8.6 Early Steps in the Civil Rights Movement (1940s and 1950s)

World War II raised expectations. Black Americans had fought fascism abroad in segregated units and pushed the 'Double V' campaign at home (7.12). NAACP membership grew enormously, and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded in 1942, tested nonviolent protest.

In 1947 Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color line with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and Truman's Committee on Civil Rights issued To Secure These Rights, calling for federal action. In 1948 Truman issued Executive Order 9981, ordering the desegregation of the armed forces, which was largely carried out during the Korean War. Southern Democrats who opposed his civil rights stand formed the States' Rights ('Dixiecrat') Party and ran Strom Thurmond for president in 1948.

The NAACP's legal team, led by Thurgood Marshall, chipped away at 'separate but equal' in higher education, winning cases like Sweatt v. Painter (1950). Then it challenged segregated public schools directly.

In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), a unanimous Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren ruled that segregated public schools violate the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause because separating children by race is inherently unequal. The Court drew on evidence that segregation harmed Black children's sense of self-worth. Brown overturned Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) for public education.

In a follow-up decision (Brown II, 1955), the Court ordered desegregation 'with all deliberate speed', vague language that let many Southern districts delay for years. Mexican American families had won a similar ruling for California schools in Mendez v. Westminster (1947), and Hernandez v. Texas (1954) extended equal protection to Mexican Americans in jury selection.

In August 1955 fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi; his mother's decision to hold an open-casket funeral and publish photos shocked the nation. In December 1955 Rosa Parks, a seamstress and experienced NAACP activist, was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. Black residents boycotted the city buses for 381 days, organized carpools and walked to work. A young minister, Martin Luther King Jr., emerged as the boycott's leader. A federal court case, Browder v. Gayle, which the Supreme Court affirmed in 1956, ended bus segregation.

Nonviolent direct action means openly breaking unjust rules or disrupting business as usual, peacefully, to force change. King, drawing on Christian teaching and Mohandas Gandhi, helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957 to spread this approach.

Many white Southern leaders vowed 'massive resistance'. In 1956, 101 Southern members of Congress signed the Southern Manifesto denouncing Brown. Some districts closed public schools rather than integrate, and White Citizens' Councils pressured Black activists economically.

In 1957 Arkansas governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard to block nine Black students, the Little Rock Nine, from entering Central High School. After mobs threatened the students, President Eisenhower, who had been cautious about civil rights, sent the 101st Airborne Division to protect them, showing that the federal government would enforce court orders. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first since Reconstruction, though it was weak.