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The Civil Rights Movement in World Perspective

Kevin Gaines is director of the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies and professor of history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His new book is American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (UNC Press). He is also the author of Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics and Culture During the Twentieth Century (UNC Press, 1996) .

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Kevin Gaines, The Civil Rights Movement in World Perspective, OAH Magazine of History , Volume 21, Issue 1, January 2007, Pages 57–64, https://doi.org/10.1093/maghis/21.1.57

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T he Mighty Sparrow, a calypso performer from Trinidad, sang in 1963, at a perilous juncture during the civil rights movement, “I was born in the USA but because of my color I'm suffering today.” “The white man preaching democracy but in truth and in fact it's hypocrisy,” Sparrow continued, warning that he was “getting vexed.” His proposed solution was the song's up-tempo refrain: “So—we want Martin Luther King for President!” Sparrow put his irreverent humor to deadly serious purpose, his song indicting both temporizing U.S. officials during the Birmingham crisis and a nation far from ready to elect a black president. Recorded for Caribbean audiences, including immigrants to the U.S., Sparrow's topical song reminds us, along with a number of recent studies, that the activities of King and the civil rights movement were keenly observed by audiences from all over the world.

Until quite recently, U.S. historians were accustomed to thinking of the civil rights movement within a domestic U.S.-based framework. But in its time, the movement had global dimensions that were abundantly clear to many contemporaries, including Sparrow, King, and many others, as this essay will show. Recent scholarship has engaged the ways in which the consciousness of civil rights leaders and black activists was in fact a worldview , a framework linking local and global events and perspectives. At the same time, that scholarship has yet to make a discernible impact in college and secondary school U.S. history textbooks. If the civil rights movement is covered in undergraduate surveys or high school classes (and sadly, we should not assume that even the most basic history of the movement is routinely taught), its story often remains a nation-based account of the response of presidential administrations to southern racial upheavals, with King as the movement's main protagonist.

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Book Review: The Twentieth Century Civil Rights Movement: An Africana Studies Perspective by Mark Christian

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• Published: 28 June 2021
• Volume 25 , pages 507–510, ( 2021 )

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• Christel N. Temple   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6198-3413 1  

There are many histories on the US Civil Right Movement, but none approaches the familiar saga of the Black freedom struggle with the intent to ground it within the discipline of Africana Studies. Mark Christian relies on decades of student curiosity and wonder about the Civil Rights Movement to structure his retelling in ways that align with his pedagogy. He features African American historical contexts, analyses of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., the activism of Black women in the Movement, and insightful chapters on the era’s liberal politics. Christian prompts readers to broaden their application of the movement’s contemporary interpretation by boldly offering more sociological and psychological explanations of racism and pathology and by grounding his arguments in an Africana Studies disciplinary lexicon.

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Temple, C.N. Book Review: The Twentieth Century Civil Rights Movement: An Africana Studies Perspective by Mark Christian. J Afr Am St 25 , 507–510 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-021-09545-3

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11.3: U.S. Civil Rights and Liberatory Movements

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• Mario Alberto Viveros Espinoza-Kulick & Kay Fischer

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The Civil Rights Movement

The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 is widely recognized as the start of the modern Civil Rights Movement in the United States, with the arrest of Rosa Parks who refused to give her seat to a white passenger. Still, it should be noted that earlier court cases, direct actions, and civil disobedience all led to the development of this movement, and Parks was not the first to refuse giving up her seat on the bus. However, Parks’ actions did lead to the Montgomery bus boycott becoming one of the most impactful boycotts in the U.S., ushering in a mass movement to dismantle the Jim Crow South and legal segregation of schools, businesses, and public transportation. The Civil Rights Movement also instituted voting rights for African Americans and other disenfranchised communities. This era culminated into significant legislative victories including: the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged as a leader for this movement, although there were many others who haven’t been as widely recognized for their contributions including women and gay men. Bayard Rustin, Fannie Lou Hamer , Ella Baker, and Septima Clark, to name a select few, played instrumental roles in what is considered one of the most effective mass movements in U.S. history.

One year since the start of the boycott, buses were desegregated following a Supreme Court ruling and Dr. King quickly became a national political figure. He established the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and led multiple nonviolent protests against “the moral injustices of a segregated society” (Paulson, 2020, p. 144). Dr. King led more than 200,000 supporters of the movement in the 1963 March on Washington, D.C., and led another major protest of the movement in 1965, marching from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama to pressure Congress to pass the voting rights bill. In most instances, peaceful demonstrators were met with violence, harassment, arrests and even death by white mobs and police.

An earlier landmark decision was the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education , which overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling on “separate but equal” in public education, making racial segregation in schools illegal (pp. 142-143). The decision was met with severe resistance from whites, with some school districts preferring to close their schools instead of integrating with African American students. When a violent white mob attempted to stop the integration of Black students in Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, President Eisenhower sent federal troops to protect the “Little Rock Nine” (p. 143). See also "Challenges to Legal Segregation" under Chapter 2 .

It is important to note that the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case was not the first to address segregation and discrimination in schools. In 1884, Chinese Americans Mary and Joseph Tape were not allowed to enroll their daughter in the San Francisco public school district because she was Chinese. The Tapes sued the school board and the landmark California Supreme Court Case, Tape v. Hurley (1884) ruled that all children, including children of non-white immigrants, were entitled to public education in the state. However, the state assembly passed a law that established racially segregated schools under a separate but equal doctrine and the Tapes' daughter, enrolled in a separate school in Chinatown that was created for Chinese and other Asian American children.

The 1946 Mendez v. Westminster case was another landmark decision challenging school segregation, and this was a crucial precursor to Brown v. Board of Education. Gonzalo Mendez (Mexican American) and Felicitas Mendez (Puerto Rican) tried to their enroll their three children in a public elementary school in Orange County but were denied because the school didn't allow Mexican Americans to attend. They and 5,000 other similarly aggrieved parents filed suit against multiple Orange County schools districts and ultimately the Supreme Court declared that segregation on the basis of a Spanish surname was unconstitutional. See also "Sidebar: Mendez vs. Westminster and Discrimination in California's Public Schools" under Chapter 2 .

“Sit-ins” were another useful tactic for the Civil Rights movement, started by four Black college students protesting the discrimination of Black patrons at the local Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. These students and supporters formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960, and they played an important role in voter registration drives.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited literacy tests and an amendment in 1970 and 1975 banned literacy tests in all fifty states permanently (p.142). Literacy tests, poll taxes, white primaries and other policies were adopted in the Jim Crow South at the end of Reconstruction as a way to eliminate the African American right to vote (p. 141).

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it illegal to discriminate on grounds of “race, color, religion or national origin,” adding the banning of discrimination in employment practices, and it was followed up by the Civil Rights Act of 1968, also known as the Fair Housing Act, which prohibited discrimination in housing.

Black Panthers

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, often called the Black Panther Party (BPP) was a political organization founded in 1966 in Oakland, California by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. The BPP was rooted in the ideology of Black nationalism, socialism, and armed self-defense, and the organization based its practices on the logic of separatism, rather than the integration approach taken by other civil rights organizations. This debate is a profound and existential one for many activists and movements, who must decide when to operate within the systems that exist and when to challenge the system as a whole and work for transformation. Stokley Carmichael was a BPP leader who led the party to form educational and social programs, in addition to political activity. Women also played an important role in the BPP, and can be seen in formation in Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\).

Leaders like Bobby Seale sponsored initiatives like the Free Breakfast Program, which provided meals to low-income children, helping them to be better prepared and engaged throughout their school day. This was an effective strategy because it directly helped people in need, it demonstrated the capacity and funding for a group of people to provide and distribute food for free, and it raised awareness about one way that economic condition (the ability to provide breakfast) was influencing academic outcomes (participation and engagement in school). Because of their high-profile successes, the BPP quickly became a target for the FBI, headed at the time by J. Edgar Hoover, who created the COINTELPRO program to infiltrate, surveil, and divide members to bring down and dismantle domestic organizations that challenged the status quo, including the Black Panther Party. An image showing the targeting of Black Panther Party leaders is included in Figure \(\PageIndex{4}\).

Asian American Movement, 1960s - 1970s

In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power, Asian Americans were inspired to forge their own way based on a pan-ethnic identity . Rejecting the label, “Oriental,” young Asian Americans of the 1960s adopted the term “Asian American” to describe their identity and movement. Resisting both the “model minority” and “yellow peril” stereotypes, they organized for economic and racial justice in education, labor, and housing, along with fighting in solidarity with Black, Brown, and Native communities who faced related oppressions rooted in white supremacy, capitalism, and imperialism.

Asian American Studies historian, Daryl Maeda, pointed out how the Asian American movement “drew heavily from the African-American movement” in order to inform Asian American subjectivity and racial commonality, such as embracing the militant style of dress, adoption of the “Black Power” slogan to “Yellow Power,” and deeper connections between the Asian American and African American movements. For instance, the work of Japanese American activist Yuri Kochiyama’s dedication to Back liberation struggles and close friendship with Malcolm X (Fujino, 2005) (Dhingra and Rodriguez, 2021, p. 73).

Asian American activists and organizations participated in “serve-the-people” programs fighting for affordable housing, access to healthcare and social services, labor rights, women’s rights, and LGBTQ rights. For example, one of the major campaigns for housing was the decades-long effort to save the International Hotel (I-Hotel) in San Francisco, which primarily housed elderly Filipinx and Chinese men who lived in the single room occupancy building. When in 1969, the owners of the I-Hotel attempted to evict residents who had nowhere else to go, the Asian American movement rallied to protect the residents, even forming barricades and facing 250 riot police (Lee, 2015, p. 307 - 308).

Similar to what many other women of color activists faced in that era, Asian American women called out the sexism and secondary status they faced, being relegated to background work like taking notes, making coffee, and even cleaning toilets. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Asian Americans felt marginalized both within the mainstream white gay liberation movement and within the Asian American movement. Activist and journalist, Helen Zia remembered being put on trial by other Asian American and Black liberation activists in Boston, stating, “I had not yet come out, and they made it clear that if I did, I would also be out of the liberation community. That threatening message kept me in the closet for the next several years” (pp. 309 - 310).

The Asian American movement was uniquely transnational as well, as members organized against U.S. wars, militarism, and imperialism in Asia. For example, they protested against the Vietnam War, critiqued US military occupation in Okinawa and Korea, and aligned with other anti-colonial, anti-imperial, socialist, and communist struggles in Asia. As noted by Maeda, the Asian American movement “sought to achieve radical social change by building interracial coalitions and transnational solidarities” with the goal of dismantling interlocking systems of oppression (p. 304, p. 308).

The Asian American movement was formed across college campuses, including the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) started by Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee in 1968 at UC Berkeley. They were the first organization to use the term “Asian American.” AAPA was intentionally pan-ethnic, bringing together Asian Americans across generations, class, and ethnicity. AAPA also “explicitly critiqued the United States as a racist, imperialistic, and exploitative society,” pointing out how Asian Americans have been systematically affected by racial injustice. AAPA also committed to interracial solidarity with other “Third World people,” both abroad and within the United States. AAPA played a major role at both SF state (1968) and UC Berkeley’s (1969) Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) strike to bring about Ethnic Studies at colleges and universities across the nation (pp. 304 - 305).

Young Lords (1968 - 1972)

The Young Lords started in 1968 with Puerto Rican youth in Chicago, many of whom were former gang members. The socialist organization advocated for grassroots services controlled by and for the people. They also organized for Puerto Rican independence (a U.S. territory since the 1898 Spanish-American War), including leading a march of 10,000 in 1970 in New York City. The Young Lords Organization (YLO) chapter in New York City, founded by Puerto Rican college students, became the Young Lords Party. Chapters were formed mostly o the east coast and also briefly in Hayward, California (Ruíz and Sánchez, Korrol, 2006, pp. 815 - 816). The Young Lords were inspired by global liberation struggles and the Black Panther Party (BPP). The original Chicago group gained a national spotlight when taking over a local church to provide community services for the poor. Similar to the Black Panthers, the Young Lords dressed in military style with army jackets, combat boots, and purple berets with a YLO button (Hulst, 2013, pp. 636-639).

The Young Lords’ community organizing centered on the social needs of working class and poor Puerto Rican communities, including garbage collecting, free hot breakfast for children, clothing drives, child-care services, Puerto Rican history classes, health programs, and entertainment through poetry readings, music, etc. Their health offensive focused on taking over the Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx and organizing a lead poison and tuberculosis testing site. Another offensive focused on prison conditions for incarcerated Puerto Rican and African Americans, who were reporting high suicide rates, in addition to addressing police violence, drug addiction, and the war in Vietnam (Ruíz and Sánchez Korrol, 2006, p. 816).

Puerto Rican women were active in the Young Lords from the beginning, confronting “male chauvinism” within the party. In 1971, Denise Oliver, the first woman on the Central Committee, called for women’s participation, stating,

when the Party got started, there were very few sisters….We saw that we really weren’t gonna be able to do any kind of constructive organizing in the community without sisters actively involved…because most of the people that we’re organizing are women with children, through the free-breakfast program and through the free-clothing drive and health care programs (Ruíz and Sánchez Korrol, 2006, p. 816).

Women in the party called out how they were often relegated to domestic and office work, such as typing, taking care of children, and being sexualized by male members. Female Young Lords formed a women’s caucus, recognizing the need to discuss and dismantle machismo culture in the community. The party recognized the intersection of women’s oppression, capitalism, and imperialism, and eventually revised their Thirteen Point Program to assert gender equality and an end to homophobia (Ruíz and Sánchez Korrol, 2006, p. 816). The program also addressed the group’s desire for self-determination, anti-racism, community control over institutions like hospitals, schools, and law enforcement, for Puerto Rican history and Spanish language to be taught, and they demanded a socialist and nonviolent state (Hulst, 2013, pp. 636-639).

The Young Lords didn’t last a very long time, but they still made an impact by asserting Puerto Rican independence and rights for Puerto Ricans in the U.S. They experienced some divisions within the organization as well as infiltration by the FBI’s COINTELPRO, similar to what happened to the BPP. In 1972, the remaining Young Lords became the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization (Hulst, 2013 & Ruíz and Sánchez Korrol, 2006). Former members continued the fight for Puerto Rican freedom, by occupying the Statue of Liberty in 1977, demanding the release of Puerto Rican political prisoners and protesting against U.S. military exercises on the island of Vieques (Hulst, 2013, pp. 636-639).

Brown Berets

In the 1960s, heightened awareness of racial injustice inspired many groups to stand up and take action. The Brown Berets were one such group that formed among Chicana/o/x activists. It began with a group of high school students who were part of a civic participation program inspired by the Black Panther Party to take a stance of radical nationalism. Chapters formed in California and around the country, and many are still active today. The group shared ideological positions with the Black Panther Party, including resistance to police brutality, opposition to the Vietnam War, and a militant commitment to revolutionary social change. This position also made them a regular target for government interference and sabotage. They implemented free medical and food programs to help community members affected by disparities in access. The Brown Berets have always taken on a coalitional standpoint and embraced a commitment to Third World alliances with other communities of color in the U.S. and around the world. The image shown in Figure \(\PageIndex{7}\) features a young activist in 1994 as part of the Brown Berets preparing to participate in a protest for immigration equity and against Proposition 187.

American Indian Movement

During the 1960s, Native American communities were dealing with many of the same issues as communities of color in the United States. The US government embraced an urban relocation model that forced Native Americans off of reservations and traditional lands into low-income jobs and neighborhoods in cities and urban areas. Although the government promised jobs, housing, and healthcare, these were few and far between. The mixture of many tribal groups in large cities led to the embracing of a pan-Indian identity united by shared experiences of settler-colonialism, genocide, and displacement. This included dealing with tensions between urban Native communities and those living on reservations, the highest unemployment rates of any racial or ethnic group, and disparate rates of child abductions and children being taken into foster care and adopted by non-Native families. The pan-Indian community acted as a support system and buffer against racism and poverty and fostered resilience. Today, there is a backlash against the pan-Indian identity because it erases cultural specificity and traditional tribal knowledge.

The American Indian Movement (AIM) was first formed in Minneapolis in 1968 before expanding to other chapters around the country. Some of the key figures in AIM include Russel Means, Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt, John Trudell, Leonard Peltier, and Mary Jane Wilson. Roberta Downwind suggested the name “AIM,” which lends itself to graphic interpretation in the form of arrows and targets, signaling the legacy and importance of resistance. One major difference between AIM and other civil rights movements was that their focus was less on integration with dominant society and more on maintaining cultural integrity, the enforcement of treaty rights, and empowering tribal sovereignty. Key issues for AIM included: economic independence and opportunity, police brutality and abuse, and culturally relevant healthcare. Women leaders played a key role in speaking up to both anti-Native issues but also the unique experiences and perspectives of Native feminists. AIM was involved in many demonstrations, including the occupation of Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay from 1969-1971, as well as the Longest Walk from Alcatraz to Washington, DC.

One major success of AIM was lifting the ban on Native American spiritual ceremonies that was established by U.S. law in 1884 through the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978. This built on a decade of legal reform, including the 1965 Indian Self-Determination and Education Act, 1968 Indian Civil Rights Act, 1972 Indian Education Act, 1975 Indian Education Assistance and Self-Determination Act, and 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act. Like the Black Panthers and Brown Berets, AIM was targeted by the FBI for infiltration and disruption, and the national organization disbanded in 1978, although it was outlived by local chapters of AIM that continue to mobilize and inspire Native American and Indigenous activists today.

AIM was not the only organization to mobilize Native peoples from multiple tribes. For example, the National Congress of American Indians was founded in 1944 to face off against the federal government and improve the conditions of Native Americans. The group was somewhat more moderate in advocating for reforms. The National Indian Youth Council  was formed in 1961 to advocate for sovereignty and human rights. Youth were dissatisfied with the advocacy and leadership of elders. Similarly, Women of All Red Nations (WARN) formed out of AIM and focused on the leadership and experiences of Native women.

Women advocates were key to many aspects of Native American and American Indian movements. For example, the occupation of Wounded Knee was a protest designed, organized, and implemented by older women. After spearheading dissent at Pine Ridge, the Oglala Lakota Sioux women took on more responsibilities, including carrying weapons. Leaders like Bisonette and Moves Camp were key elders who carried out negotiations on behalf of the movement. See also "Alcatraz, AIM and Wounded Knee" under Chapter 4 .

Sidebar: Political Prisoners

As part of the strategy of intimidation and subversion, the U.S. federal government has taken activists as political prisoners. Mumia Abu-Jamal was 14 years old when we has beaten by white racists and a police officer. He found the Black Panther Party (BPP) and embraced its approach to change, moving to Oakland to live with BPP members and organize for the movement. However, he also came under surveillance by the FBI, which made him a target. He was charged and convicted with killing a police officer and has been held in prison ever since, currently serving a life sentence without parole. Similarly, Leonad Peltier was arrested shortly after his involvement in the Wounded Knee occupation and general community leadership. He was charged for the death of two police officers, although there is much evidence that was missing from the trial. Peltier maintains his innocence and substantial evidence was not reviewed in the first trial and appeal for the case. However, the targeting of activists for their outspoken advocacy can lead to a “chilling effect” where activists are less likely to take risks out of fear of imprisonment or other consequences. You can view artistic renditions of both individuals in Figure \(\PageIndex{8}\) and Figure \(\PageIndex{9}\).

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Chapter 68: Civil Rights Case Study–Race

“We claim exactly the same rights, privileges and immunities as are enjoyed by white men—we ask nothing more, and will be content with nothing less.”

—Declaration of the Colored Mass Convention in Mobile, Alabama in April 1867 (1)

“In affirming that Black Lives Matter, we need not qualify our position. To love and desire freedom and justice for ourselves is a prerequisite for wanting the same for others.”

—Belief Statement of Black Lives Matter, retrieved in 2020. (2)

African Americans are certainly not the only group of Americans to have experienced discrimination at the hands of the government, corporations, or their neighbors. Yet it is true that they have been the victims of broader, more systemic forms of discrimination over longer periods of time than other racial or ethnic groups in the United States. Further, the legal changes that resulted largely from the Black Civil Rights Movement have revolutionized life in the United States for all people. Therefore, we will use this window into American political history to illustrate key developments in civil rights.

Race and Civil Rights Before and After the Civil War

Most Americans are not taught in school how close the country came prior to the Civil War to institutionalizing a race-based (and probably gender-based) republic that very likely would have persisted until today. In his farewell address to Congress in December, 1860, Democratic President James Buchanan proposed to amend the Constitution to allow states to affirm the right to hold slaves, allow slavery in the territories, and recognize the rights of slave owners to recover runaways wherever they fled. Congressman Thomas R. Nelson of Tennessee proposed a Constitutional amendment to forbid anyone from voting “unless he is of the Caucasian race, and of pure, unmixed blood.” Most significantly, Senator William H. Seward and Representative Thomas Corwin succeeded in getting both houses of Congress to pass by 2/3 vote an amendment—known as the Corwin Amendment—which said the following: “No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.” Outgoing President Buchanan expressly supported this amendment, and incoming Republican President Abraham Lincoln had “no objection” to it. Maryland and Kentucky had already ratified the Corwin Amendment before South Carolinian militiamen fired on federal forces at Fort Sumter, beginning the Civil War. (3)

Prior to the end of the Civil War, most Blacks were slaves, and the legal position of free Blacks was tenuous. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) is particularly instructive in this regard. Dred Scott, a slave from Missouri, sued his owner for freedom based on the fact that his owner had taken him to Illinois, a free state, and to the Wisconsin Territory, a free territory. Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled that Scott did not have standing to sue and summed up free Blacks’ precarious position when he answered his own summation question: “Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guaranteed by that instrument to the citizen?” The Court answered a resounding “No,” which was its way of saying that Blacks—slave or free—could not ever expect to become full and equal members of the American political community.

In 1861, eleven Southern states seceded from the Union to create a slave-owning independent republic. After a bloody Civil War in which 620,000 people were killed, the North defeated the South. In the wake of the North’s victory in the Civil War, Congress passed three amendments to the Constitution that we’ll refer to as the Civil War Amendments . Securing passage of these amendments was difficult. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, and only barely passed with the necessary two-thirds vote. The Fourteenth Amendment defined citizenship as belonging to all persons born or naturalized in the United States, but its most important component for this chapter is its  civil rights clause , which mandated that all people receive the “equal protection of the laws.” The Fifteenth Amendment provided that citizens shall not be denied voting rights based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”  Many Democrats were apoplectic over passage of these amendments, arguing that they would lead to racial equality, social disorder, interracial marriage and even to the collapse of Western civilization. (4)

In order to give the civil rights clause practical effect, Congress passed several Civil Rights Acts during Reconstruction (1865-1877), including the  Civil Rights Act of 1875 . This law stipulated that people must be allowed full and equal access to public accommodations—public facilities as well as private businesses that serve the general public, like theaters, inns, restaurants, etc.—regardless of their race or color. This was the last civil rights bill to pass Congress for eighty-two years. When President Rutherford B. Hayes removed federal troops from the South in 1877, Whites moved quickly to reinstate a racial hierarchy resembling the one that had developed under slavery.

The majority of Southern Whites had no intention of allowing Blacks to vote, to be treated equally by the law, or to develop economic independence. In the years immediately after the Civil War, Southern states passed a series of laws that became known as Black Codes , which kept as many African American citizens in conditions of servitude as possible. Blacks were forbidden from self-employment, and thereby denied trades like blacksmithing, which they may have learned while they were slaves. More importantly, Black Codes required Blacks to sign “annual labor contracts with plantation, mill, or mine owners. If African Americans refused or could show no proof of gainful employment, they would be charged with vagrancy and put on the auction block, with their labor sold to the highest bidder. . . [If] they left the plantation, lumber camp, or mine, they would be jailed and auctioned off.” (5) And, of course, Whites discriminated rampantly by not allowing Blacks to access basic commercial businesses.

Many court cases resulted directly from passing the 1875 Civil Rights Act, as Blacks continued to be refused service on account of their race at inns, hotels, railroads, and theaters around the country. In Tennessee, Sallie J. Robinson purchased a ticket to ride on the Memphis & Charleston Railroad but was removed by the conductor because she was Black. In Missouri, W. H. R. Agee was denied accommodation at the Nichols House Inn because he was Black. Similarly, Bird Gee was not allowed to eat at an inn in Topeka, Kansas because he was Black. In San Francisco, George M. Tyler was not allowed to attend a production at Maguire’s Theatre because he was Black. (6) These four cases reached the Supreme Court in 1883 and were decided together as the Civil Rights Cases (1883) . This was an important test of the meaning of civil rights and the Fourteenth Amendment’s mandate that no state may deny any person the equal protection of the laws. In a devastating decision for those who believed in equality, eight of the nine Supreme Court justices ruled in favor of private business owners in these cases and overturned the 1875 Civil Rights Act as unconstitutional. How could the Court rule that this Act was unconstitutional—a law designed to guarantee the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment? The Court ruled that while states must not discriminate, the owners of private businesses were free to discriminate against potential customers on the basis of race. Justice Bradley, writing for the majority, said that “Civil rights, such as are guaranteed by the Constitution against State aggression, cannot be impaired by the wrongful acts of individuals, unsupported by State authority in the shape of laws, customs, or judicial or executive proceedings.”

There was one dissenter in the  Civil Rights Cases — Justice John Marshall Harlan —who argued that the states were complicit in the so-called private discrimination of businessmen. He wrote, the “keeper of an inn is in the exercise of a quasi-public employment. The law gives him special privileges and he is charged with certain duties and responsibilities to the public. The public nature of his employment forbids him from discriminating against any person asking admission as a guest on account of the race or color of that person.” Unfortunately, Harlan was alone among the justices in being many decades ahead of his time. The decision in the  Civil Rights Cases sent a huge message to businessmen that the United States Constitution would not stand in the way if they wanted to refuse service to Blacks. Many did just that—and this behavior was not limited to the South, nor was it only targeted at African Americans.

The Supreme Court sent an even more disastrous signal in the case  Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) . In 1890, the Louisiana legislature passed the Separate Car Act requiring that all trains operating in the state be segregated by race and forbidding people from “going into a coach or compartment to which by race he does not belong.” Most train companies resented the costs of putting extra cars on their trains to meet the Separate Car Act requirements. Train companies and a New Orleans civil rights group known as the Committee of Citizens worked with New York lawyer Albion Tourgee to bring suit against the law. This suit was to be a test case, and the Committee needed someone to violate the law, to be punished, and have standing to sue. On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy purchased a first-class ticket on the East Louisiana Railroad’s train running from New Orleans to Covington, Louisiana, and took a seat in a car reserved for Whites only. Plessy, a married shoemaker whose heritage was African and French, has been referred to as one-eighth Black. Indeed, press accounts of the time indicate that the train conductor had to ask Plessy his race before he was arrested for being in the “wrong” car. The Committee of Citizens hoped that the Supreme Court would rule in favor of Plessy, for surely this was a violation of the civil rights clause of the Fourteenth Amendment: Here is a state law that mandated segregating train passenger according to race. But the Supreme Court upheld the law as constitutional, arguing that no violation of the civil rights clause had taken place because the passengers were all treated equally, albeit in a segregated fashion. This reasoning became known as the separate but equal doctrine  and was the rationale to officially sanction segregation for the next six decades. Justice Harlan was again the lone dissenter; he argued that, “In respect of civil rights, common to all citizens, the Constitution of the United States does not, I think, permit any public authority to know the race of those entitled to be protected in the enjoyment of such rights.” His argument did not carry the day and the precedent set by  Plessy allowed separate but equal to characterize American life. (7)

Categories of Racial Discrimination in the Twentieth Century

Discrimination against African Americans took many forms, not all of which can be covered here. However, you should be aware of the following five categories of discrimination:

Segregated Public Accommodations —Using as precedents the  Civil Rights Cases (1883)  and  Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), states and businessmen freely segregated and excluded Blacks as well as other racial and ethnic group members. Just about any form of public accommodation you can think of was segregated somewhere at some time in the United States—and again, this practice was not restricted to the South. Public accommodations such as trains, buses, drinking fountains, hospitals, cemeteries, parks, beaches, and swimming pools were segregated. Private business owners of gas stations, hotels, inns, theaters, restaurants, lunch counters, and the like were free to refuse service to African Americans and others.

One might be tempted to think of segregated public accommodations as the least objectionable form of discrimination. After all, it does not affect one’s overt political equality the way that prohibitions against voting might. One would be wrong in such thinking. Clearly, the victims of segregated public accommodations did not feel this way, and the reasons are obvious. Segregated public accommodations placed an omnipresent badge of civic inferiority on its victims that shrank their universe of social, economic, and political possibilities. This was especially true given that segregation was backed up by actual or threatened violence. A great resource in helping us understand this perspective is Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Talk About Life in the Segregated South . In that book, Ann Pointer, a resident of Macon County, Alabama, described the impact of not having access to public transportation:

“We could not ride the buses although we were paying taxes. But we couldn’t ride those buses. Nothing rode the bus but the whites. And they would ride and throw trash, throw rocks and everything at us on the road and whoop and holler, ‘nigger, nigger, nigger,” all up and down the road. We weren’t allowed to say one word to them or throw back or nothing, because if you throw back at them you was going to jail.” (8)

Violating the rules and norms of segregated public accommodations was life-threatening for Blacks all across America, albeit with obvious regional and local differences. Traveling for business or family visits took on a very different character for African Americans, as they had to be careful about where they could safely go, where they could find a hotel or restaurant that would serve them, or where they could find a welcoming gas station. In 1937, Victor H. Green , a New York City postman, created the first  Green Book, a reference guide to tell Blacks where they could safely go in the New York Metropolitan area. He updated and expanded the Green Books every year, encompassing more and more of the country. The first edition was fifteen pages long, and the final edition in 1967 was ninety-nine pages long. The book even listed private residences who would welcome Black travelers to stay in areas where there were no welcoming hotels. (9)

Segregated Housing —There have been many forms of housing discrimination in American history. You should know about three of them. Many cities used  overt city ordinances that divided the town into racial zones and mandated that residential property in “White” areas be purchased by Whites, while property in “Black” areas be purchased by people of color. In a case out of Louisville, Kentucky, the Supreme Court ruled these kinds of city ordinances unconstitutional in 1917 ( Buchanan v. Warley ), but the practice continued for decades after that decision.

Another form of housing discrimination was racially or religiously restrictive covenants , which were agreements entered into between buyer and seller that restricted the future sale of the property to only certain kinds of people. The Court ruled against these kinds of covenants in 1948, when the Shelley family in St. Louis successfully challenged a racial covenant on their home ( Shelley v. Kraemer ), but it was very difficult to enforce the Court’s ruling until the Fair Housing Act passed in 1968. Even though they are no longer enforceable in real estate transactions, these kinds of covenants are still on the books across the country because it’s actually difficult for individual homeowners to get them removed. What did these covenants look like? Here are but two examples:

“…no part of said property nor any portion thereof shall be for said term of fifty years occupied by any person not of the Caucasian race, it being intended thereby to restrict the use of said property for said period of time against the occupancy of owners or tenants of any portion of said property for residence or other purpose by people of the Negro or Mongolian race.” [Covenant initiated in the Greater Ville neighborhood of St. Louis, Missouri, in 1911]

“That neither said lots nor portions thereof or interest therein shall ever be leased, sold, devised, conveyed to or inherited or be otherwise acquired by or become property of any person other than of the Caucasian race.” [Covenant initiated in the El Cerrito neighborhood of San Diego, California, in 1950] (10)

The third form of housing discrimination took the form of redlining , which was a practice once encouraged by the federal Home Owner’s Loan Corporation in which minority neighborhoods were red lined, meaning that loans would be very difficult to get and/or expensive. This institutionalized discrimination in government-backed mortgages made it difficult for Black families in particular to build home equity, which is the primary way that most families build wealth. (11) These forms of housing discrimination were perpetuated by Whites who did not want to live in integrated neighborhoods and who often committed or threatened violence. The legacy of housing segregation is apparent all over the United States, and it is not an accident. As activist and author Tim Wise explains,

“ The so-called ghetto was created and not accidentally. It was designed as a virtual holding pen—a concentration camp were we to insist upon honest language—within which impoverished persons of color would be contained. It was created by generations of housing discrimination, which limited where its residents could live. It was created by decade after decade of white riots against black people whenever they would move into white neighborhoods. It was created by deindustrialization and the flight of good-paying manufacturing jobs overseas.”  (12)

Wise is on to something that we need to remember. The world that we see today is always a legacy of the past, and often that past includes intentional decisions to construct the future that we occupy. In other words, the unequal and somewhat segregated living arrangements that we see today were in large part the result of conscious government policies and decisions that happened before we were born. Richard Rothstein, a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute, outlined this well in his book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America . “Racial segregation in housing,” Rothstein wrote, “was not merely a project of southerners in the former slaveholding Confederacy. It was a nation-wide project of the federal government in the twentieth century, designed and implemented by its most liberal leaders.” (13) Rothstein documents in great detail the government policies designed to segregate America: The Federal Housing Administration’s bankrolling of segregated housing developments and evading the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down racially restrictive covenants; the use of government housing projects to concentrate Black residents while promoting single-family home ownership to Whites; the suppression of Black wages through the lack of federal action until the mid-1960s to enforce anti-discrimination in the workplace; the tacit support of federal agencies for redlining by banks. And, lest we forget, the profession of realtors went to considerable lengths to maintain the right of property owners to discriminate with respect to whom they would sell or rent housing. Famously, Ronald Reagan made the following statement in 1966 in defense of just this kind of discrimination: “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, he has a right to do so.” For much of the 20th Century, the real estate industry actively worked against free market principles in the American housing market and in so doing, “dramatically reshaped the country for all Americans” by constructing segregated neighborhoods north and south, east and west. (14)

Segregated Education —The separate but equal doctrine was applied to education with a vengeance and without any pretense of equality between Black schools and White schools. Almost all school districts in the South were segregated from the late nineteenth century into the 1960s. Some school districts outside of the South were segregated as well, including the schools in the nation’s capital. The first legal crack in segregated schools came from California and dealt with Latinx students. In 1946 the 9th Federal Circuit Court struck down separate “Mexican schools” in Orange County, with the Court saying that “A paramount requisite in the American system of public education is social equality. It must be open to all children by unified school association regardless of lineage.” (15) The NAACP Legal Defense Fund took up a number of school segregation cases in the 1950s, one of which was that of Linda Brown, who was denied admittance to her neighborhood school and instead had to take a bus to a segregated school. In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) , the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that segregated schools were inherently unequal, reversing the  Plessy  doctrine as it applied to education. Thus,  de jure , by law, segregation is unconstitutional, but  de facto, in fact, segregation is alive and well in America’s schools. (16)

Voter Discrimination —The Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed the right to vote regardless of race, but Southern white elites did not want African Americans to vote. Beginning after Reconstruction ended in 1877, southern Democrats regained control over state legislatures and undertook several measures to keep blacks from voting. One measure was extralegal and consisted of outright intimidation . Groups like the Ku Klux Klan lynched Blacks, shot those who were politically active, bombed their houses, got them fired from their jobs, burned crosses to frighten communities, and spied on civil rights organizations. In many southern states, literacy tests  were used to keep African Americans from registering to vote. Potential voters were required to take an often-subjective “test” of their literacy, their knowledge of the federal or state constitution, or their knowledge of completely arcane bits of information. Literacy tests were combined in some cases with  good character clauses , in which people needed to be certified as being of good character in order to register.  Grandfather clauses automatically registered anyone–Whites–whose male ancestors were eligible to vote at some date before the Fifteenth Amendment passed. Southern states instituted white primaries , in which people of color were barred from voting. This was important because the South was solidly Democratic at the time, meaning that the primary race was often of greater significance than the general election in November. Poll taxes were also used to discourage Blacks from voting. Finally, Southern Whites used racial gerrymandering  to design election districts that bisected African Americans populations, thereby diluting their numbers should they actually register to vote.

Affirmative Action for Whites —Most White Americans don’t realize the extent to which they have benefited first from slavery and second from government policies that privileged Whites. It almost goes without saying that many Whites and White-owned companies benefited directly from the 300 years of labor theft that was slavery—although there is an argument to be made that many poor Southern Whites saw their wages artificially suppressed by slavery’s existence. Ira Katznelson, Columbia University political science and history professor, has documented how twentieth-century government policies designed to help all Americans ended up being tailored in ways that disproportionately helped White Americans. This was accomplished primarily due to the powerful Southern Democratic voting bloc that resulted from the Solid South phenomenon. Southern Democrats dominated congressional committees and insisted on certain racist concessions when it came to policy making.

How did this work? Many of the New Deal programs were specifically designed to disadvantage most African Americans. For example, most Southern Blacks at the time were working as domestic maids or farm laborers. Southern politicians insisted that New Deal legislation that promoted labor unions, set minimum wages, set maximum hours, and established Social Security explicitly exclude maids and farm workers. As Florida Representative James Mark Wilcox put it, “You cannot put the Negro and the White man on the same basis and get away with it.” (17) Social Security is a classic example: according to Katznelson, fully 65 percent of Blacks were initially excluded from the program because of concessions to Southern politicians. The same was true of the National Recovery Administration, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Fair Labor Standards Act. Even the GI Bill suffered from Southern meddling. Largely crafted by Representative John Rankin of Mississippi—an avowed racist—the law was written in a way that did not disturb segregation in the South. The GI Bill offered veterans educational grants, subsidized home mortgages and business loans, assistance finding a job, and job training—but all of this was administered at the local rather than federal level. Banks could still red-line Blacks’ mortgage applications, colleges could still deny Blacks entrance, and local jobs programs could still discriminate. Thus, the GI Bill was an undoubted boon to White veterans, but often an unfulfilled promise to Black veterans.

Has affirmative action for Whites ended? Mostly, although higher education is a sector that still practices a sneaky form of it. While the Supreme Court struck down the ability of colleges and universities to use race as one of many factors in making admissions decisions, legacy admissions and admissions for the children of donors and faculty at elite public and private schools still skews in favor of Whites. At Harvard, for example, fully 43 percent of White students were admitted using these kinds of preferences–and three-quarters of them would have been rejected had they not been the children of alumni, donors, or faculty, or had they not played particular sports like lacrosse or sailing. (18) Elite public universities also skew disproportionately White by recruiting the children of wealthy people who reside out of state. For example, “places like the University of Alabama give an effective 45 percent bump to the children of the top 1 percent,” which happen to be predominantly White. (19)

Important Civil Rights Legislation

Beginning in 1957, the federal government passed several civil rights laws, three of which you need to know in any U.S. Government course. They are the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

Civil Rights Act of 1964 —Demanded by civil rights leaders for decades, proposed by President John F. Kennedy, and pushed through by President Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy’s assassination, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a monumental political achievement. It was truly bi-partisan legislation, with a majority of congressional Republicans and Democrats supporting it. However, Southern Democrats and a few Republicans almost unanimously opposed it. Notably, Republican Senator Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act. Because Goldwater was the Republican Party’s nominee for president that year, it was an indication of the Republican turn against civil rights for decades to come. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did the following:

• Outlawed discrimination in voter registration, but this section had poor enforcement language.
• Established that “All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, and privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.”
• Authorized the U.S. Attorney General to sue in cases where people were denied the equal protection of the laws, unequal access to public accommodations, or equal access to public schools and colleges.
• Banned discrimination in programs that receive federal assistance.
• Banned employment discrimination directed at “any individual because of his race, color, religion, sex or national origin.” This includes hiring, firing, conditions of employment, and compensation.
• Created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which is empowered to make prosecution recommendations to the U. S. Attorney General regarding employment discrimination. (20)

Voting Rights Act of 1965 —After the Civil Rights Act passed and after President Lyndon Johnson trounced Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election, Johnson vowed during his 1965 State of the Union address to “eliminate every remaining obstacle to the right and the opportunity to vote.” The Voting Rights Act was designed to shore up a weakness of the Civil Rights Act—namely, that it was insufficiently aggressive in defending the right of all people to vote regardless of race. Passed later in 1965—again, over Southern opposition—the Voting Rights Act did the following:

• Established that “No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”
• Established that whenever the U. S. Attorney General was engaged in a proceeding against a state or district that was violating the right to vote, federal authorities were empowered to come in and take over the voting registration and election management from local authorities until the problems were rectified.
• Established that “no citizen shall be denied the right to vote in any Federal, State, or local election because of his failure to comply with any test or device in any State” that has used such tests or devices to disenfranchise people on the basis of race or color.
• Established a pre-clearance provision whereby states or political subdivisions of states who have engaged in racially motivated voter discrimination need to submit “any voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure with respect to voting different from that in force or effect on November 1, 1964” to the Justice Department for approval.

Note that in  Shelby County v. Holder  (2012), the Supreme Court struck down the Voting Rights Act’s important “pre-clearance” provision, allowing primarily Southern states to change their voting laws without having them approved ahead of time by the Justice Department. This opened the gates for many Republican-led state legislatures to pass without Justice Department review onerous voter I.D. laws that fell heaviest on the poor, the elderly, and people of color. Writing in dissent, Justice Ginsberg argued that “Throwing out preclearance because it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” (21)

Civil Rights Act of 1968 —The Civil Rights Act of 1968 was primarily designed to address two issues that previous legislation had not—namely, applying the Bill of Rights protections on Native American reservations and equal access to housing. Thus, in popular parlance, the Civil Rights Act of 1968 encompasses the following two main pieces:

• Indian Civil Rights Act —This part of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 applied most of the Bill of Rights and Constitutional protections to Native Americans living under the various tribes’ jurisdiction. It stipulated that no Indian tribe shall prohibit free exercise of religion, free speech, free press, or the right of people to assemble peaceably and petition for redress of grievances. Further, no Indian tribe can violate the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable and warrantless searches and seizures. Indian tribes were forbidden from conducting unreasonable and warrantless searches and seizures, taking of private property without just compensation, violating fair trial procedures, and inflicting cruel and unusual punishments.
• Fair Housing Act —This part of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 outlawed housing discrimination. The Act made it unlawful to “refuse to sell or rent after the making of a bona fide offer, or to refuse to negotiate for the sale or rental of, or otherwise make unavailable or deny, a dwelling to any person because of race, color, religion, sex, familial status, or national origin.” Further, it made it unlawful to “discriminate against any person in the terms, conditions, or privileges of sale or rental of a dwelling, or in the provision of services or facilities in connection therewith, because of race, color, religion, sex, familial status, or national origin.” Another interesting part of the law is that it made it unlawful “to represent to any person because of race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin that any dwelling is not available for inspection, sale, or rental when such dwelling is in fact so available.”

These three laws set the framework for breaking down  de jure  discrimination —that is, discrimination written into laws and official policies at the federal, state, local, and company levels. What they did not do was eliminate  de facto  discrimination , which is discrimination in everyday life that is unsupported by law or policy. The issues that remain, according to civil rights leaders, are no less significant: dealing with the lasting impact of past  de jure discrimination, discriminatory policing, social prejudice affecting how people interact in all sorts of settings, and unequal access to economic and educational opportunities. Some of these challenges can be addressed by public policy, while others are difficult to address via government action. For example, Gene Slater, an expert on housing discrimination, writes that “To this day, an estimated four million housing discrimination complaints each year go uninvestigated, and fair housing remains largely unenforced.” (22)

1. Eric Foner,  The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution . New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019. Page 94.

2. No author, “What We Believe,” Black Lives Matter . No date.

3. The text of the Corwin Amendment retrieved from the University Maryland . See also Michael A. Bellesiles, Inventing Equality: Reconstructing the Constitution in the Aftermath of the Civil War . New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2020. Pages 68-70.

4. Michael A. Bellesiles, Inventing Equality: Reconstructing the Constitution in the Aftermath of the Civil War . New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2020. Pages 111-198.

5. Carol Anderson,  White Rage. The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide . New York: Bloomsbury. 2017. Page 19.

6. Peter Irons, A People’s History of the Supreme Court . New York: Penguin Books. 1999. Page 212.

7. This account is drawn from Steve Luxenberg, Separate. The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation . New York: W. W. Norton. 2019.

8. William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad, editors, Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Talk About Life in the Segregated South . New York: The New Press, 2001. Pages 173-74.

9. Jacinda Townsend, “How the Green Book Helped African American Tourists Navigate a Segregated Nation,”  The Smithsonian Magazine . April, 2016. Available  here .

10. Cheryl W. Thompson, et al., “Racial Covenants, a Relic of the Past, are Still on the Books Across the Country,” National Public Radio Morning Edition . November 17, 2021.

11. Tracy Jan, “Redlining Was Banned 50 Years Ago. It’s Still Hurting Minorities Today,” The Washington Post. March 28, 2018.

12. Tim Wise, “White America’s Greatest Delusion: ‘They Do Not Know It and They Do Not Want to Know It.'”  Alternet . May 6, 2015.

13. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America . New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1917. Quote is from page xii.

14 . Gene Slater, Freedom to Discriminate: How Realtors Conspired to Segregate Housing and Divide America . Berkley, California: Heyday, 2021. Reagan quote is on the front piece and the other quote is from page 8.

15 . Mendez v. Westminster (1947).

16. Emily Richmond, “Schools Are More Segregated Today Than During the Late 1960s,”  The Atlantic . June 11, 2012.

17. Ira Katznelson,  When Affirmative Action was White . New York: W. W. Norton. 2015. Page 60. This whole section draws from this source.

18. Fabiola Cineas, “Affirmative Action for White College Applicants is Still Here,” Vox . July 6, 2023.

19. Kevin Carey, “These Schools Also Favor the One Percent,” The Atlantic . August 15, 2023.

20. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 at Our Documents .

21. Michael Waldman, The Fight to Vote . New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016. Page 233.

22. Gene Slater, Freedom to Discriminate: How Realtors Conspired to Segregate Housing and Divide America . Berkley, California: Heyday, 2021. Page 7.

Media Attributions

• Whites Only Housing © Arthur S. Siegel is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Poll Tax Receipt © Levine Museum of the New South is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Civil Rights Act 1964 © Cecil Stoughton, White House Press Office is licensed under a Public Domain license

Attenuated Democracy Copyright © by David Hubert is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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The Civil Rights Movement: 7 Key Moments That Led to Change

By: Sarah Pruitt

Updated: January 30, 2024 | Original: February 1, 2024

In the mid-1950s, the modern civil rights movement arose out of the desire of African Americans to win the equality and freedom from discrimination that continued to elude them nearly a century after slavery was abolished in the United States.

To confront the widespread segregation, disenfranchisement and violence faced by Black people on a daily basis, activists used different types of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience to win public sympathy to their cause and bring about meaningful legislative change.

From a bus boycott to Freedom Rides to the fight for fair housing, here are seven pivotal moments in the civil rights movement. 

1. Nine Black Students Arrive at Central High School in Little Rock

Though the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), state and local officials in a number of Southern states continued to block integration of their schools.

In 1957, the NAACP resolved to challenge these policies, enlisted nine Black students who agreed to register at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. When the students showed up for the first day of classes on September 4, they confronted a furious mob of white students and others, as well as 250 Arkansas National Guard officers sent by Governor Orval Faubus to prevent them from entering.

After a standoff that lasted several weeks, President Dwight Eisenhower issued an executive order that put the state National Guard under federal authority and sent U.S. troops to enforce the federal desegregation order . Escorted by members of the 101st Airborne Division, the “ Little Rock Nine '' were finally able to enter Central High, though they faced continued physical and verbal attacks during their time there.

Meanwhile, television and newspaper coverage of the events in Little Rock drew international attention to the issue of school segregation, the battle over federal and state power and the growing civil rights movement.

2. Rosa Parks Refuses to Give Up Her Seat

Black activists in Montgomery, Alabama had challenged the city’s bus segregation before, but something different happened after December 1, 1955, when seamstress and local NAACP chapter secretary Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on the bus to a white passenger. In response to Parks’ arrest, the Montgomery Improvement Association and its young president, Martin Luther King Jr. led some 90 percent of the city’s Black residents in a boycott of the city’s buses.

Despite efforts by city officials and white citizens to thwart them, the boycotters stayed firm, organizing carpools or walking miles to work every day to continue their protest.

In June 1956, a federal district court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that Alabama’s segregation of buses was unconstitutional; the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that decision in November. On December 20, King called for an end to the bus boycott after 382 days. “We came to see that, in the long run, it is more honorable to walk in dignity than ride in humiliation,” he said.

The success of the Montgomery bus boycott demonstrated the effectiveness of nonviolent civil disobedience, and prompted its leaders to form a new civil rights organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, with King as its president. 

3. The Greensboro Four Sit at a Woolworth Lunch Counter

Another key moment in the civil rights movement began on February 1, 1960, when four Black students at the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina (now North Carolina A&T State University), sat down at a “whites-only” lunch counter inside a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, N.C. and refused to leave when they were denied service.

They stayed seated until closing time, and the following day returned with around 20 other Black students; hundreds more had joined by the end of that week.  

Fueled by media coverage, word spread quickly about the events precipitated by the “ Greensboro Four ,” sparking a wider sit-in movement in cities across the country organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

As a result of such coordinated resistance, dining establishments throughout the South were forced to integrate, including, by July 1960, the original Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro.

Like the bus boycott in Montgomery, the sit-in movement provided an early and potent example of how nonviolent civil disobedience could effect change in the civil rights movement.

4. The Freedom Riders Travel South

After the U.S. Supreme Court banned segregation in interstate bus travel in 1946, activists from the Congress of Racial Equality and the Fellowship of Reconciliation tested the verdict with an interracial bus ride through the upper South they called the Journey of Reconciliation. In 1960, when the Court extended the ban to include bus terminals, restrooms and other facilities, CORE decided to resurrect the idea of “ Freedom Rides ” to ensure that states were enforcing the rulings.

On May 4, 1961, seven Black and white activists boarded two buses bound from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans. As they traveled deeper into the South, the riders faced increased violence, culminating on May 14, when a mob of some 100 people met the buses upon their arrival in Anniston, Alabama. One bus was firebombed, and the riders beaten by the assembled crowd, which included members of the Ku Klux Klan who had been permitted by local authorities to attack the riders without fear of arrest.

A new band of Freedom Riders soon took up the charge. Even as hundreds of riders were arrested throughout the South, coverage of their treatment by local authorities and citizens galvanized public opinion in support of their cause. In the fall of 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission bowed to pressure from the Kennedy administration, issuing regulations that enforced the Court’s bans on segregation on interstate buses, terminals and other facilities.

5. The March on Washington Showcases Support for Civil Rights

A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters , first called for a march on Washington in 1941 to demand jobs for African Americans in the booming wartime economy. Plans were canceled after President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to issue an executive order banning discrimination by defense industries.

Flash forward two decades, with President John F. Kennedy ’s proposed civil rights legislation stalled in Congress, Randolph joined a group of leaders calling for a march to speed the progress toward racial and economic equality.

On August 28, 1963, some 250,000 people marched from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. in a show of unity and support for the civil rights bill.

In addition to speeches by Randolph and other leaders, the assembled crowd enjoyed performances by music legends Mahalia Jackson, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.

Last to speak was King, who delivered a 16-minute speech that would become one of the most famous orations in history . After the march, King and other march organizers met with Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House to discuss the need for bipartisan support for civil rights legislation.

Though Kennedy was assassinated that November, Johnson would sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964 —the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction—into law less than a year after the March on Washington .

6. Police Beat Protestors in Selma on ‘Bloody Sunday’

Though the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protected voting rights for African Americans, efforts to register Black voters in southern states continued to meet with fierce resistance after its passage.

In early 1965, King and other civil rights leaders decided to wage a voting rights campaign centered in Selma, Alabama, where only 2 percent of Black residents had been able to get on the voting rolls. After an Alabama state trooper fatally shot a young demonstrator, Jimmie Lee Jackson, civil rights leaders planned a protest march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery , some 54 miles away.

On Sunday, March 7, Alabama state troopers wielding night sticks, tear gas and other weapons rushed the group of some 600 marchers as they crossed the  Edmund Pettis Bridge, beating them back to Selma.

With images of “ Bloody Sunday ” broadcast across the world, the marchers drew wide public sympathy—and the support of President Johnson, who federalized the Alabama National Guard to protect the marchers along the way.

On March 21, some 3,500 marchers left Selma for Montgomery, arriving on March 25, when King delivered another iconic oration, known as his “How Long, Not Long” speech, on the steps of the state capitol. Less than five months later, Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965 , which guaranteed the right to vote to all African Americans. 

7. MLK Joins Marches for Fair Housing in Chicago

By the mid-1960s, despite Supreme Court decisions outlawing the exclusion of African Americans from certain areas of cities, racial discrimination in the rental and sale of housing remained widespread across the country.

Recognizing that lack of fair housing was a crucial component of racial injustice in the United States, King took a leading role in the Chicago Freedom Movement, a campaign of marches and demonstrations calling for open housing in that city beginning in 1965.

In August 1966, the movement won two important victories, when the Chicago Housing Authority agreed to build public housing in predominantly white areas and the Mortgage Bankers Association pledged to end discriminatory lending practices. 

On April 4, 1968, with proposed federal fair housing legislation stalled in Congress, King was assassinated in Memphis. Just one week later, in King’s honor, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act , which became the final major legislative achievement of the civil rights movement.

The law protected buyers or renters of housing from discrimination, making it unlawful for sellers, landlords and financial institutions to refuse to sell, rent or provide financing for a dwelling based on factors other than an individual’s financial resources—including race, religion or national origin.

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History Education Research Journal

• i Table of Contents: History Education Research Journal 18(2)
• 126 ‘I’m not Catholic and I’m not Protestant’: Identity, individualisation and challenges for history education in Northern Ireland
• 148 Retheorising national assessment of the narrative mode for historical causal explanation in England
• 166 Collective memory and historical narratives: The African American civil rights movement
• 183 Of dragons and dinosaurs: How children’s toys and games create ideas of the past, of history and of fiction
• 199 Realising Roma rights through a high-stakes history test: Secondary school students narrating the Swedish Roma past, present and future
• 224 Cultivating historical consciousness in the history classroom: Uncovering the subtleties of student meaning making with the help of found poetry
• 247 ‘We too find it difficult’: A consideration of site-based Holocaust education as emotional labour
• 264 The educational power of heritage sites
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• Abstract : found
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Collective memory and historical narratives: The African American civil rights movement

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This study explores how undergraduates, as historical thinkers, learn to interact with history and construct their understanding of the past, and examines the role that primary and secondary sources play in narrative construction and revision. Using the African American civil rights movement as a content focus, participants used images to create initial narratives that reflected their understanding of the movement. Half the participants then read an essay on the movement written by a prominent historian, and the other half examined 18 primary sources that reflected the historian’s interpretation of the movement. Participants then each created a second narrative, again selecting images to depict their understanding of the movement. The results of the study suggest that even as students work with primary sources, they need an effective narrative framework based on recent scholarship to forge powerful counter-narratives that transcend outdated interpretations and historical myths. In terms of teaching and learning about the lengthy struggle for racial justice in the United States, simply encouraging teachers and students to ‘do history’ and conduct their own online research is unlikely to change persistent narrative structures that continue to enable and excuse systemic racism.

Main article text

The civil rights movement circulates through American memory in forms and through channels that are at once powerful, dangerous, and hotly contested. ( Hall, 2005 : 1233)

Introduction

In the United States, powerful historical narratives often dominate the public’s understanding of the past and contribute to a collective memory that reproduces knowledge about events and individuals deemed historically significant ( Seixas, 2007 ; Seixas and Morton, 2013 ; VanSledright, 2011 ). The American collective memory has often been built around principles of expanding freedom and nation-building ( Foner, 1999 ; Takaki, 1993 ), and an understanding that ‘the United States was the only country in the world that began with perfection and aspired to progress’ ( Hofstadter, 1955 : 36). While contemporary historians consistently offer challenges to this ever-present American narrative, Wertsch (2008 : 142) has noted the power of ‘specific narratives’ and, especially, ‘schematic narrative templates’. Schematic narrative templates run deep because such templates exist outside the bounds of conscious reflection and serve as ‘very powerful coauthors’ when individuals attempt to ‘simply tell “what really happened”’ ( Wertsch, 2008 : 142). Individuals might recite incorrect details within a narrative, but the continuing existence of basic elements of the narrative structure ensures its survival ( Barton and Levstik, 2004 ). These basic elements rarely acknowledge problematic aspects of the nation’s past ( VanSledright, 2008 ). Instead, these narratives work to build a national community (Barton, 2012), and through the conscious use of pronouns that give students a sense of participation in the grand story ( Barton, 2001 ; Barton and Levstik, 1998 ; Levstik, 2000 ), they serve as powerful cultural tools ( Barton and Levstik, 2004 ; Salinas and Blevins, 2014 ; Wertsch, 1998 ).

Historical consciousness, or ‘the area in which collective memory, the writing of history, and other modes of shaping images of the past in the public mind merge’, provides a useful framework for the study of powerful narratives in the context of history education ( Seixas, 2004 : 10). In schools, collective memories can merge with or challenge formal school narratives, which are often articulated in curriculum materials. Through textbooks, nations often communicate ‘cultural truths’ using narrative templates that turn complicated histories with multiple layers into simplified stories of the past ( Grever and Van der Vlies, 2017 ). Such narratives survive because of their ability to provide collective memory, because they are considered to be ‘good stories’ and because they inspire patriotism ( Raphael, 2004 , cited in Grever and Van der Vlies, 2017 : 293). In school contexts, ‘The teaching of history through narrative and story is thus commonplace but seldom suspect’ ( Salinas and Blevins, 2014 : 36), provided that these stories do not undermine understood cultural truths.

Enduring narratives exist about the civil rights movement in the United States. In May 2019, hundreds of thousands of American high-school students answered an essay question on the Advanced Placement (AP) US history examination that asked them to ‘Evaluate the extent to which ideas about democracy contributed to the African American Civil Rights Movement in the period from 1940–1970’ ( The College Board, 2019 ). The question on the AP examination, the closest thing that the United States has to a national curriculum in history, was simply the most recent evidence of the prominence of the civil rights movement, the persistence of narratives of progress, and the issue of race more broadly, in history education. In the United States, debates over Confederate monuments, reparations and historical roots of police brutality have increased in recent years. Americans have explored the centrality of race in new public museums, such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the nation’s capital, and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. In classrooms, teachers and students have encountered innovative curriculum projects such as Teaching Hard History ( Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d. ) and The 1619 Project ( New York Times Magazine , 2019 ), have read John Lewis’s best-selling graphic novel trilogy, March , his memoir of being an activist in the civil rights movement ( Lewis et al., 2013 ), and have watched the critically acclaimed and popular feature film Selma (2014). And in the streets, Americans have marched to address publicly contemporary police brutality and to insist that Black Lives Matter.

Furthermore, the American civil rights movement has enjoyed growing popularity in schools beyond the United States as countries look to history to help address growing issues of diversity, past and present. Students in New Zealand have found the history of the movement useful in understanding the experiences of indigenous peoples in their country ( Frost, 2009 ). Lessons on racial segregation, non-violent protest and the rise of Black Power in the United States are a staple of the British secondary curriculum in modern world history. Rivalled only by attention given to the topic of slavery, the history of the American civil rights movement has contributed to larger curricular efforts in the UK, such as Abdul Mohamud and Robin Whitburn’s (2016) Doing Justice to History: Transforming black history in secondary schools , debates about the role of empire in British history education, and the more recent emergence of The Black Curriculum ( https://theblackcurriculum.com ) to teach black British history and challenge the ‘hegemonic assertion of white Western history’ ( Mohamud and Whitburn, 2016 : 5; Moncrieffe, 2020 ).

The recent AP examination in US history was also indicative of another development dominating American history education: a movement to engage students in creating their own narratives – to ‘do history’ ( Drake and Nelson, 2009 ; Lesh, 2011 ; Monte-Sano et al., 2014 ; Nokes, 2019 ; Seixas and Morton, 2013 ; Wineburg et al., 2011 ). In this context, The College Board revised the AP history examinations twice in recent years to promote and assess students’ historical thinking skills. Reflected in part by popular curricula such as Reading Like a Historian ( Stanford History Education Group, n.d. ), and efforts such as Teaching with Primary Sources ( Library of Congress, n.d. ) and the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework ( NCSS, 2013 ) to promote historical inquiry, the use of primary sources to teach the cognitive skills of historians has never been more popular. At the same time, numerous critiques of US history textbooks, such as James Loewen’s (2018) immensely successful Lies My Teacher Told Me , have meant that history teachers, especially those trained in recent years, are increasingly committed to looking to primary sources and other resources to craft better historical narratives in the classroom. Such developments, however, raise questions about precisely how teachers craft historical narratives for instruction ( Brown and Hughes, 2018 ).

Given a growing consensus about the need to broaden narrative structures in the teaching and learning of history, and especially in the context of the African American civil rights movement, this study examines the questions:

How do undergraduate students, as historical thinkers who interact with history, learn to construct their understanding of the past?

What role do primary and secondary sources play in shaping narratives, especially in terms of revising powerful master narratives and collective memory?

Considering the role of primary and secondary sources in shaping narratives necessitates an examination of the historiography of the civil rights movement.

Historians’ evolving interpretations: The civil rights movement

The historiography of the civil rights movement is voluminous, and numerous historians have attempted the daunting task of synthesising the growing body of literature ( Gaines, 2002 ; Lawson, 1991 ; Fairclough, 1990 ). Most relevant to this study is the important shift in recent decades away from older narratives that focused on a top-down approach to social change with an emphasis on biographies of leaders, especially Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr, and the relationship between prominent organisations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), national politics centred on Washington DC, and legal changes in the South ( Garrow, 1986 ; Oates, 1982 ; Branch, 1988 ). Focusing on what Bayard Rustin (1971 : 111) identified as the ‘classical phase’ of the movement, framed by legal victories such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the Voting Rights Act 1965, this celebratory narrative of a liberal consensus, limited mostly by black militancy, was associated with liberal historians and, later, with neo-conservatives interested in portraying American society as free from racial inequality ( Hall, 2005 : 1234; Matusow, 1984 ). As historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall (2005 : 1234) has argued, King is the traditional narrative’s ‘defining figure – frozen in 1963’ as he delivered his ‘I have a dream’ speech in Washington.

Fuelled by more radical historians sceptical of the ability of American post-war liberalism to achieve racial justice, revisionist interpretations have emphasised the agency of African Americans as the driving force for the movement, with studies of mass mobilisation ( Morris, 1984 ), grass-roots organising ( Carson, 1981 ; Payne, 1995 ), and a lengthy struggle for racial justice driven by relatively anonymous ‘local people’ on the community level ( Dittmer, 1995 ; Chafe, 1980 , Thornton, 2002 ). The newer histories of the movement have stressed its origins in the liberal–left coalitions and labour conflicts of the New Deal in the 1930s, as well as the importance of gender, women’s activism, economic justice and black militancy in shaping a movement that was far more complex ( Sullivan, 1996 ; Kelly, 1994 ; Crawford et al., 1990 ; Wright, 2013 ; Laurent and Wilson, 2018 ; Tyson, 1999 ; Jeffries, 2009 ; Joseph, 2006 ). The scope of more recent works has broadened to emphasise civil rights efforts and obstacles in the North, Midwest and West ( Sugrue, 1996 ; Formisano, 1991 ; Biondi, 2002 ; Theoharis, 2018 ; Self, 2005 ), as well as the under-appreciated impact of global issues such as imperialism and the Cold War ( Von Eschen, 1997 ; Dudziak, 2000 ). Finally, historians writing since the ascendancy of the New Right have contextualised the legacies and limits of the movement, and race relations in general, since 1968 within conservative politics and political realignment ( Carter, 1996 ; Kousser, 1999 ; Kruse, 2005 ; Lawson, 2015 ).

A small but growing portion of historiography has focused on a topic of special importance to a study of teaching and learning: the relationship between the movement and memory. Often, as in the case of Julian Bond (2001) and Jenny Walker (2001) , these analyses have focused on the important yet problematic role of the media in shaping narrow perceptions of the movement at the time and through historical narratives. Gary Daynes (1997 : 51) has described different ‘styles of commemoration’ associated with efforts to remember King in Atlanta, with two approaches – ‘memorial’, focused on lobbying and fundraising, and ‘tributary’, focused on loyalty – often at odds with historians’ commitment to historical evidence. For example, while the March on Washington remains central to the traditional narrative, Daynes (1997) points out that the event in 1963 was hardly representative of civil rights activism. The event’s huge biracial crowd, national television audience, lack of violence and short length (one day) distort our perceptions of the gruelling and often unseen work of civil rights activists. Many accounts also diminish the importance of economic issues to the larger movement in referring to the event as simply the ‘March on Washington’, and omitting ‘for Jobs and Freedom’. Above all, as Renee C. Romano and Leigh Raiford (2006) and other scholars have demonstrated, remembering the civil rights movement has been about struggle where politics, resources and identity – both collective and individual – converge in ways to shape how Americans approach social problems today. As historian Jeanne Theoharis (2018 : xiv) contends, how we conceptualise the history of the civil rights movement ‘provides a shield for present-day action and inaction’.

Perhaps the most succinct and valuable argument for reinterpreting the movement came from historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall (2005) in her Presidential Address to the Organization of American Historians entitled, ‘The long civil rights movement and the political use of the past’. Hall (2005) criticised the master narrative of the movement as a narrow, misleading and politicised story that undermines the true legacies of a much longer and ongoing struggle for social justice. Rejecting the ‘satisfying morality tale’ that ‘prevents one of the more remarkable mass movements in American history from speaking effectively to the challenges of our time’, Hall (2005 : 1235, 1234) promoted a more complex narrative centred on national conflicts over race, class and gender – including determined activists, persistent opponents and contentious public policy – from the Great Depression through to the present day.

Hall’s (2005 : 1235) assertion that a revised narrative is ‘harder to simplify, appropriate, and contain’ has important implications for a crucial site in which history and memory collide: the history classroom. In addition to Loewen (2018) , other scholars have criticised the impact of US history textbooks that prioritise the role of elites in forging the movement ( Epstein, 2008 ), obscure the history of racial violence ( Brown and Brown, 2010 ) and the crucial role of African American women activists, and commit a ‘curriculum crime’ in failing to incorporate issues after 1965, such as urban unrest and the positive contributions of the Black Power movement ( Sanchez, 2016 ). Much of the criticism focuses on the misleadingly moderate image of King, often juxtaposed with Malcolm X, as a proxy for the entire movement, which ignores King’s ‘scathing critiques of American capitalism’ and, after 1967, the American war in Vietnam ( Alridge, 2006 : 677). These critiques mainly emphasise content that is not included in textbooks, and focus on misrepresentations. Analysis of narrative structures within textbooks is also needed ( Vanhulle, 2009 ), as is consideration of why specific content is included ( Grever and Van der Vlies, 2017 ).

Curricula outside the United States have not fared much better. Scholars in the UK have lamented a history curriculum that leaves students profoundly ‘ignorant about British imperial and colonial history’ ( Heath, 2018 : n.p.), and which provides a simplistic account of the American civil rights movement ( Ward and Hunt, 2020 ). The results are growing efforts to promote inquiry-based instruction in black British history that challenges older narratives and ‘interrupt[s] the psyches of students and teachers’ ( Mohamud and Whitburn, 2016 : 12). In part in response to the global Black Lives Matter movement, British educators have called for ‘repositioning’ history education ( Moncrieffe and Harris, 2020 ) via the use of the online resource The Black Curriculum ( https://theblackcurriculum.com ) to decolonise classroom learning and address the role of white privilege, both in schools and in wider society. Such efforts on both sides of the Atlantic illustrate Terrie Epstein’s (2008) argument that the intersection of racial identity and historical narratives in classrooms has profound implications for society’s ability to understand race, inequality and the challenges of a pluralistic democracy.

As history teachers attempt to craft a coherent story for students by selecting and arranging topics, they draw upon forms of knowledge about history as a discipline that are specific to teaching history ( Monte-Sano and Budano, 2013 ; Shulman, 1986 ). In world history ( Bain and Harris, 2009 ; Harris and Bain, 2011 ) and in United States history ( Wineburg and Wilson, 2001 ), researchers have noted distinct differences between novice and experienced teachers, and teachers who have disciplinary expertise when it comes to making choices about how to frame narratives. Recent movements emphasise the importance of teachers engaging students in ‘doing history’ ( Drake and Nelson, 2009 ; Lesh, 2011 ; Monte-Sano et al., 2014 ; Nokes, 2019 ; Seixas and Morton, 2013 ; Wineburg et al., 2011 ), and emphasise historical thinking rather than the telling of a master narrative. The idea of narrative power has not necessarily diminished, however; rather, teachers are to teach students how to craft their own narratives. Yet, pre-service and experienced teachers continue to struggle as they consider how to offer alternative histories to dominant stories, and they often seek to adhere to a positive image of the past, even as they attempt to revise this history ( Levstik, 2000 ; Swalwell et al., 2015 ). Barton (2012) has called for expanding the range of sources available to students in schools in order to complicate their understanding of narratives of freedom and progress. In this context, we devised a study that addressed specifically the use of primary sources and the role that secondary sources might play in shaping narratives, especially in terms of revising powerful master narratives and collective memory.

Setting and participants

This research used a case study design ( Yin, 2003 ) bound by definition and context ( Miles and Huberman, 1994 ). Participants included 17 undergraduate history majors, mostly sophomores and juniors, who had completed an average of eight or nine college history courses, including surveys in United States history. The students (12 males and 5 females) were also teacher candidates in a secondary history education programme in a large Midwestern university and, with the exception of one Latinx student, all were white. The participants enrolled in an upper-level United States history special topics course, The United States in the Twentieth Century: Thinking and Learning About the American Past, offered during the spring 2015 semester. According to the syllabus, the course addressed ‘key issues in twentieth century American history while also exploring explicitly how historians think, teach, and learn about history’. One of the authors was the instructor of the course.

Multiple assessments in the class focused on the constructed nature of history and the development of narratives. In the assessment considered here, students were first asked to use photographs or other images to create and defend a historical narrative of the African American civil rights movement (see Box 1 ). The initial assignment restricted the students’ research to the internet and a chapter in United States History: Reconstruction to the present ( Lapsansky-Werner et al., 2008 ), a widely used high-school US history textbook, modified to exclude all images and captions. Students also provided a brief rationale for their choices. They were given only 45 minutes to complete the task.

Box 1: Assignment to create the students’ initial narratives (all students)

Task: Select 10 images that create a valuable historical narrative of the African American civil rights movement. Next to the image or a description of the image, you will need to explain in a few sentences why you chose to include it in your narrative. Why is the image valuable in terms of learning about the movement? Why did you choose it to be part of your short list of essential images?

You can use the following resources to craft your individual narrative on the movement:

Scan of chapter in a typical high-school US history textbook, United States History: Reconstruction to the present ( Lapsansky-Werner et al., 2008 )

Your understanding of the historical topic.

A week later, students were divided randomly into two groups (A and B). They were given specific instructions, which differed by group, to complete an additional written assignment at home (see Box 2 ). Of the 17 students in the class, 16 completed this second assignment, with 7 students in Group A completing the task and 9 students in Group B completing the task. Students in Group A read Hall’s (2005) essay on the ‘Long civil rights movement’ in The Journal of American History . In contrast, students in Group B read a packet of 18 primary sources (see Box 3 ). These sources, which did not include photographs or other images, were chosen because they reflected Hall’s (2005) revisionist interpretation that broadens the civil rights movement chronologically and geographically, and sees it as a struggle deeply tied to efforts to achieve racial, gender and economic justice. Mirroring a central argument in Hall’s essay, the sources depicted a movement that started as early as the New Deal in the 1930s, included the ongoing struggle for racial justice after 1968, and portrayed racism as ‘institutionalized patterns of exploitation, segregation, and discrimination’ throughout the nation ( Hall, 2005 : 1239).

Box 2: Assignments to create students’ revised narratives

Part I: A revision of your earlier narrative

Select 10 images that create a valuable historical narrative of the African American civil rights movement. Next to the image or a description of the image, you will need to explain in a few sentences why you chose to include the image in your narrative. Why is the image valuable in terms of learning about the movement? Why did you choose the image to be part of your short list of essential images?

You can use the following four resources to recreate your individual narrative on the movement.

Part II: Final reflection

In a 2–3 page, double-spaced, typed essay, describe the impact of this assignment on you as both a historian and a history teacher. Some questions to address are: What are the implications of your new narrative for United States history? How would you compare your preliminary narrative of the civil rights movement with your revised narrative? How would you describe the experience of creating and recreating meaningful historical narratives? As a teacher, how would this assignment impact your work and/or the experiences of your future students? Please use specific examples from your resources to illustrate your points.

Box 3: The collection of primary sources given to students in Group B

Flyer for Tobacco Workers’ Strike, South Carolina, 1945

Martin Luther King speech, ‘Beyond Vietnam’, 1967

March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, pamphlet, 1963

Lyrics for song from labour and civil rights movement, ‘Which side are you on?’

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) letter to Martin Luther King, 1964

Employment advertisements depicting racial and gender discrimination from The Atlanta Constitution newspaper, 1960

Double V Campaign during the Second World War, Pittsburgh Courier , 1942

Letter from Massachusetts Black Caucus on race and antibusing moving in Boston, 1974

Newspaper article on the violent reaction by white opponents of the movement in Chicago, ‘Rights hecklers burn cars’, Chicago Tribune , August 1966

Poem expressing link between white racism and anti-tax movement in Atlanta, 1963

Kevin Phillips’s essay on the South and the New Right, ‘The emerging Republican majority’, New York Times , 1969

Memoir ‘Negro in the CCC’, 1935

State maps of US presidential elections, 1944–84

Housing and ‘racial compatibility’ in real estate, Federal Housing Association’s Manual, 1938

Excerpt from Civil Rights Act 1964 that includes reference to ‘sex’

Excerpt from Ronald Reagan’s campaign speech in Neshoba County, Mississippi, 1980

Excerpt from Joseph Kamp, Communist Carpetbaggers in Operation Dixie , 1946

Oral history interview with white opponent of school busing in Boston, 2005.

To summarise, students assigned randomly to Group A read a secondary source, an essay penned by a prominent historian. Students assigned randomly to Group B examined primary sources that the instructor selected, which were chosen because they aligned with a central argument in the historian’s essay. After reading their assignment materials, students in both Groups A and B were instructed to craft narratives by again selecting a set of 10 images to tell a story of the movement.

Students completed all work individually. Finally, students in both groups provided a rationale for their revised collection of photographs on the movement and, as instructed in Part II of the assignment, wrote a final reflection which described the impact of the assignment on their role as a historian and an emerging history teacher.

Data and analysis: Initial narratives

Students’ assessments consisted of images and accompanying written explanations of their selections. Researchers recorded the images that students chose, and engaged in content analysis of their written work. Given the nature of the assignment, few specific themes emerged in the written portion of the assignment; rather, specific details and a rationale for the decisions made were noted. While the 17 teacher candidates who submitted the initial narrative assignment had completed eight or nine history courses at the college level, a review of their transcripts suggested that they entered the class with varied backgrounds in United States history. However, their narratives indicated a substantial consensus about the civil rights movement, as their choices reflected the traditional narrative of the movement in the South between 1954 and 1965. Photographs of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and often anonymous civil rights activists involved in direct action in southern locations such as Montgomery, Little Rock, Greensboro and Birmingham dominated their narratives, and a story of progress and expanding freedoms emerged consistently. One teacher candidate who misunderstood the directions to choose only primary sources even included a graphic of a timeline for the movement, entitled ‘Civil rights progress: 1954–1968’. Of the 17 teacher candidates, 15 chose photographs of King at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, while 10 of the narratives included various images of Rosa Parks. Only 6 included images from before 1954, such as photographs meant to symbolise the US Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Other figures, such as Malcolm X or members of the Black Panthers, were included in 7 of the narratives. Only 2 of the 17 students referenced contemporary issues, such as the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri and the Black Lives Matter movement. Just 3 students included overt references to gender, and a single teacher candidate in the group included images portraying the efforts of Native Americans and Latinos to achieve racial justice. Finally, even though the teacher candidates attended high school and college in the Midwest, 92 per cent of the total of 170 images portrayed the movement in the South, with no overt references to civil rights struggles in northern cities such as Chicago or Detroit.

The students on this course, similar to Americans surveyed by Wineburg and Monte-Sano (2008) , crafted a remarkably consistent narrative centered on well-known figures. The 10 images selected by one student in the class reflected and illustrated this rather traditional approach:

Jim Crow water fountain

Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

African American student at Little Rock High School, 1957

Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and lunch counter sit-ins

King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech in 1963

President Lyndon Johnson and the 1964 Civil Rights Act

March on Selma, 1965

President Johnson and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Revised narrative findings

The seven students who read Hall’s (2005) essay on the ‘Long civil rights movement’ selected a new set of images that reflected a narrative about a struggle for racial justice that originated in the nineteenth century, and included more efforts since the 1960s, such as the battles over school busing and the Equal Rights Amendment, and recent debates about the Black Lives Matter movement and gay marriage. In addition to conventional images, these narratives included a portrait of anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells from the nineteenth century, a map of the Great Migration of African Americans to the urban North starting in 1916, and a photograph of the Harlem Hellfighters, an all-black infantry unit from the First World War, as well as a graphic depicting the Double V campaign during the Second World War to highlight, in the student’s words, ‘efforts of black Americans to use both domestic and foreign US policy to shape their arguments for civil rights’. Another narrative included a photograph portraying Southern white opponents to ‘race mixing’ that explained how the Cold War and anti-communism ‘destroyed the postwar black–labor–left coalition’ and ‘strengthened the Republican party’.

In contrast to both their initial narratives and those narratives offered in most US history textbooks, students in Group A chose numerous images that linked race and labour as part of a broader, enduring activism that viewed economic justice as central to racial equality. Their revised narratives illustrated Hall’s (2005 : 1239) argument about the ‘gordian knot that ties race to class and civil rights to workers’ rights’. A student included a cartoon of the Federal Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), formed by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1941 to, according to the student, ‘put racial discrimination on the national agenda for the first time since Reconstruction’. The same student included a photograph of labour leader A. Philip Randolph, while another student chose an image depicting the Taft–Hartley Act of 1947 as part of an argument about the challenges facing African American workers after the Second World War. Two more students referenced the central role of the US federal government in shaping the growth of a racially exclusive white suburbia in the post-war period. One narrative portrayed white Americans benefiting from a racist federal policy related to home mortgages, while another included a housing map of 1950 Atlanta depicting ‘white flight’. Interestingly, one student referenced the ‘racial tensions’ in the North, while also quoting Hall (2005 : 1246) about the links between civil rights and the efforts of unions to fight discrimination via ‘universalistic social welfare policies’. However, this student was unable to pair these commentaries with images that actually depicted these important interpretations.

Despite access to 18 provocative primary sources that reflected the trajectory of a long civil rights movement, the nine students in Group B still chose images that relied heavily on the traditional narrative. About 85 per cent (77) of the total of 90 total images from the group illustrated events between 1954 and 1968, almost all of which portrayed the movement in the South. Eight of the nine students included images representing direct action protests in cities such as Montgomery, Greensboro and Birmingham. The Brown v. Board of Education US Supreme Court case was depicted in 11 images, with multiple students also selecting images of King, Rosa Parks, the Little Rock Nine, the Freedom Rides and the Civil Rights Act 1964. Images of Malcolm X, the Black Panthers and segregated Southern facilities such as bathrooms were each included in three narratives. One student inexplicably chose a photograph of black and white hands.

Even students who aimed to create a broader narrative struggled, as 13 additional images simply replicated one of the sources provided in the original set, such as the poster depicting labour unrest among tobacco workers ( Box 3 , Source 1), the article in the Chicago Tribune reporting racial violence in 1966 ( Box 3 , Source 9), and the letter associated with the Double V campaign in the Pittsburgh Courier during the Second World War ( Box 3 , Source 7). Other duplications involved the FBI letter to King ( Box 3 , Source 5), King’s speech about Vietnam ( Box 3 , Source 2), the Civil Rights Act 1964 ( Box 3 , Source 15), and the anti-taxation poem from Atlanta ( Box 3 , Source 10). In these cases, the students submitted a broader narrative of the movement, but they provided no evidence that they were able or willing to locate and use new images to craft narratives that illustrated important issues such as the role of labour conflict, the relationship between civil rights, war and American foreign policy, or the complex role of the federal government and the rise of modern conservatism in shaping the movement. The narratives completely or largely avoided images associated with a number of events that often receive substantial coverage in US survey courses at the undergraduate level, such as the New Deal and the Great Depression, the political realignment of the Republican Party in the South after 1968, and the persistent challenges of racial discrimination and segregation in the urban North.

Sometimes the inclusion did not necessarily mean that students understood the implications of such evidence for revising older narratives. Three of the four teacher candidates who used the 1964 Civil Rights Act failed to mention its later importance in terms of gender equality (even though the included excerpt made a specific reference to sex), and only three of the seven teacher candidates who referenced the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom discussed the emphasis that the event placed on jobs and economic justice. In a particularly revealing example, one student included an instructive photograph from the 1963 event filled with placards that declared, ‘We Demand An FEPC Law Now’, ‘AFL-CIO For Full Employment’ and ‘We March for Jobs for All Now!’, with only vague commentary about ‘equal rights’ and the fact that whites were involved in the march as well. The images associated with the conventional narrative of the movement, plus duplications from the primary source packet, meant that only about 12 per cent of the images provided by the students in Group B represented new selections that reflected a more revisionist interpretation of the movement. These images included photographs of such figures as A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, as well as references to abolitionism, the 13th Amendment, race riots in 1919, and 2014 protests about the police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri.

The results of the study suggest that secondary sources such as Hall’s (2005) provocative essay on the long civil rights movement are far more effective than primary sources for encouraging emerging teacher candidates both to revise conventional historical narratives and perhaps to confront their own often unexamined role in creating narratives. As history textbooks garner increased criticism, and history education continues to embrace the teaching of historical thinking through primary sources, teacher candidates may be ill-equipped to select meaningful primary source evidence. Emerging teachers may need additional support in understanding the implications of narratives and interrogating primary sources, especially as undergraduate survey courses, the college courses closest to high-school history classes, often involve the fewest opportunities to analyse and employ primary source evidence. For example, many of the participants in the study who read Hall’s (2005) essay (Group A) commented on how the secondary source ‘opened my eyes’ and challenged their naivety. These teacher candidates reflected on how teachers and students are ‘constantly evaluating and re-evaluating’ their perspectives about the past. In contrast, the teacher candidates who worked with primary sources (Group B) largely commented on their lack of knowledge. They perceived narratives as static and either accurate or inaccurate, but, without a framework to guide their thinking, the primary sources they read were not enough. For these students, the sources allowed them to ‘assess the holes’ in their background knowledge, but their engagement with the sources then stalled.

From prolific photographs in newspapers and magazines in the 1950s, to contemporary textbooks, images have long been central to our understanding of the civil rights movement. In fact, research suggests that images are crucial to the way in which many people engage with the past. In the 1990s, historians David Thelen and Roy Rosenzweig conducted a study of the relationship between Americans and the past. Despite frequent criticisms of Americans as historically illiterate, they described the ‘widespread nature of American engagement with the past’ ( Rosenzweig, 2000 : 264). However, the degree of engagement varied a great deal, with significant implications for this study. While Americans generally felt ‘unconnected’ from history while ‘studying history in school’, over 91 per cent of those surveyed identified looking at historical photographs with family, and almost as many reported interacting with history via films and television programmes in the previous 12 months ( Rosenzweig, 2000 : 265). In our study, conducted two decades later, the teacher candidates reinforced these experiences, as every participant reported that they had watched films or television programmes related to history, looked at historical photographs, and, perhaps reflecting the ubiquitous role of phone cameras in American life, taken photographs to preserve memories. They also agreed with Americans surveyed earlier that history museums and personal accounts – two experiences often dominated by photographic evidence – were more trustworthy as sources than high-school teachers, college professors, books, or films and television. Although the college history majors, not surprisingly, reported far more frequent engagement with history through books than Americans in general, images of the past still dominated how they, as emerging teachers, experienced historical narratives.

When surveyed about how they, as future teachers armed with only a textbook and a laptop, crafted their initial narratives of the civil rights movement, the students estimated how much of the 45 minutes allotted for this assignment they spent on various resources. Taken as a whole, the class reportedly spent 44 per cent of the time on Google Images, 17 per cent thinking about their past high-school and college history courses, 15 per cent looking at the high-school history textbook, and 12 per cent reading text sources found via Google. They spent about 6 per cent of the time thinking about films and other forms of popular culture, and the rest of the time on miscellaneous sources such as Wikipedia and personal experiences of travel or museums.

This self-reported reliance on images on the internet (for the crafting of their initial narratives) allowed the students to find and use photographs that, in part due to origins in the mass media of the mid twentieth century, simply reinforced the misleading and distorted narrative that historians have challenged for decades. While the digital age may mean seemingly unlimited access to data, it might not help teachers craft meaningful counter-narratives, and it might, in fact, have limited them. The students’ searches for this study yielded photographs that largely mirrored the troubling limitations of mainstream textbooks. Their subsequent initial narratives differed little from the images that had been removed from the secondary US history textbook that they used, which relied on an impressive 40 images in fewer pages, yet only included 3 photographs that challenged the classic interpretation of the movement. For Group B, their revised narratives reflected a similarly limited and narrow understanding of the movement. It is likely that teachers who are capable of designing instruction that reflects the weight of recent scholarship need more support in finding and employing digital evidence.

While images may be crucial to the historical consciousness ( Seixas, 2004 ) of both teachers and students, it is also possible for emerging teachers, regardless of flawed curriculum materials, and even limited academic background, to examine and revise existing historical narratives. However, this study underscores the role of the media, and American popular and political culture, in hindering the ability of teachers to craft meaningful counter-narratives. Despite the dramatic rise in calls for a racial reckoning in the United States, and the growing commitment of educators to develop culturally competent teachers, to teach hard history and to promote social justice, traditional narratives – what one historian refers to as a ‘palatable … fable’ ( Theoharis, 2018 : 141, 211) – still dominate history classrooms. Unlike in previous eras, the problem is not that African American history is excluded from the curriculum; it is that it is often conceptualised and taught in a way that prevents students from understanding the long struggle for racial justice in a way that addresses the structural racism, white privilege, gender discrimination, and crucial relationship between American capitalism and social inequality that continue to shape so much of the lives of teachers and students today. For example, the fact that few teacher candidates even attempted to use historical evidence associated with the rise of a politically conservative counter-revolution after 1968 leaves their future students ill-equipped to understand the complex ways in which race continues to inform American politics. The master narrative frames the movement as successful by 1965, and therefore largely divorced from the contemporary debates over race that dominate American culture during their lifetimes. In this sense, teachers who continue to frame the civil rights movement in narrow terms are perhaps inadvertently complicit in opposing racial change. And their students, especially students of colour, know it. The result, as Terrie Epstein (2008 : 9) argues, is that ‘millions of young people leave the public schools knowing a nationalistic perspective but not believing it, while those who accept it have no framework for understanding racism and other forms of inequality today’.

If remembrance is, as Hall (2005 : 1233) suggests, ‘always a form of forgetting’, then history classrooms are the wellspring for our society’s collective amnesia. How do we prepare teachers who understand the central role of analysis and reinterpretation, what Hall (2005 : 1263) describes as ‘novel forms of storytelling’, as being not just the craft of historians, but also crucial to the daily efforts of teachers and their students? Although photographs remain accessible and valuable primary sources for modern history, can historians and history teachers rely on them to portray the sort of complex and often subtle ways in which structural racism and racial identity have shaped history? If historical narratives are inevitably arguments and, as John A. Arnold (2000 : 122) has argued, ‘arguments present the opportunity for change’, how can teachers best interact with historical evidence to empower students to confront the past and imagine a more just and equitable future?

Our study of how emerging history teachers attempt to reframe their understanding of the civil rights movement underscores the importance of an effective narrative framework from which to inform the selection of meaningful primary source evidence. Informed by Hall’s (2005) provocative notion of a long civil rights movement that reflects both recent scholarship and the complexity of race in contemporary America, students in Group A were far more likely to forge powerful counter-narratives for the classroom. In contrast, the experience of students in Group B suggests that teachers, despite a commitment to use primary sources to teach both historical content and skills, often struggle to create lessons that transcend outdated interpretations and historical myths without the use of rich narratives tied to the evolving work of historians. In terms of teaching and learning about the lengthy struggle for racial justice in the United States, simply encouraging teachers and students to ‘do history’ and conduct their own online research is not going to change persistent narrative structures that continue to enable and excuse systemic racism. This 2015 study, conducted after the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012, the founding of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, and the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, speaks to the enduring power of narratives and collective memory. Recent events in American society, specifically the increased visibility of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 and attention to systemic racism in the United States, remind us of the necessity of constantly revisiting students’ construction of narratives, and the power that collective memory holds over our understanding of the past.

Darryl Pinckney, author of numerous books and essays on African American history and culture, recently reflected on the different experiences of encountering the history of the civil rights movement in books and via the successful feature film Selma . Pinckney (2015 : n.p.) concluded that, ‘although reading in the U.S. is a minority activity, the book is still the only medium in which you can make a complicated argument. For the black experience’, he explained, ‘the word is still chief witness’. The challenge remains how to prepare history teachers as another kind of witness, capable of crafting the type of classrooms and professional lives that nurture the complicated arguments that students and other citizens need to engage the past and make sense of the present.

Research ethics statement

The authors declare that research ethics approval for this article was provided by the Institutional Review Board, Illinois State University, Protocol 2014-0414.

Conflicts of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest with this work.

Notes on the contributors

Richard Hughes is Associate Professor of History at Illinois State University, USA, where he teaches courses in US history and history education as part of the secondary teacher education programme. He serves as Assistant Editor for Teaching History: A Journal of Methods , and is an officer in the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in History. His research interests range from race in modern US history to the evolving disciplinary understandings of history teachers.

Sarah Drake Brown is Associate Director of the National Council for History Education (USA). She is Editor of Teaching History: A Journal of Methods , and her research focuses on teacher candidates’ developing historical understandings and use of assessment, and on history teachers’ professional learning.

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