1963: Human Rights and Civil Rights

1900-1999: A New Divide
Written By Stephanie Brizee

Big Idea

Black people have been fighting for their human rights since 1619 when they arrived in North America as enslaved workers. By the 1960s, hundreds of years of protest and advocacy led to important political, cultural, and legal advancements for African American civil rights in the United States. The work still continues to this day as Black Americans live in “righteous hope” of a more beautiful future.

What’s important to know?

  1. Still More to be Done: The deeply ingrained racist views of Black people as inferior to White people meant that positive legal changes often did not change the daily experience of Black individuals in America.

  2. Key Legislation: Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, legislation was passed to advance Black rights.

  3. Key Commentary: Daniel Moynihan from the Department of Labor created a report. He argued that while American laws have changed, centuries of structural racism have put communities at a big disadvantage that White Americans have not addressed.

  4. Key Moments & People: The Civil Rights movement included the work of Black Americans across the nation. A few key moments and people are highlighted below.

1: Still More to be Done

Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights movement leaders in front of the statue of Abraham Lincoln during the March on Washington, August 28, 1963.

Source: Wikipedia

Throughout the 1950s, some civil rights advancements were made, such as in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) ruling, which desegregated schools. After 330 years of increasingly internalized views of Black people as inferior to Whites was not easily overdone with legal changes. Even legal advancements still left many African Americans facing daily acts of discrimination and segregation. (Feagin, 2014, pp. 155-157)

As Lang noted, African Americans still faced a “postsegregation pattern of black racial control” (Lang, 2009, p. 128). The nationwide housing crisis for African Americans, threat and acts of lynching, and other forms of intimidation and violence led to eventually led to the rise of new national civil rights leaders such as Medgar Evers and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who emerged to lead another nation-wide movement to overcome the stereotypes, legal restrictions, and cultural norms that continued to deny African Americans their due rights and respect.

2: Key Legislation

Civil Rights Act of 1957

The Civil Rights Movement gained momentum with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which established the Civil Rights section within the Department of Justice and authorized it to issue injunctions against those violating the right to vote. The act further established the Civil Rights Commission, which was tasked with investigating potential civil rights violations and recommending appropriate remedies. The work of the Civil Rights Commission helped establish the need for the next significant pieces of legislation, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. (National Archives)

1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act

President John F. Kennedy and his successor Lyndon B. Johnson helped the U.S. Congress pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was meant to end race-based discrimination. This legislation and the 1965 Voting Rights Act were steps in the right direction, but as with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments passed after the Civil War, legal rights did not automatically create social and economic ones. Local governments and local institutions controlling housing, real estate, and education resisted federal laws as much as possible, especially in the south, which led to widespread social upheaval in 1967 and 1968 (Feagin, 2014, pp. 204-205).

The War on Poverty and the Economic Opportunity Act

In 1964, Johnson also introduced his ideas of a “War on Poverty.” He aimed to combat an unemployment rate of 19% and to address gaps in education and health care that he believed contributed to the high unemployment rate. Later that year, Congress passed the Economic Opportunity Act which established the Office of Economic Opportunity and provided for the creation of programs such as VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), the Job Corps (free educational and job training for 16-24 year olds), and Head Start (early childhood support).

3: Key Commentary

The focus on strengthening American society became more finely pointed the next year when Daniel Moynihan, then a political appointee working in the U.S. Department of Labor published his report The Negro Family: The Case For National Action. (Moynihan, 1965).

In this report Moynihan cited what the African American community knew all too well — American society may have changed its laws, but the centuries of structural racism had left the communities at an incredible disadvantage that White Americans had not yet addressed. He wrote, “the racist virus in the American blood stream still afflicts us: Negroes will encounter serious personal prejudice for at least another generation” (Moynihan, 1965).

He went on to argue that the dissolution of the Black family stood at the heart of their challenges and that dissolution came because African American men could not find jobs and therefore could not be breadwinners and leaders in their homes (Moynihan, 1965). The report was leaked and received with much criticism from the left and the right (Wilson, 2009, p. 35). The Economic Opportunity Act was intended to help address some of the issues that Moynihan called attention to in Black communities. However, without significant changes to the many structural parts of American life perpetrating the ongoing segregation, isolation, and police fixation frustration and anger continued to build in Black communities across America.

4: Key Moments & People

Many African Americans across the United States protested and resisted day after day in large and small ways. There are so many stories that could be told. Below are a mixture of some of the more well-known actions of the Civil Rights era alongside some of the lesser known ones.

  • Most people know of Rosa Parks and her refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, which started a 17,000 person strike that lasted 381 days. Her actions called attention to what thousands of Black people faced every day in the indignities segregated bussing.

    What is less well known are the stories of many other women who resisted with equal passion and commitment. -

    • Aurelia Shines refused to give up her bus seat in 1948 while pregnant, and then again in 1955 after. along day of work.

    • Claudette Colvin refused, also in 1955, to give up her seat. She was arrested but also pregnant and single and so the NAACP decided not to use her as an example.

    • Mary Louise Smith was 18 and upset because the woman she had just cleaned for had refused to pay her. She told the bus driver she was not moving for anybody, she had as much right to her seat as the next person.

    • When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat and was arrested, she was 42 and married and seemed like a safer choice public relations-wise for the NAACP to use to push the issue of segregation on the busing system (Ramey Berry and Gross, 2020, p. 163).

    The Supreme Court ruled in 1956 that segregated busing was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

  • Freddie Lee Shuttlesworth is another hero of the Civil Rights Movement. Co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he helped organize the Freedom Rides in the summer of 1961, he worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr., and participated in lunch counter sit-ins and other acts of non-violent protest. He also participated in the famous marches to Selma, which eventually led to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

    His moral resolve and unwavering courage amazed many around him. A friend from Birmingham noted of his tenacity, “There was no rationale reason for a Fred Shuttlesworth to exist in Birmingham. For him to exist in Birmingham and stay alive, for him to do the things that he did, there’s nothing rationale about it” (Manis, 2001, 2). Maybe not rationale to the average White person, but for Fred Shuttlesworth it was the only way he felt one could live if American society was to change — and change it, he did.

  • Whitney M. Young, Jr. became the president of the National Urban League in 1961. At 40 years of age, the leader transformed the organization into a much larger, more politically engaged civil rights organization. He did so managing to keep White support and grow the organizations activism at the same time.

    He described the National Urban League as: “we are the social engineers, we are the strategists, we are the planners, we are the people who work at the level of policy-making, policy implementation, with the highest echelons of the corporate community, the highest echelons of the governmental community – both at federal, state and local level – the highest echelons of the labor movement." (Young, 1964).

    He was an advisor to three presidents — Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon — and was even offered a Cabinet level position under Nixon. Under his leadership, the Urban League helped train young African Americans for the workforce, lobbied for millions of dollars to aid Black communities, and worked with large employers such as Ford, to hire more Black workers.

    Young biographer, Dennis Dickerson (1998), described him as a man who “believed that racial equality was an attainable goal if powerful and influential whites joined with civil rights leaders to tear down social and economic barriers to black advancement” (p. 318).

  • Dorothy Height served as the president for the National Council for Negro Women (NCNW) for 40 years, during which time. she dramatically influenced the civil rights movement while also elevating the role and influence of Black women. Not surprisingly, her mentor was Mary McLeod Bethune who served in President Roosevelt’s administration and was the unofficial organizer of the Black Cabinet (Crewe, 2009, p. 200).

    She played an important role with what was known as the “Big Six”—Martin Luther King, Jr. (Southern Christian Leadership Council), Whitney Young (National Urban League), A. Philip Randolph (American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations), Roy Wilkins (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), John Lewis (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and James Farmer (Congress of Racial Equality). However, she noted that she was part of their meetings and so more aptly this group was the big seven. She helped plan the March on Washington and appealed strongly for a woman’s to have a speaking role on the stage that day. Although denied, her presence along with the other women on stage, sent a clear message as to their involvement in the civil rights movement (p. 201).

    Height was very focused on ensuring the continuation of institutions such as the NCNW and creating programs that would deliver on the vision and promises of the institution. She credits this approach to her graduate school training in social work, “which emphasized the connected-ness between activities and programs. ‘In social work,’ she said, ‘you are taught that activities must be part of a well-thought-out plan’.” (p. 203).

The Civil Rights Movement represented a time of significant change and opportunity, albeit not perfectly and often requiring significant sacrifice by the African American community.

Listen

Listen to oral histories conducted with a variety of civil rights leaders from the Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Oral History Project at the University of Kentucky:

Interview with Martin Luther King, Jr, March, 18, 1964
The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Oral History Project
Interview with Malcom X, June 2, 1964
The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Oral History Project
Interview with James Baldwin, April 27, 1964
The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Oral History Project
Interview with Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., March 17, 1964
The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Oral History Project
Interview with Bayard Rustin, 1964
The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Oral History Project
Interview with Stokely Carmichael
The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Oral History Project
Interview with Whitney Young, Jr., April 13, 1964
The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Oral History Project
Interview with Ruth Turner, David Cohen, May 7, 1964
The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Oral History Project

Students

Want to learn more? Watch the video below on student activism in the civil rights movement.

Video from Crash Course Black American History.

Think about It!

Imani Perry and the ongoing Work of the Civil Rights Movement

In her book, More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States (2011), Imani Perry notes her focus on trying to understand “our ongoing embrace of racial inequality in the United States, despite the fact that we are a society that formally and colloquially decries racism and proclaims equality” (p. x). Her books explores “why a social transformation as profound and deep as the civil rights movement could not divorce American democracy from the blood money of racial caste with which it purchased its stability” (p. xx).

She challenges modern Americans to think about the pursuit of racial equality as an “intentional practice.” The struggles for equality and the challenge to remove centuries of racialized ways of thinking is real. She challenges her readers: “we can decide whether this reality will make us impotent or rigorous” (p. 183).

She goes on, “[i]n a society and world with past and present experiences of ethnic conflict and oppression, we cannot think of something like racial justice as having an end point after which we stop thinking about it. it must be a commitment that is consistently engaged and regularly retooled to meet the needs of the moment. Who is on top and who is on bottom, who is in and who is out will shift over time, but we can sustain a commitment to being aware of the exclusions of those relegated to the figurative basements of our society and those ‘standing outside our gates,’ as it were… A practice of racial freedom and equality would require a collective way of being and operating in good faith toward the goals of civi and political participation and fair opportunity and access for all members of our society” (p. 183).

One way she argues that we can operationalize this intentional practice is through “shifting narratives.” She defines this as “tell some different stories and repeat those different stories more often. Think about how we describe different racial groups, their histories, their present. Almost immediately, we are thrown into either stereotypes of invisibility, or both for many groups. The stories we tell and integrate into our knowledge impacts how we see ourselves, how we see others around us, how we treat them, what opportunities we provide, what expectations we have” (p. 187).

In re-evaluating our narratives, she argues that we must start with how we describe the civil rights movement. “As a preliminary move, we must revisit how we narrative the civil rights movement. Expunge the sentimental and melodramatic. Recover the authentic history of strategy, social organization, the organizing of many, the mundane sacrifices, the unanswered aspirations” (p. 187).

How does her exhortation make you re-evaluate your own understanding of the civil rights movement? What stories have you accepted or believed that after engaging with more history you may now be questioning? How does this idea of intentional practice change how you think about racist ideas and practices?

Your Turn

What do you think caused the Civil Rights Movement to be successful in ways that prior actions had not been? Where does the work of the Civil Rights Movement still carry on?

Stephanie Brizee
Previous

1956: Community Erasure and Community Building in the Highway Revolts
Next

1964: President Johnson’s “War on Crime” and the Black Panther Movement