades before the dream of equality could be realized.

In 1909, Mary Ovington read an article about racial discrimination in America. She was a socialist and suffragette. She contacted friends who shared her political views on discrimination and they formed the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP).

The NAACP also started its own magazine called Crisis; the magazine was edited by William du Bois, he was first black man to obtain a Ph.D. This magazine was incredibly popular with black Americans and white sympathisers.

Although black soldiers have fought in America’s armies since the Revolutionary War, they were usually segregated from the white troops and given inferior training and duties. This started to change during World War II.

The first group of Tuskegee airmen, the 99th squadron, arrived in North Africa on May 31, 1943. In all, about 450 Tuskegee graduates flew missions in Europe and North ...

This is a preview of the whole essay

The first group of Tuskegee airmen, the 99th squadron, arrived in North Africa on May 31, 1943. In all, about 450 Tuskegee graduates flew missions in Europe and North Africa during the war. At first most of the Tuskegee pilots flew escort missions, protecting bombers flown by white crews. They were famous for never losing a plane they were escorting to enemy fire. Later they were able to fly bombing missions with white squadrons as well.

Education in Black America couldn’t have been worse; they were stuck in a vicious cycle. They were given a very basic education according to J.C Furnas, a popular author of the time, writing Anatomy of Paradise: Hawaii and the South Seas. ‘Only the children over the age 14 know much about reading and writing; their parents know nothing at all.’ This is because of the basic education they were given, the teachers knew little or nothing about school work and the entire ‘qualified teachers’ going to white schools. Poor education led to poor qualifications. If you have little or no qualifications you can only get a poor job. Poor jobs tend not to pay much and therefore you cannot afford to buy anything, struggling to buy the basics. This leads to a poor quality of life. Once you get stuck in this cycle it is very hard to get out of with nothing improving and so it continues.

Black Americans, after being granted freedom, had no where to live, due to their poor education they had no money and therefore could not own a proper house or have decent access to a qualified G.P. The quality of life black Americans had was well below the poverty line. They were forced to build ghettos around big cities; this is because families moved here to find work. There were massive slums built within months around the outside of the majority of major cities. There were 11 million black Americans living below the poverty line in 1959, this accumulates to about 56% out of the whole black population. J.C Furnas quoted in a newspaper report that ‘There were no blankets all winter, but sacks helped a little. With the wind whistling through the wide cracks in the floor.’ This shows the quality of their living space, with their houses being no more than a box made out of corrugated iron and next to no blankets made surviving another day exceptionally hard, without whites attacking you at every conceivable moment. If you are not being protected from the elements you are more susceptible to getting colds or diseases and without having a qualified doctor this made their lives worse. America, having one of the greatest medical systems in the world was strictly for whites. Black Americans had to attend a Jim Crow hospital. Everything blacks had to attend was Jim Crow. They were just laws which separated the mixing of black and whites everything was separated from Coca Cola machines to schools and cemeteries these were poorly funded and often well below standards, they were also always well in demand, this is because of the amount of them. Black Americans could not use any thing which had ‘For Whites only’ branded across it. There could be a cue of blacks as far as the eye could see waiting to use a water fountain and no one at the white drinking fountain. Blacks weren’t allowed to go anywhere near the white fountain. The usual punishment was death or a mass beating.

Throughout America lynching was common; anything the whites disapproved of was punishable by lynching. From 1886 to 1954 an average of 2 black Americans were lynched every week. Lynching is when someone is executed by hanging at the nearest and most convenient pole.

Lynching was not kept for any single crime; an angry white mob would do anything to get their hands on a black that, in their eyes, had broken the law. One account of this is ‘in Omaha a white mob completely destroyed a courthouse by fire in order to secure a Negroe on the charge of attacking a white girl. The group succeeded in seizing him, whereupon he was dragged through the streets, shot more than a thousand times, and mutilated beyond recognition. He was finally hanged downtown at one of the busiest intersections.’

Any age any crime it didn’t matter what, a good example of this is the murder of Emmett Till. In Mississippi in 1955 a fourteen year old boy named Emmett Till whistled at a white girl, his punishment for doing so was to be chased by a pack of blood thirsty, foaming at the mouth enraged whites, they chased him down the street, and when they caught him they beat him. Beat him till he was a bloody lifeless carcass lying on the floor.

The lynching season was usually any time around an election. This was to do with the Ku Klux Klan, they would go round and in a bid to increase the amount of people voting for them would go and attack blacks, they held very strong racialist views on blacks and tried to scare the population into feeling the same.

Racial discrimination had existed for several generations; racial harmony would still take some time to achieve. The events of the early 1950’s saw key civil rights campaigners such as Martin Luther King Junior rise to high profile positions. They were able to use the events to influence the changes that would be necessary to enable black and white Americans to live and work together without discrimination.

1b. Why did the Civil rights movements develop in the 1950’s?

During the 1950’s the black Civil Rights movement developed dramatically. In this essay I will explore the reasons behind why there was such a sudden improvement and focus on black civil rights in the United States during this decade.

Before concentrating on the 1950’s it is essential to understand the impact that the Second World War had on raising the profile of black Americans. When the war broke out in 1941, African-American leaders and newspapers pressured the government to allow African-American troops to have an equal role in the fighting instead of being left with only manual labour jobs. Partly in response to this pressure, the government opened up the 66th Air Force Flying School at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Because it was still segregated, this creation was only a partial solution, but it did function as the only Air Force flight training centre open to black pilots.

Up until World War II, most white leaders in the military claimed that African-American soldiers did not have the brains or the discipline to advance in the armed forces. The Tuskegee airmen helped challenge and ultimately change that belief. The pilots and soldiers trained at the Tuskegee Institute won more the 850 medals and proved that they were capable of serving their country—and those they were deserving of better treatment.

The armed forces were finally fully integrated in 1948, three years after World War II ended. Many white military and political leaders still doubted the ability of black soldiers, so President Harry Truman issued an executive order stating, in part, that it was “the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed forces without regard to race, colour, religion, or national origin.” That order ended segregation in the military once and for all. In 1950 the US fought in the Korean War and black soldiers were required to form part of the army, therefore able to apply Truman’s policy at an early stage.

During the 50’s a sequence of events acted as a catalyst to produce one of the greatest leaders in history. Martin Luther King was a Baptist minister brought up in the Deep South and is remembered as a kind and non violent protester for the rights of black Americans. He was one of the world’s best known advocates of non-violent social change strategy.

He was the grandson of the reverend A.D Williams who was the founder of Atlanta’s NAACP chapter. On December 5th 1955, 5 days after the Montgomery Civil Rights Activists Rosa Parks refused to obey the cities rules regarding segregation on buses, Black residences launched a bus boycott and elected King as president of the newly formed Montgomery improvement association. As the boycott continued through to 1956 King gained national prominence as a result of his exceptional oratorical skills and personal courage. He had to face up to extreme violence, his own house was bombed and he was convicted of conspiring to interfere with the bus companies operations. However despite the attempts to suppress the movement on November 13th 1956 the Supreme Court ruled that bus segregation was illegal insuring victory for the boycott.

In 1957 seeking to build upon the success of the boycott movement King and other southern black ministers founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). King was the SCLC President and he was now striving to achieve the goal of black voting rights. On May 17th 1957 he spoke to a crowd of 15 000 in Washington D.C. The following year he toured India in order to understand Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of non violence. In 1958 Dr King also met with President Eisenhower on problems effecting black Americans. This clearly indicated that Dr King was reaching the highest levels of U.S government. On his return to the United States he resigned from his pastoral duties to concentrate on Civil rights full-time. He moved to Atlanta to direct the SCLC.

Although King was portrayed as the key black spokesperson he did not mobilise mass protest activity during the first five years after the Montgomery boycott ended.

Other events took place in the 50’s which enabled the civil rights movement to make great steps forward. In 1957, in the Deep South of the ‘land of opportunity’ nine black students were allowed to attend Little Rock Central High School Arkansas. This was the first time that blacks had been allowed to attend the same schools as whites. This is because of a famous court case in 1954. Brown versus Topeka, this case went right up to the Supreme Court and was won by the blacks. This forced President Truman into making segregation in schools unconstitutional. This enraged white pupils as many of the classes were now half empty. Segregationist leaders called for student boycotts. They were part successful with two thousand pupils skipping lessons in order to make a stand against black students learning alongside them.

The events of the 1950’s and the exceptional leadership and inspirational skills of Martin Luther King provided the springboard for further developments in the next decade. The groundwork had been started but there was still a lot of work to be done.

2. In what ways did the civil rights movement change during the 1960’s

The tone had been set, the 1960’s was to see further dramatic developments. The catalysts behind these were human, political and technological.

The same ideas from the fifties were still viewed at the beginning of the sixties with many blacks straightening their hair and living in the shadows of the whites. They wanted to be an American and to be involved in whatever success was given to this nation of freedom. Equality and justice were the Civil Rights main aims, which were obviously not fulfilled during the fifties. However at the start of the sixties they were coming to fruition by the forward thinking of Martin Luther King and J. F Kennedy. The powerful speeches made by King in the capital, Washington D.C clearly illustrated how far he had come since his earlier days.

King proved that peace and law abiding could be just as powerful as rioting and violence. The sit down protests in the middle of main roads were common and proved a powerful point. With the added backing of the brand new communication devices introduced towards the end of the fifties the civil rights movement was gaining interest. People in Los Angeles could see on their televisions what was happening in New York as the events took place and therefore did not need to wait for newspapers to report on the story days later.

Christianity was still seen as the religion of black America and in times of hardship this was seen as a saviour from the whites. However the sixties also saw the increase in popularity of an alternative civil rights protest group. Their leader, Malcolm X, saw Christianity as the religion of whites and therefore should not be worshipped by ‘us’.

At the end of the sixties everything had changed. The ideas of Kings dream had been scrapped and thanks to people like Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers the new saying was ‘Seize the time.’ This totally contradicted the old dream of King and sent black America into a frenzy of riots and violence. Blacks were tired of waiting and wanted change now.

Malcolm X did not oppose King but did not like his teachings, King being Christian and X being a Muslim. X believed in violence because being non violent means to ‘be defenceless in the face of the cruelest beasts that has ever taken people into captivity.’ X also believed that there was no need to be non violent if his enemy were to get away with it, ‘I don’t go along with any kind of non-violence unless everybody’s going to be non violent. If they make the Ku Klux Klan non violent, I’ll be non violent’.

Even though the campaigners in the north were making more of a stir and notice they were suffering heavily as Look Magazine discovers, ‘Non-violent direct action enabled the Negro to take to the streets in active protest, but muzzled the guns of the oppressor because even he could not shoot down in daylight unarmed men, women and children. This is why there was less loss of life in ten years of southern protest than in ten days of northern riots.’

The reason for this was that King was a strong follower of Ghandi and lived in the South. King was able to put his opinion forward easier to that of his neighbours where as X and Seale came from the big cities in the North and believed in the violence which was frequently broadcast on television and resulted in many casualties. The biggest uprisings were in black communities such as Harlem, Boston, and Brooklyn. This was because when people start a riot they don’t go thirty miles down the road to do so they do it where they are and completely wreck the area. Whites did not take as much notice of this type of protest because it did not affect them in the way that Kings protest did and although gained all of the medias attention did not prove as vital as what King was leading in the South.

The Congress of racial equality was a powerful group towards the end of the sixties. They strongly backed the ideas laid down by King and still thought Christianity was the way forward. Whereas X believed Islam to be the saviour, he believed that Christianity was the religion of whites, and blacks should not follow in the white’s foot steps and should be proud to be different. Using the saying, ‘We are not white, we should be proud to be who we are.’

The government was unsure as what to do with a certain Cassius Clay who was gaining worldwide stardom after become world boxing champion. This attracted world wide interest about the roles of blacks in America’s society; they were allowed to go to the cinema but didn’t earn enough money so this privilege was useless. Many countries started to question the U.S’ laws about segregation and what blacks could and couldn’t do. Linked to this the Vietnam War saw further developments in the US Army, similar to those that had started during the Second World War and Korean War.

The US had to act, the momentum was building – the work had been achieved by key individuals and although Martin Luther King and Malcolm X had contrasting ideals they were both striving for the same thing – equal rights.