By 1945 the USA was the world’s most powerful and important country. Whathappened there affected people the world over. In this depth study you are going toexamine life inside the USA after 1945, in particular the issues of civil rights and racerelations.

◆◆ Part 1 analyses the reasons for the anti-Communist Red Scare of the 1950s andspecifically the phenomenon of McCarthyism.

◆◆ Part 2 investigates the achievements of the movement for black civil rightsthrough the 1950s – focusing on the campaign for integrated education and theMontgomery bus boycott.

◆◆ Part 3 continues the story of the black civil rights movement through the 1960sand 1970s and compares the roles of key individuals, Martin Luther King andMalcom X, and the contributions of three American Presidents, Kennedy,Johnson and Nixon.

◆◆ There was more to the civil rights movement than just the campaign for blackcivil rights. Part 4 considers the methods and achievements of three othergroups campaigning for civil rights: Hispanic Americans, Native Americans andthe women’s movement.

Focus

◆◆ OCR’s USA 1945–1975: Land of Freedom? Paper 1 Depth Study ◆◆ AQA’s Race Relations in the USA 1955–1968 Paper 2 Depth Study

It is designed for use alongside these two books:

which you can order from http://www.hoddereducation.co.uk

Permission is given to download and make copies of this resource for students in your own institution only. It may be loaded to a VLEor to student computers but may not be passed on beyond the purchasing institution. Any other use is strictly prohibited.

This chapter covers

The USA, 1945–75: Land ofFreedom?

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Part 1 Why was there a Red Scare in theUSA in the 1950s?The USA emerged from the Second World War as the most powerful nation on earth. Its enemies weredefeated and its allies were exhausted. You might think that the USA would be brimming withconfidence and yet in the years after the war the USA was gripped by fear and suspicion ofCommunism, a phase which became known as the Red Scare. American fear of Communism wentback a long way: the USA was democratic, capitalist and largely Christian. Communists in contrastbelieved in a single-party state, centralized control of all industry and atheism. With such differentbeliefs anti-Communism was a fact of life in the USA. What is surprising is how strong the anti-Communist feeling proved to be in the 1950s. Why did this happen? There were two main factors:

• the international situation – and particularly the tense relationship with the USSR during the ColdWar

• internal political developments in the USA – and the activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

The international situationKey developments in the Cold War, 1945–50.

• The capitalist USA and the Communist USSR had fought the Second World War as allies – puttingaside their different beliefs to beat the common enemy of fascism. However, even before the war wasover, they had started to argue about what should happen in Europe after the war.

• The USSR had made huge territorial gains at the end of the war, moving its frontier hundreds ofkilometres westwards into Europe.

• All the countries of eastern Europe – Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romaniaand Bulgaria – had come under the control of Moscow by 1948, and all had either electedCommunist governments or had Communist governments imposed on them. There was a divisionacross the continent between Communist countries and capitalist countries, which WinstonChurchill called an ‘Iron Curtain’.

• The USA tried to halt this Communist expansion. In 1947 US President Truman proclaimed theTruman Doctrine, promising help to any country trying to resist the Soviet advance. The US offeredMarshall Aid – billions of dollars to help revive the war-damaged economies of western Europe sothat they could resist Communism.

• It seemed that the USSR was determined to advance further westwards in 1948 when they cut allsupply routes into west Berlin. Only an extraordinary fifteen-month airlift of supplies prevented thecity from being starved out.

• In 1949 NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) was formed, a military alliance against theperceived Soviet threat.

• In spite of these developments, 1949 was a bad year for the USA in this struggle. First the USSRdeveloped its own atomic bomb. The US monopoly of this fearsome weapon was broken, withunthinkable possible consequences.

• Then in the same year China was taken over by Chinese Communists led by Mao Zedong. A newCommunist nation of 500 million people had emerged. Worse still, Mao’s victory had been wonagainst opponents who had been massively aided by the USA.

• Communism was also advancing in Malaya, Indonesia, Burma and the Philippines.• In 1950, Communist North Korea invaded South Korea. The USA got United Nations support for a

successful counter-attack, until Communist China sent support to North Korea. Soon the USA wasbogged down in the Korean War which was to last until 1953.

SOURCE 1Now in 1949 all of China fell to theCommunists. We saw red almosteverywhere. And the Russians got the bomb.We leaped from what we knew to what wedreaded to think. Somehow, somewhere,possibly right here at home, we were beingbetrayed. Who gave the Russians the secretof the A-bomb? Who lost China to theCommunists? Suspicions fell on fertileground.

Extract from the commentary of a 1984American TV documentary called A WalkThrough The Twentieth Century with Bill

Myers. Myers was (and still is) adistinguished political journalist.

Why was there a Red Scare in theUSA?

1 Draw your own diagram like this with‘The Red Scare’ in the centre.

2 Write extra phrases inside the cloudto summarise the key features of theRed Scare. For example:McCarthyism; or fear of Communistspies.

3 Outside the cloud add another ringof labels to summarise all thedifferent factors which caused theRed Scare, for example: ◆ Cold War tensions◆ Rivalry between political parties◆ Politicians trying to raise their ownprofile

4 For each factor explain how itcontributed to the Red Scare.

The Red Scare

Focus Task

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Internal political developmentsMeanwhile in response to these developments, and feeding off them, a number of things hadhappened in the USA.

The Federal Bureau of InvestigationThe Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had a strongly anti-Communist director, J Edgar Hoover. He had been a driving forcebehind the Red Scare that happened after the Russian Revolution. In1947 President Truman let him set up the Federal Employee LoyaltyProgram. This allowed Hoover’s FBI loyalty boards to investigategovernment employees to see if they were current or former membersof the Communist Party. From 1947 to 1950, around 3 million wereinvestigated. Nobody was charged with spying. But 212 staff wereidentified as ‘security risks’ (that is, Communist sympathisers) andwere forced out of their jobs.

The House Un-American ActivitiesCommitteeFrom the 1930s, the US Congress had a House Un-American ActivitiesCommittee (HUAC). It had the right to investigate anyone who wassuspected of doing anything un-American. Un-American mostly meantCommunist! To start with, the committee was hardly noticed. But in1947 it became big news.

The FBI had evidence that a number of prominent Hollywoodwriters, producers and directors were members of the CommunistParty. HUAC called them to be questioned by the committee. They werenot government employees. It was not illegal to be a Communist in afree democratic country such as the USA. So when the Hollywood Ten,as they became known, appeared before the committee, they refused toanswer any questions. Every time they were asked the standardquestion: ‘Are you now or have you ever been a member of theCommunist Party?’, they pleaded the First Amendment of the USConstitution (which guaranteed all Americans freedom to believe whatthey wanted) and said that the HUAC did not even have the right to askthe question.

They were each jailed for one year for contempt of court becausethey refused to answer questions. Hollywood studios ‘blacklisted’ theten, and most of them never worked again in Hollywood. Because thefilm industry was the highest profile industry in the country, HUAC wassuddenly catapulted into front-page news. Now everyone had heard of it.

The McCarran ActThe Hiss and Rosenberg cases helped to lead to the Internal SecurityAct of 1950. This was usually known as the McCarran Act because itwas pushed through by Nevada Senator Pat McCarran. PresidentTruman opposed it because he claimed it would make a mockery ofthe USA’s Bill of Rights. Congress defeated his opposition by voting 80per cent in favour of the Act. The main measures were:• All Communist organisations had to be registered (including finger

printing of members) with the US government.• No Communist could carry a US passport or work in the defence

industries.• The Act even allowed for the setting up of detention camps in

emergency situations.

The Hiss caseIn 1948 a man called Whittaker Chambers faced the HUAC. Headmitted to having been a Communist in the 1930s. He also said thatAlger Hiss had been a member of his group. Hiss was a high-rankingmember of the US State Department. Hiss accused Chambers of lyingand Truman dismissed the case. However, a young politician calledRichard Nixon (a member of the HUAC) decided to pursue the case. Hefound convincing evidence that Hiss did know Chambers, anddebatable evidence that Hiss had passed information to the USSRduring the war. Hiss was never tried for spying, but he was convicted ofperjury in 1950 and spent nearly five years in prison.

It is still not known whether Hiss was guilty of passing secrets or not.

The RosenbergsThe Soviet Union developed its own atomic bomb in 1949. This wasmuch sooner than expected. The USA had been sure it would takeSoviet scientists four more years. The US government stronglysuspected that spies had passed its atomic secrets to the USSR. In 1950a German-born British physicist, Klaus Fuchs, was convicted of passingUS and British atomic secrets to the USSR.

The investigation into Fuchs also led to suspicions against JuliusRosenberg and his wife Ethel. At their trial in March 1951 they deniedall the charges against them. But they were found guilty and sentencedto death. They were executed in June 1953.

The evidence that convicted the Rosenbergs appeared to be flimsy.However, historians today believe that the Rosenbergs were guilty. Theynow know of coded telegrams between the Rosenbergs and Sovietagents that began in 1944. The telegrams were eventually published in 1995.

1 Write a sentence for each of the following, explaining its role in the RedScare: • Federal Employee Loyalty Program • McCarran Act• HUAC • J Edgar Hoover• Hiss Case • Richard Nixon• Rosenbergs

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1 After Democrat Adlai Stevenson had made aspeech in the 1952 presidential electioncampaign, a woman praised him: ‘You havecaptured the vote of every thinking person inAmerica.’ Stevenson is said to have replied,‘Thank you, Ma’am, but we need a majority!’What do you think he meant by this?

2 Compare Sources 2 and 3. Which was madeby supporters of the HUAC and which by itsopponents? Explain your choice carefully.Refer to details in the source.

HysteriaHow did the people of the USA react to this Red Scare? Most of the evidence suggests that they lapped itup. Some were hysterically anti-Communist themselves and welcomed every exposé as another victoryfor American values. Even those who were not violently anti-Communist got caught up in the dramaof it all. Interrogations were filmed and photographed. Just to appear before HUAC could ruin acareer. ‘Suspects’ were asked to ‘name names’. If they did not tell, they were suspected of being aCommunist. If they did, then those they named were in turn, investigated.

Politicians on both sides could also see the vote winning potential of it all. To win elections theymust be seen to be tough on Communism. Into this steaming atmosphere stepped a ruthless andambitious young Republican Senator called Joseph McCarthy.

McCarthyismIn 1950 McCarthy was in search of a headline. He got it! He claimed that he had a list of over 200Communists in the State Department. He had not found these Communists himself. His 200Communists were from the official report from the FBI’s loyalty board investigations. He claimedthere were card-carrying Communists in the government. This was also based on FBI reports. In fact,35 of the 57 had been cleared and the other 22 were still being investigated.

McCarthy confessed that he was amazed by the amount of publicity his comments generated, buthe was determined to use his new-found prominence. Democrat Senator Millard Tydings declaredthat the charges lacked foundation. McCarthy simply attacked Tydings for being un-American.

With elections just around the corner, Republican senators backed McCarthy and in the 1952 USSenate elections the Republicans reaped the benefits. They won many seats. Tydings himself lost hisseat to a McCarthy supporter.

McCarthy was on a roll. After the election, President Eisenhower appointed him as head of a WhiteHouse committee to investigate Communist activities in the government. Throughout 1952 and 1953McCarthy extended his own investigations and turned his committee into a weapon to increase hisown personal power and terrify others. His methods mainly involved false accusations and bullying.He targeted high-profile figures and accused anyone who criticised him of being a Communist.

SOURCE 3

An American cartoon from the early 1950’s.

SOURCE 2

‘Investigate them? Heck that’s mah posse’ – a cartoon byBill Mauldin from 1946. A posse is a group of mengathered together to hunt down a criminal. Maudlin

served as a GU during the war and had been wounded.This cartoon was kept in an FBI file as evidence of un-

American attitudes.

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SOURCE 4Looking for an issue that would get him re-elected, he seized on the fears of millions, andlaunched the squalid campaign that became known as McCarthyism. Its tactic: reckless andundocumented accusation against government employees. Intimidation bred audacityand audacity fed upon itself. McCarthy soon had the celebrity he sought. The stage was hisalone to command.

An extract from the commentary of a 1984 American TV documentary called A WalkThrough The Twentieth Century with Bill Myers (see Source 1).

The ‘witch hunts’McCarthy claimed that General George Marshall (the American general most admired by WinstonChurchill and the author of the Marshall Plan which gave US economic aid to Europe after theSecond World War – see Chapter 4 ) was at the centre of a gigantic conspiracy against the USA.President Eisenhower did virtually nothing to protect his great friend Marshall from these accusationsbecause he did not want to clash with McCarthy.

Thousands of others found their lives and careers ruined by the witch hunt. False accusations ledto their being ‘blacklisted’ which meant that they could not work. Over 100 university lecturers werefired as universities came under pressure from McCarthy. The HUAC ‘blacklisted’ 324 Hollywoodpersonalities. Studio bosses such as Walt Disney, Jack Warner and Louis Mayer supported the HUACand refused to employ anyone who was suspected of having Communist sympathies. They also didtheir bit to raise the temperature further by producing science-fiction films such as Invasion of theBody Snatchers, which fed the hysteria by introducing the threat of alien invaders – which wasclearly supposed to represent the Communist threat to the USA.

SOURCE 5

Senator McCarthy gives a press conference.

What was McCarthyism?

1 Under each of the following‘headings’ try to sum up this aspectof McCarthyism in just 25 wordsusing the information on pages 4–5.We have started the first one for you.◆ Beliefs – Anti-Communism.

McCarthy believed that the SovietUnion wanted to damageAmerica. He also believed that . . .

◆ Methods◆ Motives

2 Now try to pare it down still further –summarise McCarthyism in just 25words!

Focus Task

Why did people supportMcCarthyism?

Support for McCarthy depended on fourthings.

Which of these do you think was thestrongest leg of McCarthy’s stool? Addnotes to your own diagram to showhow this contributed to support forMcCarthy. Include examples andevidence from these pages.

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1 Read Source 4. It should be fairly clearthat Bill Myers was not an admirer ofMcCarthy! How does the tone andlanguage of Source 4 demonstrate this?

2 Does Source 5 prove that Americanswere anti-Communist in the 1950s? Usedetails from the source and your ownknowledge to explain your answer.

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ry The return of Captain AmericaCaptain America was a comic book superhero. He was created in 1941 to fight the Nazis. At the end ofthe war Marvel comics ‘killed him off’. He crashed while flying an experimental plane. However, inthe era of the Red Scare, Marvel comics sensed the public mood and they bought back CaptainAmerica in 1953 – as ‘Captain America, Commie Smasher’. The story now ran that he did notactually die but had been frozen in ice.

What do you think this teaches us about the Red Scare? It may seem a bit silly, but comics andcartoons are a good source of evidence about the public mood at a particular time because lots ofpeople bought these comics; they were as popular in this period as computer games are today.

SOURCE 6

Captain America in action, 1944.

Did anyone oppose McCarthy?They certainly did. Many senators spoke up against him, including the Republican Senator RalphFlanders from Vermont. Quality newspapers such as the Washington Post, New York Times andMilwaukee Journal produced sensible and balanced reporting that damaged McCarthy’s credibility.As Source 8 shows, some (although certainly not all) very big names from Hollywood protested at thetreatment of actors, writers and producers.

Another significant opponent of McCarthy’s was also one of his victims – the university professorOwen Lattimore. He was an expert on China and East Asia and had been the top adviser to PresidentTruman when China fell to the Communists in 1949. This made him a target for McCarthy. Lattimorewas questioned by the HUAC for 12 days and gave as good as he got. McCarthy’s ally Senator PatMcCarran had Lattimore investigated for perjury (which means lying to the court while under oath).The FBI carried out five investigations on Lattimore until a federal judge finally threw out all thecharges against him in June 1955.

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Activity

Imagine you work for Marvel Comics in thelate 1940s or early 1950s. You are puttingthe idea to your boss that it would be agood idea to bring back Captain America.Prepare a short report or presentationexplaining:• why you think this would be popular• what the new Captain America will do

(including the enemies he will fight). You can research Captain America on theinternet – but don’t go into too much detailand forget you are doing History!

SOURCE 7The technique apparently used by SenatorMcCarthy against me is apparently typical.He first announced at a press conferencethat he had discovered the top Russian agentin the United States. At first he withheld myname, but later, after the drama of hisannouncement was intensified by delay, hethen whispered my name to a group ofnewspaper reporters with full knowledgethat my name would be bandied about byrumour and gossip and eventuallypublished. I say to you that this wasunworthy of a Senator or an American.

Professor Owen Lattimore at the HUAChearings in 1952.

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? In 1952 one of America’s leading playwrights, Arthur Miller, wrote his most famous play, TheCrucible, which was nominally about the witch-hunts in the early days of the United States but allhis audiences knew that he was using his play as a way of condemning the methods used byMcCarthy in the anti-Communist witch hunts.

Probably the most influential opponent of McCarthy was the TV journalist Ed Murrow. On 20October 1953 Murrow broadcast a programme which criticised the methods used by the US Air Forceto investigate one of its servicemen. On 9 March 1954 Murrow broadcast an entire episode of his showSee It Now attacking McCarthy. It used footage of McCarthy and his own actions to condemn him.Murrow’s broadcast is generally seen as one of the most influential and damaging attacks onMcCarthy and an important factor in his decline.

SOURCE 8We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation isnot proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will notwalk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if wedig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended fromfearful men.

An extract from Ed Murrow’s See It Now broadcast attacking McCarthy, March 1954.

The decline of McCarthyismDespite these opponents it was four years before McCarthy finally ran out of steam. The turning pointwas when he began to attack the army. He claimed there were Communist sympathisers in highcommand in the army. His accusations seemed increasingly ridiculous. In televised hearingsMcCarthy was steadily humiliated by the lawyer representing the army, Joseph Welch. At one point,McCarthy reminded Welch that he had an employee in his law firm who had belonged to anorganization that had been accused of Communist sympathies. The court burst into applause forWelch when he replied ‘Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense ofdecency?’

McCarthy lost all credibility and was finished as a political force. A motion of censure was passedby the Congress against him. There was still strong anti-Communist feeling in the USA – that had notdisappeared – but the methods used by McCarthy were discredited and the man himself began to beseen as a liability. Some people said McCarthyism was doing as much damage to America as thesupposed Communist spies could ever do. President Eisenhower who supported and promotedMcCarthy now made the joke that McCarthyism has become McCarthywasm!

McCarthy himself had become an alcoholic. He died of liver disease three years later, in 1957, atthe age of 48.

The legacy of McCarthyismMcCarthyism has had a huge impact on America and American history. In 1994 the US governmentpublished National Standards for history for high school students. The document mentionedMcCarthy twenty times, and stressed the need to study McCarthyism as an example of howfundamental American values were violated. Few American politicians or historians have beenprepared to defend McCarthy in any way. Most agreed with the views of Bill Myers (see Source 4).However, in 2004 American historian Ted Morgan published a book called Reds. He argued thatAmerica did face a real threat from Soviet spies in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But he also arguedthat McCarthy’s actions made it more difficult to catch these spies because he was so incompetent.Even this view was controversial, because still today writing anything which appears to supportMcCarthy opens up deep wounds.

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Activity

Imagine the publishers of this book havereceived a letter complaining about Source 4on page 4 (Bill Myers) because it is very onesided. The letter writer wants the sourceremoved. Discuss what you would do if youwere the publisher and then write an emailor letter explaining your decision. You willbe able to do this best after you have readpages 5–7.

Why did McCarthyism decline?

Go back to the ‘stool diagram’ that youdrew from the Focus Task on page 5.

Discuss:1 Which of the legs do you think were

the first to give way? 2 Why did these legs give way?3 Which legs did not give way?4 Why did those legs stay strong?Now use the discussion to write yourown paragraph(s) explaining the reasonsfor the decline of McCarthyism.

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Part 2 How successful was the strugglefor black civil rights in the 1950s?

BackgroundIn the 1920s and 1930s vicious racial prejudice had been common in American life. The SecondWorld War challenged this to some extent, although in other respects it made matters worse.

SOURCE 2

An American propaganda poster from 1943.

If you take Source 2 at face value then it looks like the USA began to appreciate its black citizens.Around 1 million black Americans served in the armed forces in the Second World War. Black unitsdistinguished themselves in Europe at the Battle of the Bulge (1944) and in the Pacific in the Battleof Iwo Jima (1945). There was also large-scale migration of black Americans (over 400,000) to theUSA’s industrial centres to help with the war effort. On average, these Americans doubled their wagesto about $1,000 per year.

Against these positive developments was a lot of evidence that longstanding prejudices had notbeen rooted out. It was not until 1944 that the US marines allowed black soldiers into combat. Up tothat point, they had only been used for transporting supplies, or as cooks and labourers (they wereoften referred to as mules). Many black women served in the armed forces as nurses, but they wereonly allowed to tend black soldiers. By the end of the war, only 58 black sailors had risen to officerrank in the US Navy. Black sailors were assigned to the dangerous job of loading ammunition on toships bound for the war zones.

SOURCE 1

A sign erected to prevent black people moving into a governmenthousing project, Detroit, 1942.

1 Explain the message of Source 2. 2 Search the internet for other US posters from

the Second World War. Use the search terms‘USA posters World War 2’. What proportionare like Source 2?

3 Do you think Source 1 was a more accuratereflection of the reality of life in the USA thanSource 2? Explain your answer.

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On the home front it was a similar story. Black workers generally earned half what white workersearned. In June 1941, President Roosevelt ordered employers on defence work to end discrimination.But it took more than executive orders to change attitudes. In 1942, at the Packard electronicscompany, 3,000 white workers walked out when three black workers had their jobs upgraded as aresult of the order (and the management walked out too). There were race riots in 47 cities duringthe war, the worst of which was in Detroit during June–July 1943.

The advances made in the Second World War encouraged black Americans to try to win greaterequality. However, in the 1950s racism was still an everyday experience for black people, particularlyin the southern states of the USA:

• Many Southern and border states enforced the so-called ‘Jim Crow’ laws (see Source 3), each onein slightly different ways and to different extents. These laws segregated everyday facilities such asparks, buses and schools. NB: the USA has a ‘federal’ structure which means that some laws aremade by central government and apply to the whole country, while others are made by the statesthemselves and only apply in that state.

• Black Americans had officially been given the right to vote early in the century, but in some statesvarious practices were used to prevent them from voting – most commonly, the threat of violence.In Mississippi, for example, black people who tried to register to vote faced intimidation or evenlynching. Only five per cent of the black population in Mississippi was registered to vote.

• Law officers (police) not only failed to stop attacks on black people, they frequently took part inthem. White juries almost always acquitted whites accused of killing blacks.

• Black Americans faced official and legal discrimination in areas such as employment andeducation. In the South, white teachers earned 30 per cent more than black teachers.

• The best universities were closed to blacks. In 1958, a black teacher called Clemson King wascommitted to a mental asylum for applying to the University of Mississippi.

What was the state of black civilrights in America in 1950?

Design a leaflet to be sent to thegovernment setting out the grievancesof the black people in the southernstates of the USA. You could refer to thecontribution of black Americans to theUS war effort in the Second World War.

Focus Task

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The main ‘Jim Crow’ states (coloured orange) in the 1950s, and the sites of some civil rights protests,1950–70.

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The civil rights movementCivil rights are the rights you have as a citizen of a country. In a fair country, everycitizen should have equal civil rights. The US Constitution was supposed toguarantee that all people were treated equally – they should all be allowed to votein elections, to be educated, to travel freely, to earn a living. Yet the USA was clearlyfailing many of its black citizens.

There were many campaigners working to win equal civil rights for blackAmericans, but there was also a powerful minority resisting them. Some whitesbelieved that giving civil rights to black people was a grave danger to their way oflife. They would fight it every inch of the way.

In the 1950s the civil rights movement became a powerful and effectivepolitical force. Over the next four pages you are going to investigate how thishappened and what the movement achieved in the 1950s.

The struggle for equal education: a legalchallengeFor decades, it had been legal in the USA for states to have separate schools forblack and white children. The states argue that separate education did not meanunequal if the schools for white children and the schools for black children wereequally well equipped. However, the truth was that schools for black children werealmost always less well equipped.

Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, 1954In September 1952 the National Association for the Advancement of ColouredPeople (NAACP) brought a court case against the Board of Education in Topeka,Kansas. The case was about a girl called Linda Brown who had to travel severalkilometres and cross a dangerous rail track to get to school, rather than attend awhites-only school nearby. This was not the only example of inequality in educationbut the civil rights campaigners chose it as a ‘test case’ to see whether the SupremeCourt would allow states to continue to segregate schools. They knew that if theywon this case, then the whole principle of ‘separate but equal’ would cometumbling down.

In May 1954 Chief Justice Earl Warren finally announced in favour of Brownand the NAACP. Warren stated that segregated education could not be consideredequal. It created a feeling of inferiority for black students and that meant that allsegregated school systems were unequal ones. He ordered the southern states to setup integrated schools ‘with all deliberate speed’.

Little Rock, ArkansasIntegration was met with bitter resistance in some states. Arkansas was oneexample. Three years later it had done very little to integrate its schools. In 1957 theSupreme Court ordered the Governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, to let nine blackstudents attend a white school in Little Rock (see map Source 3). Faubus orderedhis state troops to prevent the black students from attending school. He claimed thatthis was because he could not guarantee their safety. Faubus only backed downwhen President Eisenhower sent federal troops to protect the students and make surethat they could join the school. The troops stayed for six weeks.

James Meredith and ‘Ole Miss’What about higher education? Universities in the southern states of the USA were also segregated,including the famous ‘Ole Miss’ – Mississippi State University. In 1962 James Meredith, a blackstudent, won his appeal to overturn the decision to exclude him from the university. Mississippi stateand university officials objected, so President Kennedy’s brother, Robert, the US Attorney-General, sentin federal marshals. Violence erupted, two marshals were killed and 160 people were wounded, butMeredith entered ‘Ole Miss’. The Bob Dylan song ‘Oxford Town’ celebrates this breakthrough.

SOURCE 4

One of the black students at Little Rock, 15-year-oldElizabeth Eckford, trying to ignore the abuse of the

1,000-strong crowd. Forty years later the woman yelling atEckford publicly apologised for her actions.

Activity

On pages 10–27 you are going to study the main events in thecivil rights campaign. You will see that campaigners used arange of methods and tackled a wide range of issues. Makeyour own copy of the chart below and complete it as youwork through the chapter. If you come across other methodsadd extra rows to your chart.

Method of campaigningExample andissue it wasused to tackle

Score outof 5 and/orcomment

1 Court case/ legal challenge

2 Non-violent direct action

3 Empowering ordinarypeople

4 Marches anddemonstrations

5 Violent protest

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The Montgomery bus boycott: non-violent directactionWhat we now call the civil rights movement is often said to have started with the actions of RosaParks from Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1955.

Montgomery had a local law that black people were only allowed to sit in the middle and backseats of a bus and they had to give up those seats if white people wanted them. Rosa Parks was a civilrights activist and she decided to make a stand against Montgomery’s racially segregated bus service.She refused to give up her seat to a white man. She was promptly arrested and convicted of breakingthe bus laws. The civil rights movement helped the black people of Montgomery to form theMontgomery Improvement Association (MIA). The MIA decided that the best way to protest and togenerate publicity was to boycott the buses. On the first day of the boycott, the buses were empty and10,000–15,000 people turned out to hear a speech from the newly elected MIA president, MartinLuther King (see Profile, page 20).

The boycott was a great success. The bus company lost 65 per cent of its income. The blackcommunity organised a car pool which carried about two-thirds of the passengers that the buseswould have carried (the rest walked). It was the first major example of the power of non-violent directaction – that is, challenging discrimination by refusing to co-operate with it. It showed how powerfulpeople working together could be.

At the same time, civil rights lawyers fought Rosa Parks’ case in court. In December 1956, theSupreme Court declared Montgomery’s bus laws to be illegal. This meant that all other such busservices were illegal and by implication that all segregation of public services was illegal. Throughoutthe boycott, the MIA’s leaders were subjected to massive intimidation. King was arrested twice. Localjudges passed an injunction declaring the car pool to be illegal. Churches and homes were set on fireand racially integrated buses were shot at by snipers (seven bombers and snipers were charged, but allwere acquitted).

SOURCE 7

21 December 1956. Rosa Parks sits at the front of the bus in what used to be whites onlyseats after the Supreme Court declared bus segregation to be illegal.

Why were the civil rights educationcampaign and the Montgomery busboycott important?

Both the campaigners and the Americangovernment clearly thought thesecampaigns to desegregate schools andbuses were important.

Work in pairs and take one case studyeach, either schools or buses. 1 List all the evidence on these two

pages that shows that thecampaigners thought it wasimportant.

2 Write a paragraph to explain whythey thought it was so important.

3 Swap your information with apartner to see if they came up withdifferent or similar conclusions.

4 Choose one example and use theinformation you have gathered towrite a letter to your representative inCongress (the American Parliament)about the need for equality ineducation/public transport. Youshould persuade him/her why thiscampaign is such an importantstepping stone to equality. You couldspell it out like this: ‘If the . . .campaign succeeds then . . .’ How doyou think a civil rights campaignerfrom the 1950s would complete thissentence?

Focus Task

SOURCE 5The great glory of American democracy isthe right to protest for right. There will be nocrosses burned at any bus stops inMontgomery. There will be no white personspulled out of their homes and taken out onsome distant road and murdered. Therewill be nobody among us who will stand upand defy the constitution of the Nation.

From Martin Luther King’s speech atMontgomery, Alabama, in 1955.

SOURCE 6A law may not make a man love me, but itcan stop him from lynching me. It can alsostop him from refusing to serve me in arestaurant.

King writing to President Eisenhower in1957 after the President expressed his

view that laws cannot make people behavein a moral way.

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Direct action gathers paceAfter the success in Montgomery, the civil rights campaign took off in the late 1950s and early 1960s.A number of different groups began to organise similar direct action:

• King formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). It ran conferences and trainedcivil rights activists in techniques of non-violent protest and how to handle the police, the law andthe media.

• Black and white American students were deeply moved by the civil rights movement and played amajor role in it. They set up the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

• Another civil rights activist, James Farmer, formed the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

Together these groups staged many different protests.

Sit-insIn 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina, SNCC students began a campaign to end segregation inrestaurants in the town. Their local branch of Woolworths had a lunch counter which hadchairs/stools only for whites, while blacks had to stand and eat. Four black students sat on the whiteonly seats. They refused to leave the lunch counter when they were refused service. The next day 23more students did the same; the next day there were 66 students. Within a week 400 black and whitestudents were organizing sit-ins at lunch counters in the town. With support from SNCC this non-violent tactic spread to other cities. By the end of 1960 lunch counters had been desegregated in 126cities.

Similar protests were taking place in other towns and not just in restaurants. In February 1960, inNashville, Tennessee, 500 students organized sit-ins in restaurants, libraries and churches. Theircollege expelled them, but then backed down when 400 teachers threatened to resign if the studentswere expelled. The students were attacked and abused but eventually Mayor Ben West was convincedby their actions. By May 1960 the town had been desegregated.

SOURCE 8

Black and white SNCC protesters in a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter inJackson, Mississippi, June 1963, being abused by young white racists.

1 Study sources 8 and 9. Make a list of thesimilarities and differences between the twoscenes.

2 Which of these two sources would youchoose as the image for the front cover of abook on the Civil Rights movement? Explainyour answer.

3 Does it surprise you that Source 8 waspublished much more widely than Source 9?Explain your answer.

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‘Freedom rides’In May 1961 CORE activists began a form of protest called ‘freedom rides’. Many states were notobeying the order to desegregate bus services after the Montgomery ruling. The freedom ridersdeliberately rode on buses in the city of Birmingham, Alabama, to highlight this. They faced some ofthe worst violence of the civil rights campaigns. The SNCC then took up the freedom rides, with thesame violent reaction as a result. Two hundred freedom riders were arrested and spent 40 days in jail.The Governor of Alabama, John Patterson, did little to protect the riders until he was put underpressure from the new US President, John F Kennedy, to protect them. Black Americans and theirwhite supporters had shown that they were no longer prepared to be intimidated.

How successful was the struggle for civil rights in the1950s?

You are a member of the SNCC (the Student Non-violentCoordinating Committee) in June 1961. Someone asks you whyyou are part of the movement, suggesting that all that you andthe other civil rights groups have achieved is a bus ride, gettingbeaten up and being arrested. Give an answer (either written orverbally) to this criticism. You could mention:◆ the practical advances made since the late 1950s (for

example, desegregation)◆ the moral importance of these advances◆ why you believe non-violence is the right tactic◆ where you think your protests might go from here.

Focus TaskJune 1961The events of a single day – 11 June 1961 – summed up both the hopeand the despair of civil rights activists in the USA. On the one hand, it wasa night of great excitement because the new President, John F Kennedy,committed himself to a wide-ranging civil rights programme of laws andregulations. On the other hand, at the same time that Kennedy wasspeaking, the leading black activist in the state of Mississippi, MedgerEvers, was murdered by a known racist. In the past such murders of blackpeople by white people were not even investigated by the police (who wereall white). In this case, the police did find the killer and brought him tocourt but, true to form, the court acquitted him.

SOURCE 9

Freedom riders sitting next to their burning bus near Anniston, Alabama. A mob of white people met the bus at the bus terminal, stonedit and slashed the tyres, then followed the bus out of town and set fire to it. They attacked the passengers as they fled the bus.

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Part 3 Who improved civil rights the mostin the 1960s and 1970s?By 1961 the civil rights movement had achieved some very notable successes which you have studiedin the previous section. For example:

• They had won legal rulings such as Brown v Board of Education of Topeka which outlawedsegregation in key areas of education and public transport.

• Sit-ins and freedom rides by civil rights activists had ensured that these laws could not be ignoredby state governments.

• They had developed a style of protest – non-violent direct action – that earned them much supportand respect and gave them moral authority when their opponents were all too ready to use violenceagainst them.

• Notable individuals had emerged as leaders of the civil rights movement, in particular MartinLuther King and Malcom X who you will study in detail on pages 20–3.

• The civil rights movement was without doubt fast becoming become a major national issue – notjust an issue of civil rights for black people in the southern states but a much wider struggleaffecting and of interest to ethnic minorities and the white majority throughout the USA. Themovement had built up great momentum.

• The new, young, popular and visionary President, John F Kennedy had promised his support for themovement.

However, even the most enthusiastic campaigner would have told you in 1961 that there was still amountain to climb. That vicious racism was still endemic in many parts of the USA; that black peoplefaced much greater poverty and deprivation than white people; and that many black people still felthelpless to change their lives. They would say that the campaign needed to move up a gear and usethe momentum it had established to finally achieve equality for black people. Over the next 4 pagesyou are going to see how the campaign developed and changed in the following 15 years andconsider who or what did the most to improve black civil rights through the 1960s and 1970s.

Birmingham, Alabama: civil rights marchIn April 1963 Martin Luther King organised a civil rights march in Birmingham, Alabama. Six yearsafter the Montgomery decision, this city had still not been desegregated. Its police force wasnotoriously racist. It had links to the Ku Klux Klan.

The aim of the march was to turn media attention on Birmingham to expose its policies tonational attention. King knew that, with civil rights now a national issue, the American andinternational media would cover the march in detail. Police chief Bull Connor obliged. In the fullglare of media publicity, police and fire officers turned dogs and fire hoses on the peaceful protesters.The police arrested over 1,000 protesters (including King himself, see Source 1) and put many in jail.Critics accused King of provoking the violence by staging this march. Source 1 is his reply.

SOURCE 1Instead of submitting to surreptitious cruelty in thousands of dark jail cells and oncountless shadowed streets, we are forcing our oppressor to commit his brutality openly –in the light of day – with the rest of the world looking on. To condemn peaceful protesters onthe grounds that they provoke violence is like condemning a robbed man because hispossession of money caused the robbery.

Martin Luther King commenting on his tactics in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Criticshad accused him of deliberately stirring up violence.

1 Remember to keep adding new examples tothe ‘methods’ table you started in theActivity on page 10.

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SOURCE 3

Fire hoses being used against protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. The waterpressure was so powerful that it could knock bricks out of walls.

In May 1963 President Kennedy intervened. He put pressure on Governor George Wallace to force theBirmingham police to release all the protesters and to give more jobs to black Americans and allowthem to be promoted. As a result Birmingham officially outlawed segregation, but in practice itremained a bitterly divided place. In September 1963 a Ku Klux Klan bomb killed four black childrenin a Birmingham church.

The civil rights bill and voting rightsThe civil rights campaign of the 1960s was dominated by two issues: the proposed civil rights bill andvoting rights.

Civil rights leaders wanted President Kennedy to introduce a civil rights bill that would enshrineblack civil rights in law and prevent the racism seen, for example, in Birmingham, Alabama. Theythought this would ensure that, while racist attitudes might persist, the law would safeguard therights of black people. President Kennedy and his brother Robert (who was the Attorney General) saidthey first wanted to concentrate on the issue of voting rights. They thought that if enough blackpeople registered to vote then these voters would have great power over the decisions that politiciansmade locally or at state level, which was where the big changes needed to come. Put simply, therewere more black people than white people in Birmingham. If the black people could all vote thenthey would vote out the white racists.

The civil rights movements did not give up on their campaign for a civil rights bill but they werehappy to take protest in this direction. They organised courses for black Americans in votingprocedures and how to register to vote. Source 4 shows what happened.

SOURCE 5I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of itscreed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. I have adream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons offormer slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heatof injustice . . . and oppression will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. Ihave a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will notbe judged by the colour of their skin but the content of their character.

From Martin Luther King’s most famous speech, August 1963.

SOURCE 2But when you have seen vicious mobs lynchyour mothers and fathers at will and drownyour brothers and sisters at whim; when youhave seen hate-filled policemen curse, kickand even kill your black brothers andsisters; when you see the vast majority ofyour twenty million Negro brotherssmothering in an airtight cage of poverty inthe midst of an affluent society; when youare harried by day and haunted by nightby the fact that you are a Negro … whenyou are forever fighting a degeneratingsense of nobodiness; then you willunderstand why we find it difficult to wait.

Extract from Martin Luther King’s letterfrom Birmingham jail, Alabama, in 1963.

SOURCE 4

Black Americans registered to vote in thesouthern states of the USA, 1940–66.

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The march on Washington, 1963: ‘I have a dream’Meanwhile, they kept up the pressure for a civil rights bill. In August 1963, Martin Luther King stagedhis most high-profile event. Over 200,000 black people and 50,000 white people marched together tothe federal capital Washington. Their stated aim was to pressure President Kennedy to introduce acivil rights bill. There was no trouble at the march, not even any litter. At the rally, King gave hisfamous ‘I have a dream’ speech (Source 5). The event had a tremendous impact on American public opinion.

SOURCE 6A B

The march on Washington, 1963. A Thousands gather at the Lincoln Memorial. B A banner displayed on

the march.

The Civil Rights Act: making discriminationillegal By 1963 civil rights was without doubt a key national issue. Almost everyone in theUSA had a view on it. In November 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated.President Johnson (1963–68) was just as committed to civil rights as Kennedy.Johnson used his skills as a politician to push through important civil rights laws.On 2 July 1964 he signed the Civil Rights Act. The Act made it illegal for localgovernment to discriminate in areas such as housing and employment.

The ‘freedom summer’, 1964The summer of 1964 has been called the ‘freedom summer’. With the momentumgained from the Civil Rights Act, King and the SCLC continued to encourage blackAmericans to register to vote. They were helped by young white people from thenorthern states who came south in great numbers to help. In the 20 months thatfollowed the Civil Rights Act, 430,000 black Americans registered to vote.

Selma King deliberately targeted areas where discrimination was worst. In early 1965 he organised a ‘votingrights’ march through Selma, Alabama. The population of Selma was 29,000 – 15,000 of whom wereblack adults old enough to vote yet only 335 (just 2.4 percent) were registered to do so. The town wasalso notorious for its brutally racist sheriff, Jim Clark. The authorities banned the planned march.However, on 7 March, about 600 people went ahead with the march anyway (without King). Theywere brutally attacked. The media called it ‘Bloody Sunday’ and the TV pictures of the violencehorrified America. King tried to keep the pressure on and rearranged the march. However, hecompromised on 11 March by leading a token march. It turned back after a short distance.

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The Voting Rights Bill, 1965–68King’s compromise avoided more violence although it annoyed the more radical activists. However,his restraint probably helped President Johnson to force through a Voting Rights Bill in 1965. Itbecame law three years later in 1968.

The Act allowed government agents to inspect voting procedures to make sure that they weretaking place properly. It also ended the literacy tests that voters had previously had to complete beforethey voted. These discriminated against poor blacks in particular. After 1965 five major cities,including Detroit, Atlanta and Cleveland, all had black mayors. In Selma, blacks began to register tovote and in the next election Jim Clark lost his job.

The assassination of Martin Luther King, 1968In 1968 Martin Luther King was assassinated, probably by a hired killer, although it has never beenproved which of King’s enemies employed the assassin. King’s death marked the end of an era for thecivil rights movement. During his life, King had helped to transform the movement from a southernsideshow to a national movement. Major battles had been fought and won. Segregation was nowillegal; the Civil Rights Act had enshrined black civil rights in law; black people in the south now heldreal political power.

But, at the same time, there was a feeling of insecurity and frustration among those who hadwatched these developments through the 1960s. The law might have changed, but had attitudeschanged with it? And what did the future hold?

1 Why was this cartoon (Source 7) published in1965? Explain your answer with reference tothe detail of the source and your backgroundknowledge.

Activity

In January 1970 a young Social Studies teacher was teaching a history lesson at TougalooCollege, a predominantly African American school in Mississippi. The topic was the so-called‘Reconstruction’ period immediately after the American Civil War (1861–65) when slaves werefreed, and the southern states were being rebuilt after the damage of the Civil War. ReadSource 8 which continues the story.1 Why was the teacher stunned in Source 8?2 Source 8 describes the beliefs of some black teenagers in 1970. What does this reveal about

their attitudes towards themselves and their history?3 How had the teenagers in Source 8 ended up with this view of their own people? 4 What does this tell you about the achievements of the civil rights movement through the

1960s?

SOURCE 8I needed to find out what the students already knew. ‘What was Reconstruction?’ Iasked. ‘What images come to your mind about that era?’ The class consensus:Reconstruction was the time when African Americans took over the governing of theSouthern states, including Mississippi. But they were too soon out of slavery, so theymessed up and reigned corruptly, and whites had to take back control of the stategovernments.

I sat stunned. So many major misconceptions glared from that statement that it washard to know where to begin a rebuttal. African Americans never took over the Southernstates. All governors were white and almost all legislatures had white majoritiesthroughout Reconstruction. African Americans did not ‘mess up’; indeed, Mississippienjoyed less corrupt government during Reconstruction than in the decadesimmediately afterward.

. . . For young African Americans to believe such a hurtful myth about their pastseemed tragic. It invited them to doubt their own capability, since their race had ‘messedup’ in its one appearance on American history’s centre stage. It also invited them toconclude that it is only right that whites be always in control.

Extract from Lies My Teacher Told Me by Professor James Loewen, an attack on theway history was taught in American schools. He is describing an incident in 1970.

SOURCE 7

Cartoon published by Martin Luther King’sSouthern Christian Leadership Conference

in Selma, Alabama, 1965.

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Black nationalism and black powerThrough the 1960s, at the same time the campaign for voting rights was taking place, there wereother developments within the black communities of the USA as well. Black nationalism was one.Most black nationalists rejected the non-violence of the civil rights movement. They felt that force wasjustified in order to achieve equality for black Americans. Others did not want equality so much ascomplete separation.

One movement that attracted many disillusioned black Americans was the Nation of Islam,headed by Elijah Muhammad. The Nation of Islam attracted figures such as boxer Cassius Clay (whochanged his name to Muhammad Ali), who was an outspoken critic of racial discrimination. Anotherfollower of the Nation of Islam was Malcolm Little, better known as Malcolm X (see pages 20–1). Hewas critical of Martin Luther King’s methods, and believed that the civil rights movement held backblack people. He wanted to see black Americans rise up and create their own separate black state inthe USA, by force if necessary (see Source 9). Malcom X was assassinated in 1965.

The SNCC itself became more radical when the black student Stokely Carmichael was electedchairman in 1966. He talked in terms of ‘black power’. He set out a radical view of ‘black power’ andin the process he was critical of Martin Luther King. Typical comments were: ‘This nation [the USA]is racist from top to bottom, and does not function by morality, love and non-violence, but by power.’

Even more radical than Carmichael were the Black Panthers. They had around 2,000 membersand were a political party but also a small private army. They believed black Americans should armthemselves and force the whites to give them equal rights. They clashed many times with policeforces, killing nine police officers between 1967 and 1969.

Race riotsFrom 1965 to 1967 American cities suffered a wave of race riots. These were not the cities of thesouthern states where black people faced the most obvious discrimination. These were cities in thenorth and west which had large black populations but which were officially free of racism. The causeof riots in most cases was poor relations between the police and black people. Most of the USA’s citieswere divided along race lines. Most of the police forces were white. Many black working-class peoplewho lived in the inner cities felt that they did not get the same protection from crime as whites. Theydistrusted the police. Many black rioters were influenced by the radical black nationalists. Otherssimply joined the riots as an expression of their frustration about the way they were treated in theUSA.

Major riots took place in most US cities, but the most serious were in the Watts area of Los Angelesin August 1965 and in Detroit in July 1967. President Johnson asked the Governor of Illinois toinvestigate the riots and his conclusion was that racism was the cause. He talked of two USAs, oneblack and one white.

SOURCE 10

A highway patrolman stands guard over protesters after the Watts riots, Los Angeles,1965. There were an estimated 30,000 rioters in this incident and 34 deaths.

1 Write a sentence to describe each of thefollowing:• Malcolm X• black power• Black Panthers.

SOURCE 9A The white man has taught the black peoplein this country to hate themselves asinferior, to hate each other, to be dividedagainst each other. The brainwashed blackman can never learn to stand on his owntwo feet until he is on his own. We mustlearn to become our own producers,manufacturers and traders; we must haveindustry of our own, to employ our own.The white man resists this because he wantsto keep the black man under his thumband jurisdiction in white society. He wantsto keep the black man always dependentand begging – for jobs, food, clothes,shelter, education. The white man doesn’twant to lose somebody to be supreme over.

B I am for violence if non-violence meanswe continue postponing a solution to theAmerican black man’s problems. If wemust use violence to get the black man hishuman rights in this country then I am forviolence.

Comments of Malcolm X in the 1960s.

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What was the impact of Black Power?There is no doubt that Black Power groups brought to national attention the disillusionment of manyAfrican Americans. But did this have a positive or a negative impact in the struggle for civil rights?There is much evidence from the time that the more radical elements of Black Power groups alarmedmoderate opinion and alienated many white Americans who might otherwise have been sympathetictowards the civil rights movement. The Black Power movement was seen as at least partly responsiblefor the riots race riots such as Source 10. The Black Power movement was also criticised by some civilrights leaders such as Roy Wilkins because it gave law enforcement authorities the opportunity andthe excuse to crack down on all African American activists. The FBI established a special counterintelligence programme called COINTELPRO which monitored thousands of activists and put manyBlack Power members into prison.

Not surprisingly the debate continues. As historians rethink and reinterpret the evidence they pointout:

• that the Black Power movement has been misrepresented and was much more complex than it wasportrayed at the time

• that media coverage of Black Power at the time was very misinformed and based more onignorance and fear than an attempt to understand the movement

• whereas Black Power and the civil rights movements are often portrayed as two separate, dividedmovements by historians, actually the two strands shared a lot of common ground. StokelyCarmichael and Martin Luther King were quite friendly and agreed on the need to fight poverty(Carmichael offered support for the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign). Both were opposed to theVietnam War. In 1967 King spoke at the SCLC Convention and told the audience to be proud ofblack pride and black culture.

SOURCE 12Race riots in fact coincided with Black Power; they did not cause it. However, they didprovide Black militants with a bargaining chip that many unfortunately misused, playinginto the popular mindset that all Black militants supported violence.

An extract from an article by Professor Yohuru Williams of Fairfield University in the USA,published 2006.

SOURCE 13Both civil rights and black power leaders were able to gain national prominence mostreadily by emphasizing intangible goals – civil/human rights and increased group pride –rather than tangible, especially economic, goals . . . Black power proponents and blacknationalist leaders challenged civil rights leaders to transform the living conditions of theblack masses, but all black leaders found it easier to transform the status and esteem ofAfrican Americans than to change racial realities. As a result, the black consciousnessmovements of the 1960s and 1970s achieved psychological and cultural transformationwithout having much impact on the living conditions of poor and working-class blacks. Theblack masses acquired an ideological vocabulary to express their anger and frustrationbut still lacked the political awareness necessary for effective action.

Clayborne Carson, Professor of History at Stanford University 1994.

SOURCE 11Historians tend to regard black power’sspeeches and boisterous nationalism as theopposite of the civil rights movement’sdreams of community. Its reputation ashaving helped unleash urban violence –and a white backlash – remains a fixedpart of civil rights scholarship and publicmemory . . . Civil rights struggles arerightfully acknowledged as having earnedblack Americans a historic level of dignity.‘Black Power’ accomplished a no lessremarkable task, fuelling the casuallyassertive identity and cultural pride that ispart of African-American life today. In thisway, in spite of the hostilities between the twomovements, there remains between them ashared history of struggle that brieflytranscended political differences whileultimately transforming the landscape ofrace relations.

An extract from Black Power’s Quiet Sideby Assistant Professor Peniel E Joseph of

the State University of New York, 2006.

Did the Black Power groups harmthe struggle for civil rights?

1 Study the information and sourcesabout the Black Power groups onthese two pages and then discussthese questions in small groups:◆ What positive contributions of

Black Power groups can youidentify?

◆ What examples of harm arementioned?

◆ What areas of agreement ordisagreement can you findbetween the historians?

2 If you were able to ask each historianin Sources 11–13 the question ‘Didthe Black Power groups harm thestruggle for civil rights?’ which ofthese opinions do you think he/shewould take? ◆ Black Power groups made a mainly

positive contribution.◆ Black Power groups did more

harm than good.◆ The issue is too complex for a

simplistic question like this.

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Martin Luther King and Malcom XYou have already come across these two figures on pages 11–19 and now we are going to look atthem in a little more detail. Both fought to represent the African American community, but thedifferences in character between them and the differences in their beliefs and methods have led manyhistorians to compare every detail of the lives and thoughts of these two.

Until recently most accounts focused on the differences between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X,particularly over their methods (violence or non-violence), their attitudes to segregation (integrationor separation) and their religious beliefs (Christianity or Islam). From the Profiles you can see someof the other differences which are often emphasised, such as their early lives. However, the two menactually shared much common ground.

SOURCE 15Had they lived, Malcolm and Martin might have advised their followers that the differencesbetween the two were not as significant as was their shared sense of dedication to thestruggle for racial advancement. Malcolm came to realize that non-violent tactics could beused militantly and were essential aspects of any mass struggle. Indeed, he was himself apeaceful man who never used violence to achieve his goals. Martin, for his part, remainedphilosophically committed to the ideals of non-violence, but he increasingly recognized thatmass militancy driven by positive racial consciousness was essential for African Americanprogress. ‘I am not sad that black Americans are rebelling,’ he remarked in his lastpublished essay. ‘Without this magnificent ferment among Negroes, the old evasions andprocrastinations would have continued indefinitely.’

An extract from an article written in 2005 written by Professor Clayborne Carson of theUniversity of Stanford.

ProfileDr Martin Luther King

➤ Born January 1929 as Michael but later changed his name toMartin.

➤ Father was a Baptist Minister who spoke out against inequality. ➤ Grew up in relative comfort during the Depression. Graduated

with a degree from the all-black Morehouse College in Atlanta1948.

➤ Studied in Pennsylvania and then gained his Doctorate inTheology from Boston University in 1955.

➤ Married Coretta Scott in 1953 and they had two sons and twodaughters.

➤ He was a Baptist minister like his father and grandfather, as well asa leader of the civil rights movement.

➤ He was a mesmerising speaker whose speech in Source 5 hasbecome one of the most famous speeches of the twentiethcentury.

➤ He believed passionately in non-violent protest but he was notafraid to face confrontation and was subject to considerableviolence himself. He favoured actions such as the bus boycott andthe sit-in.

➤ In December 1964 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.➤ Not all civil rights activists agreed with his methods.➤ He was assassinated in 1968 by Earl Ray. There have been many

theories that Ray was simply a hired killer, and that he wasemployed to murder King by one of King’s opponents.

ProfileMalcolm X

➤ Born May 1925 as Malcolm Little.➤ Father was a Baptist Minister who spoke out against inequality. ➤ Family threatened by Ku Klux Klan and forced to move. Father

killed in 1931, strongly suspected of being a racist murder butnever proved.

➤ Death of father plunged family into poverty, especially in theDepression. Mother taken into mental hospital.

➤ Became involved in drugs and crime and imprisoned for burglaryin 1946. Joined the Black Muslim faith while in prison.

➤ After release in 1952 he joined Elijah Muhammad’s Nation ofIslam in Chicago. Changed his name to X, symbolising the Africanname which had been taken from his ancestors in the past byslavery.

➤ Quickly became a leading figure in the movement. Went onspeaking tours advocating black power and founding newmosques. Became minister of the New York mosque.

➤ Malcolm X was quite open in criticising whites and the Americansystem as a whole (see Source 9 on page 18). He also disagreedwith Elijah Muhammad’s policy of non-involvement in politics andcriticised Martin Luther King for holding back African Americanradicalism with non-violent methods. Elijah Muhammadsuspended Malcolm X in 1963 and Malcolm then left to establishthe Organisation of Afro-American Unity in March 1964.

➤ By this time Malcolm was already beginning to adapt his views onblack separatism and began to urge African Americans to workwith sympathetic whites to achieve progress.

➤ Malcolm X was shot dead at a party meeting in Harlem on 21February 1965. Three Black Muslims were later convicted of themurder.

SOURCE 14A united front involving all Negro factions,elements, and their leaders is absolutelynecessary. A racial explosion is moredestructive than a nuclear explosion. Ifcapitalistic President Kennedy andcommunistic Chairman Khrushchev canfind something in common on which toform a united front despite theirtremendous ideological differences, it is adisgrace for Negro leaders not to be able tosubmerge our ‘minor’ differences in orderto seek a common solution to a commonproblem posed by a Common Enemy.

An extract from a letter written by Malcolm X to Martin Luther King in

July 1963.

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SOURCE 17

The only meeting between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, March 1964.

SOURCE 16

A selection of comments by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

Martin Luther King, Jr Malcolm X

‘I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violenceof the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly tothe greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my owngovernment.’

King, 1967

‘I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the worldrevolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution ofvalues.’

King, 1967

‘There is a magnificent new militancy within the Negro communityall across this nation. And I welcome this as a marvellousdevelopment. The Negro of America is saying he’s determined to befree and he is militant enough to stand up.’

King, 1963

‘[D]on’t let anybody frighten you. We are not afraid of what we aredoing . . . We, the disinherited of this land, we who have beenoppressed so long, are tired of going through the long night ofcaptivity.’

King, 1955

‘Black men have slammed the door shut on a past of deadeningpassivity.’

King, 1968

‘You can’t separate peace from freedom because no one can be atpeace unless he has his freedom.’

Malcolm X, 1965

‘We can never get civil rights in America until our human rights arefirst restored. We will never be recognized as citizens until we arefirst recognized as humans.’

Malcolm X, 1964

‘I believe in human beings, and that all human beings should berespected as such, regardless of their colour.’

Malcolm X, 1965

‘It is a disgrace for Negro leaders not to be able to submerge our“minor” differences in order to seek a common solution to acommon problem posed by a common enemy.’

Malcolm X, 1963

‘I have been convinced that some American whites do want to helpcure the rampant racism which is on the path to destroying thiscountry.’

Malcolm X, 1964

How different were the ideas ofMartin Luther King and Malcolm X?

1 The simplistic view: Make a list ofall of the differences you have foundon pages 20–1 between the ideasand methods of Martin Luther Kingand Malcolm X.

2 The more complex view: Readthrough the comments in Source 16.Select at least two from each manwhich you think the other one wouldhave been happy to have said.Explain your choice.

3 A counterfactual view: Now studySource 17. This was the only time thetwo men met (although a meetingplanned by Malcolm X in 1963 wasprevented because King was in prisonfollowing the Birmingham civil rightsmarch; see page 14). The meetingshown in the photograph lasted justa few seconds outside Congresswhen the Civil Rights Act was passed.Your task is to consider somecounterfactual history. What if thetwo men had been able to talk atlength? What do you think theywould have said to each other?Discuss your ideas with a partner andthen write your own imaginaryaccount of this meeting. However,your account should be based on theavailable evidence, not just come outof your imagination. Your teacherwill ask you to explain why you thinkeach man would have made thecomments you think he would havemade.

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The significance of Martin Luther KingAs well as comparing the ideas of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, historians have also tried tocompare their impact on the whole civil rights movement. There is not much doubt that MartinLuther King towers above all other civil rights leaders in terms of his reputation and his impact. Youhave studied his achievements on pages 11–17, including:

• The Montgomery bus boycott• The marches in Birmingham and Washington 1963• The passing of the Civil Rights Act 1964• The voting rights campaign.

We can see his importance today by the fact that around 125 schools are named after him andaround 770 streets also bear his name. Martin Luther King Day is a public holiday in the USA, one ofonly four days dedicated to individuals. Most young Americans learn about Martin Luther King andthe civil rights movement. The subject is generally taught in such a way that King is presented as asaint and some historians have expressed concerns that this approach fails to represent King’s storyfully and accurately. King himself was quite prepared to get involved in the hard realities of politics inhis own way, and was prepared to pressurise politicians to get changes which they may not have beencomfortable making (see Source 18). President Lyndon Johnson referred to King in very unfavourableterms, partly because he was a clever politician who had a hard edge and made tough demands.

SOURCE 18But Martin Luther King Jr. was no mere dreamer. As the civil rights revolution’s mostfamous strategist and self-proclaimed ‘symbol’, King stood at the forefront of a masspolitical movement with many leaders and agendas. Like Lincoln and the EmancipationProclamation, African Americans and their white allies organized, protested, and voted,forcing politicians to make hard choices and progressive commitments . . . In the end Kingconcluded that Lyndon Johnson had failed to mobilize and sustain a constituency of poorand working-class Americans that might defend a Great Society dedicated to real equalopportunity.

Thomas Jackson, associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and author of From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King Jr. and

the Struggle for Economic Justice.

Some members of the civil rights movement felt that King ignored important issues like poverty.Some ‘White Nationalist’ websites in the USA have been calling for the repeal of the King holiday. Thecalls are based on claims that he committed adultery and that he was guilty of plagiarism (copyingthe work of other scholars – see Source 19) when he got his doctorate in 1955. The revelationsshocked many people who had been taught that he was a saint. But should these issues affect ourjudgement as historians?

SOURCE 19Fifteen years ago I was responsible for directing research on Martin Luther King’s early lifefor the Martin Luther King Papers Project . . . What became increasingly clear as we workedthrough the papers from King’s early career is that there were serious problems ofplagiarism in his academic work . . . When word of our findings leaked to the press, itappeared first in England and only later in the American press. It was, for several days,very big news indeed. Our five minutes of infamy waned and scholarly reflection took over.Boston University convened a panel to assess the situation. It concluded that there wereserious problems with King’s dissertation, made note of that, and concluded, nonetheless,that his doctorate should not be revoked.

A comment by American civil rights historian Ralph E Luker on King’s plagiarism.

Activity

Martin Luther King has been greatly praisedbut he was also criticized – even by fellowblack activists. Here is a summary of thecriticisms:• King was pushing the pace of change too

fast and the USA was not ready. Heshould be more patient.

• King was pushing too slowly – waiting forthe Supreme Court to change a lawwould take too long. He should be lesspatient.

• Non-violence made black people victims.They should fight violently against whitediscrimination.

• Black people should not try to fit into thewhite way of life – they should achieveequality but keep separate from whitepeople.

Use text and sources on pages11–17 todraft a speech for King answering thesecriticisms.

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The significance of Malcolm XIn many ways Malcolm X’s contribution has been even more difficult to sum up. He never led a massmovement in the way that King did. On the other hand, he did manage to inspire and energise youngAfrican Americans who were disillusioned with their treatment by American society but also felt thatthe civil rights movement was not achieving anything. His main impact was intellectual. His ideasplayed a key role in the development of the Black Power Movement, the Black Arts Movement and thewidespread development of the concept of being proud to be black. He also brought the issue of civilrights into prominence in the large northern cities of the USA, helping to make civil rights a nationalissue rather than one which was confined to the South. As historian Bruce Perry said, ‘he made clearthe price that white America would have to pay if it did not agree to black America’s legitimatedemands’. Malcolm X also played a powerful role in raising the self belief of many African Americansby getting them to see that they had a long and distinctive heritage which could be traced back totheir African roots. He also had a major impact in bringing many African Americans into contactwith Islam. Although he is not revered in the same way as King, Malcolm X does have his share ofmemorials. There are many schools and streets named after him and there is an educational centreat the University of Columbia named after him. He has featured more prominently than King in filmportrayals, and this probably reflects the fact that he appealed more to the kind of younger, urbanAfrican Americans who make films, rather than the more respectable Martin Luther King.

Can they be compared?You have already seen that it is difficult to compare the ideas of these two men. It is a similar problemwith their significance. This is partly because both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King wereintelligent enough to realise how important they were. Both men realised that the African Americanprotest movement was in fact a grass roots movement which was based in local communities andoften centred on church communities. Look back at page 11 onwards and see how manyorganisations are mentioned which admired King and accepted him as a figurehead but which he didnot actually lead (e.g. CORE). Malcolm X was in a similar position, and towards the end of his life hewas working to try and bring greater unity and co-ordination between the different African Americanorganisations. Perhaps the most important contribution of both men was to provide some degree ofunity to organisations which were difficult to hold together, and the fact that these organisationssplintered after their deaths is an indication of their importance.

SOURCE 21Rather than recognizing the common ground in the ideas of Martin and Malcolm, mostblack leaders of the era after King’s death in 1968 saw them as irreconcilable alternatives.Black people were advised to choose between Martin and Malcolm, rather than affirmingthat each offers a partial answer to the problems of the race. Unlike many of their followers,the two men understood at the end of their lives that their basic messages were compatiblerather than contradictory. Both saw that the building of strong, black-controlledinstitutions in African American communities did not contradict the goal of achievingequal rights within the American political system; indeed, they came to understand thatachieving one goal could contribute to the achievement of the other. Perhaps the mostimportant consequence of their tragic deaths was that they were unavailable to serve aselder statesmen for the African American leader who followed them.

An extract from an article written in 2005 by Professor Clayborne Carson of the Universityof Stanford.

SOURCE 20When I am dead . . . I will be labelled as, atbest, an ‘irresponsible’ black man. I havealways felt about this accusation that theblack ‘leader’ whom white men consider tobe ‘responsible’ is invariably the black‘leader’ who never gets any results. Youonly get action as a black man if you areregarded by the white man as‘irresponsible’. In fact, this much I hadlearned when I was just a little boy. Andsince I have been some kind of a ‘leader’ ofblack people here in the racist society ofAmerica, I have been more reassured eachtime the white man resisted me, or attackedme harder – because each time made memore certain that I was on the right track inthe American black man’s best interests.

An extract from Malcolm X’sautobiography.

Who did more for civil rights: MartinLuther King or Malcolm X?

Work in pairs or small groups. You aregoing to prepare for a debate in whichyou will have to support the claims ofeither Martin Luther King or Malcolm Xas the greater contributor to the civilrights movement.

The problem is that your teacher isnot going to tell you which man you aresupporting until the last moment –which is just like opening an exampaper! You will have to:◆ prepare points to support the claim

of each leader◆ prepare points which could be used

to criticise each leader◆ prepare to make any other points

which you think are relevant.

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Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon: Whodid more for civil rights?These three presidents, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, led the USA in the 1960s and 1970s. In terms oftheir historical reputations it is Kennedy who shines out, partly because of his youth and the glamourof his presidency but also because he was assassinated only two and a half years into his presidency,while the promises and expectations had not lost their appeal through the natural cycle of politicalchange. Johnson, on the other hand, is largely remembered as the president who got the USA boggeddown in Vietnam, while Nixon’s reputation is even worse. He was known as ‘Tricky Dicky’ and wasregarded as a clever but untrustworthy politician. He eventually became the first ever president to beforced to resign.

Your task in this section is to strip away the reputations of these presidents in other areas andconcentrate solely on what they achieved in the field of civil rights. You can then try to decide on theimportance of the contribution made by each one.

John F Kennedy, 1961–63Civil rights was not one of Kennedy’s priorities when he took office in 1961. However, thanks to theactions of civil rights activists, he was forced to deal with the issue. Most historians agree thatKennedy was taken by surprise by the developments of the early 1960s but that he was basicallysympathetic to the aims of the civil rights activists. During his presidential campaign he promised toend discrimination in federally owned housing and he helped to get Martin Luther King out of jail.Once in office he took other important measures:

• He made high level black appointments: the NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall became the firstAfrican American US circuit judge and Robert Weaver became head of the Housing and HomeFinance Agency – the first African American senior government official.

SOURCE 22

An extract from Kennedy’s speech, broadcast on 11 June 1963. You can find the full speech online.

The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be affordedequal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treatour fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American,because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open tothe public, if he cannot send his children to the best public schoolavailable, if he cannot vote for the public officials who willrepresent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free lifewhich all of us want, then who among us would be content to havethe colour of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who amongus would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?

We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and wecherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world,and much more importantly, to each other that this is the land ofthe free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizensexcept Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettoes,no master race except with respect to Negroes?

Now the time has come for this Nation to fulfill its promise . . . Iam, therefore, asking the Congress to enact legislation giving allAmericans the right to be served in facilities which are open to thepublic – hotels, restaurants, theatres, retail stores, and similar

establishments. This seems to me to be an elementary right. Itsdenial is an arbitrary indignity that no American in 1963 shouldhave to endure, but many do.

I have recently met with scores of business leaders urging themto take voluntary action to end this discrimination, and I havebeen encouraged by their response, and in the last two weeks over75 cities have seen progress made in desegregating these kinds offacilities. But many are unwilling to act alone, and for this reason,nationwide legislation is needed if we are to move this problemfrom the streets to the courts.

My fellow Americans, this is a problem which faces us all – inevery city of the North as well as the South. Today, there are Negroesunemployed, two or three times as many compared to whites,inadequate education, moving into the large cities, unable to findwork, young people particularly out of work without hope, deniedequal rights, denied the opportunity to eat at a restaurant or alunch counter or go to a movie theatre, denied the right to a decenteducation, denied almost today the right to attend a Stateuniversity even though qualified. It seems to me that these arematters which concern us all, not merely Presidents orCongressmen or Governors, but every citizen of the United States.

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• He stood up to the governors of the southern states and tried to force them to defend the freedomriders (see page 13).

• The Justice Department, under JFK’s brother Robert, successfully attacked segregation in southernairports and brought more lawsuits than any previous government against organisations breakingthe 1957 Civil Rights Act.

• In October 1962 he sent 23,000 government troops to ensure that just one black student, JamesMeredith, could study at the University of Mississippi without being hounded out by racists.

• In September 1963 Kennedy made a major speech on nationwide TV committing himself to thecause of civil rights and calling for a new federal civil rights act.

Kennedy’s achievements were genuine and important. However, he moved far too slowly for the likingof the civil rights activists. Critics said he was not interested enough in civil rights. It certainly was nothis top priority and he probably did not understand how passionately civil rights campaigners feltabout the issue. His first proposed civil rights Bill was very moderate and left civil rights activistsdisappointed. In support of Kennedy, he probably understood public opinion better than the activistsand was trying not to alarm the public by being too radical. He also had to struggle with the fact thatmany members of Congress would have delayed and fought against measures which they thoughtwere too radical. In the end Kennedy’s assassination meant that we cannot be sure how much morehe would have done, but he certainly laid the foundations of what became the Civil Rights Act passedby President Johnson.

Lyndon Johnson, 1963–69Lyndon Johnson has a reputation as being a very difficult and even unpleasant man. There is no doubtthat he was prepared to be aggressive and forceful and to pressurise friends and opponents to achievewhat he wanted. As soon as he came to power he brought in $800 million of measures to make war onpoverty. Although not a civil rights measure, it helped many African Americans who were among thepoorer members of society. You have also seen on page 16 that Johnson brought in the Civil Rights Act1964. Johnson’s key contribution here was his ability to manage the Congress. Unlike Kennedy,Johnson was an experienced politician with many allies in Congress and this helped him to passcontroversial measures. He made the 1964 Act much more radical than Kennedy’s original proposaland got it passed by pressurising members of the Senate who were planning to delay it.

Johnson then pressured Congress into further civil rights legislation, the Voting Rights Act, in1965. This put voter registration in the hands of federal rather than local authorities and it bannedliteracy tests. The Act gave the vote to thousands of African Americans who had effectively been deniedit. It also led to the election of record numbers of African American officials to positions of authorityin the South. Johnson also appointed the first ever black Americans to the White House cabinet andthe Supreme Court. He also passed the Immigration Act (1965) and ended the system of racial quotasfor immigrants into the USA. Decisions on whether to allow immigrants to enter the USA were basedpurely on the merits of the case. However, the period also saw growing racial tensions, with seriousrioting and many deaths in several cities in summer 1968. And Martin Luther King uttered a strongrebuke of the President – saying that the escalation of the war in Vietnam and the massive spendingon it had utterly undermined his efforts to alleviate poverty among black Americans.

SOURCE 24The Constitution says that no person shall be kept from voting because of his race or hiscolour. We have all sworn an oath before God to support and defend that Constitution. Wemust now act in obedience to that oath. Their cause must be our cause too, because it is notjust Negroes, really it’s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry andinjustice. And we shall overcome.

Johnson introducing the Voting Rights Act 1965 to Congress.

SOURCE 25It was very rare in those days to have theexperience of white people in positions ofpower react positively to their perceptionsand to adopt their vision. Johnson did this,and he also adopted the call of themovement ‘We Shall Overcome’.

Reactions to Johnson’s speech in Source24 by Roger Wilkins, Assistant Attorney

General 1964–67 and one of the few topAfrican American officials of the time.

SOURCE 26When we heard Johnson on the radio and hesaid ‘we shall overcome’ it felt likesomebody had just stuck a knife in yourheart. All you fought for was over – ourPresident had sold us out.

B Joseph Smitherman, Mayor of Selma,Alabama.

SOURCE 23Kennedy did relatively little for the civilrights movement. His greatest contributionto the struggle for African-Americanequality was, there’s no polite way ofputting this, the way he died. LyndonJohnson used JFK’s memory to whip votesfor the Civil Rights Act, accomplishing whatKennedy had not.

Ari Kelman, a historian at the University ofCalifornia.

1 Compare sources 25 and 26. Why do theygive such different views of the same event?

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Richard Nixon, 1969–74Nixon was President for just six years but in this time:

• Desegregation of schools and colleges went from being a legal requirement to an actual reality –remember that desegregation of schools was supposed to have happened after the Brown vsTopeka case of 1959. In 1968 almost 70 per cent of African American students went to segregatedschools. By 1974 the figure was 8 per cent. On the other hand, housing was still largely segregatedand the students going to integrated schools were often taken long distances by bus.

• Nixon extended key sections of Johnson’s Voting Rights Act (the sections on literacy tests) whichwere due to expire in 1970. He banned these tests across the whole of the country, not just in theSouth.

• Nixon brought in quotas for the numbers of African American students who should be taken intouniversities, and also quotas for the employment of African Americans in areas such as publicadministration, the police, judiciary, etc. This policy became known as ‘affirmative action’.

• Nixon also tried to build up African Americans’ sense of having a stake in American society. Hetried to tap into the Black Power consciousness, but to turn its energy into education and business.He wanted minorities to become managers and owners and not just workers. Nixon set up theOffice of Minority Business Enterprise which gave federal contracts to businesses owned by AfricanAmericans or Hispanics. He also ploughed funding into the largest African American colleges anduniversities. By 1971 there were 13 African American Congressmen, 81 mayors, 198 statelegislators and 1,567 local office holders.

These were huge steps forward. So why have Nixon’s achievements not always been recognised?

• First of all, other aspects of his presidency have overshadowed his record on civil rights. Nixon’spresidency ended in failure. He was forced to resign (the only president ever to do so) over theWatergate scandal after he ordered the bugging of his political opponents and then tried to hidehis involvement through an elaborate series of cover-ups.

• He also got on badly with many of the leading civil rights campaigners (see Source 27). He was aright winger, while civil rights activists tended to be left wingers. As a young Senator he helped inthe McCarthy anti-Communist witch hunts (see page 5). He was recorded making racist commentsin the Oval Office, which did not help his case.

• His so-called ‘Southern strategy’ also alienated many civil rights leaders. The Southern strategyinvolved working with governors and state governments in the Southern states rather thanchallenging and criticising them as Kennedy and Johnson had done. Nixon even tried to appointSupreme Court judges who were sympathetic to Southern segregationist policies. The Southernstrategy was partly driven by politics. Nixon needed to keep voters and Southern Congressmen onhis side. However, it was also driven by realistic politics. By working with the Southern States ratherthan antagonising them it could be argued that Nixon actually got laws put into action on theground rather than simply passed in Congress.

SOURCE 27Why has it taken so long to credit Richard Nixon with advances in civil rights? For onething, Nixon alienated civil rights leaders and African Americans. The president draggedhis heels on integration of suburbs and northern schools. He made few addresses to thenation on civil rights and he inflamed racial tension through his ‘southern strategy’.Incensed black leaders criticized Nixon harshly. Their critique has remained the standardinterpretation of Nixon’s policies. Nixon’s relations with civil rights leaders became like thecold war. Each side became suspicious of the other. Yet realising they had to do deals witheach other, the two sides on rare occasions cooperated in areas of mutual benefit.

An extract from Nixon’s Civil Rights by Dean Kotlowski, published in 2001.

Who was more important inimproving civil rights, PresidentKennedy, President Johnson orPresident Nixon?

Work in threes.

Take one President each and use theinformation and Sources about yourPresident to write a speech for a debatearguing that your President did the mostto advance the cause of black civilrights. Pages 24–26 should give youplenty of ideas to use in your speech butif you want to do more research you willfind lots of material on the internet.

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Fast forward: 2009 SOURCE 28

President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle at the celebrations of his inauguration asPresident of the USA in January 2009. He is the first African American president in the

country’s history.

The fact that an African American could stand for and become President of the USA in 2009 showshow far the cause of civil rights had come in the USA by the end of the twentieth century. BarackObama himself said during the 2008 campaign that America was ‘light years away from the time ofMartin Luther King’. In fact, Obama tried to make race a very small issue in the campaign becausehe wanted to be accepted as a politician rather than as an African American politician. But it is easyto trace the events of 2009 back to the historic impact of the civil rights movement of 1950–75. Forexample:

• From the later 1960s the voting campaign began to pay dividends – African American senatorswere elected, such as Edward Broke of Massachusetts. In 1967 the city of Cleveland elected anAfrican American mayor. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, one of Martin Luther King’s closestsupporters, became a leading figure in the Democratic Party and still is today.

• In 1988 the government passed the Civil Rights Restoration Act which forced private organisationsthat received government money (e.g. companies working on government contracts) to ensurethey applied anti-discrimination rules fully. Other private organisations were not affected.

• At a local level many local authorities began to bring in anti-discrimination policies towards theworkers they employed and also in areas such as housing.

At the same time, hard statistics tell us that early in the twenty-first century African Americans werestill more likely to live in poverty than other groups, even other minority groups such as Asian or ArabAmericans or Hispanic Americans. Unemployment rates for Black Americans in 2000 were around 8 per cent, twice the rate for white Americans. Around 8 million Black Americans were officiallyclassed as living in poverty in 2000, nearly three times the rate for white Americans. They alsosuffered from greater levels of physical and mental health problems and higher rates of crime andfamily breakdown.

SOURCE 29I am the son of a black man from Kenyaand a white woman from Kansas. I wasraised with the help of a white grandfatherwho survived a Depression to serve inPatton’s Army during World War II and awhite grandmother who worked on abomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworthwhile he was overseas. I’ve gone to some ofthe best schools in America and lived in oneof the world’s poorest nations. I am marriedto a black American who carries within herthe blood of slaves and slaveowners – aninheritance we pass on to our two preciousdaughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces,nephews, uncles and cousins, of every raceand every hue, scattered across threecontinents, and for as long as I live, I willnever forget that in no other country onEarth is my story even possible.

It’s a story that hasn’t made me the mostconventional candidate. But it is a storythat has seared into my genetic makeup theidea that this nation is more than the sumof its parts – that out of many, we are trulyone.

Part of a campaign speech by BarackObama in 2008.

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Part 4 How far did other groups achievecivil rights in America?The campaign for black civil rights was a major achievement in its own right. But it also gave manyother groups in the USA a sense that other inequalities in American society could be removed ifenough people wanted them removed. In this way, the black civil rights movement helped to givebirth to other protest movements. You are going to investigate the experiences and achievements ofthree other groups or campaigners for their civil rights: Hispanic Americans, Native Americans andwomen.

Case study 1: Hispanic AmericansHispanic Americans were either immigrants from Spanish-speaking territories which bordered theUSA, or the descendants of Spanish-speaking Americans who lived in areas which had formerly beenpart of the Spanish Empire. By far the largest Hispanic group were the Mexican Americans and in thissection we are going to focus on them.

Immigration from Mexico to the USA had been a fact of life for both countries during thetwentieth century. Mexico was poor compared to the USA and the USA offered the prospect of regularwork for wages which were high by Mexican standards. These wages could be sent home to supportfamilies, educate younger brothers and sisters or help buy medicines. There were major waves ofimmigration in the early 1900s, at the time of the Depression in the 1930s and then in the SecondWorld War and after. The major form of work which the Mexicans did was agricultural labour. In1942 the US and Mexican governments agreed the bracero programme which brought thousands ofMexicans to work as contract labourers on US farms. The Mexicans had the necessary skills fromtheir own rural backgrounds and they tended to concentrate in the states which were closest to theirhomeland: Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas.

This programme continued until 1964 and under it many Mexicans decided to stay and settlerather than return home as they were supposed to. As a result, the Mexican American population ofthe USA began to grow and they became a prominent community. Their numbers swelled in 1965when the US Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act. This opened up the USA’s strictquotas on immigration from Mexico and other countries. It also had a family reunification clausewhich allowed the families of immigrants living in the USA to bring their families into the countryand enjoy US nationality.

In the case of Mexicans there was a long tradition of illegal as well as legal immigration so it isalmost impossible to be sure about the level of immigration. What is certain is that by the 1960s therewere millions. By 1978 there were over 7 million Mexican Americans in the USA, with one million inLos Angeles alone (a third of the population).

DiscriminationAs you have already seen on pages 8–27, race has been a major issue in the USA throughout itshistory. The Mexican immigrants suffered the same kind of intolerance and discrimination whichwas suffered by black Americans and by Native Americans. Mexican Americans suffered highunemployment, ill treatment and low wages in the workplace, poor housing, educational segregationand discrimination by the police. They were generally discouraged from joining trade unions orpolitical parties. They were under-represented in local politics because they were discouraged fromregistering to vote, and the number of elected Mexican American officials was tiny in relation to thesize of their community. All of these factors led Mexican Americans to reject this term and begin tocall themselves Chicanos. It was the beginning of the Chicano civil rights movement.

Chicano NationalismThe first stage of the movement was an assertion of Chicano national pride and identity. In the mid-1960s Reies Tijerina launched a legal campaign based on a treaty between the USA and Mexico in1848 to return large areas of land in New Mexico to Chicanos. The legal campaign was defeated by a

Why did immigration of HispanicAmericans increase after theSecond World War?

Make your own copy of this diagram.Add labels to the arrows which showfactors which led to increasedimmigration from Mexico to the USA.Add more arrows if you need to. Youcould also colour code these arrows toshow different factors (eg push factorsor pull factors, economic factors, legalchanges).

Mexico

USA

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combination of legal action and intimidation, resulting in Tijerina launching a raid on a court house in New Mexico. Tijerina’s campaign failed but he did succeed in highlighting the issue of thestate of Chicanos in the USA. His actions also appealed to young Chicanos, helping to give them asense of pride and identity. Rodolfo ‘Corky’ Gonzales had a similar effect. He founded the Crusade forJustice in Denver in 1966 which campaigned for better treatment for Chicanos. He was part of thePoor People’s Campaign, which Martin Luther King had established to protest about poverty anddiscrimination generally in the USA, not just on behalf of black people. Gonzales led Chicanorepresentatives from south-western USA in the Poor People’s March in Washington in 1968. He linkedissues of race, poverty, discrimination and the Vietnam War, and was an inspiration to many youngChicanos to protest against the injustices they faced and provided active help and support to ChicanoHigh School students in their protests in 1968.

Cesar Chavez One of the most high profile Chicano campaigns was led by Cesar Chavez. He was co-founder of theNational Farm Workers Association which later became the United Farm Workers (UFW). In 1966 heled a strike by California grape pickers for higher wages and safer working conditions. Chavezbelieved passionately in strong by non-violent action. He himself went on a hunger strike. The UFWcalled for a national boycott of grapes by the American public, and it was common to see car bumperstickers saying ‘No Grapes’. The strike dragged on for five years but it attracted national attention andled to a Senate Subcommittee looking into it. Chavez gained the support of Senator Robert Kennedyand in the early 1970s most of the farm owners signed bargaining agreements with the labourers forbetter wages. In 1966 and 1967 Chavez’s activities led to the spread of other similar actions in Texas,Wisconsin and Ohio. These were important achievements, although despite Chavez’s work Chicanosgenerally remained one of the poorest and most discriminated against sections of American society.

High school blow outsThe way to integrate and achieve in American society was through education and qualifications, andthe Chicanos were very aware of this. Very few Chicanos went on to college courses after high school.In fact, their schools were plagued by a high dropout rate. To this could be added the fact that theywere segregated from white students, suffered crumbling buildings, lacked Mexican Americanteachers and studied a curriculum which left young Chicanos feeling like outsiders in their owncountry. In March 1968 student activists organised a mass walkout of Chicano students from highschools in eastern Los Angeles. The protest brought some 20,000 teenagers on to the streets of LosAngeles to protest. It was a success in that there was high coverage of the event on TV and in thenewspapers. Senator Robert Kennedy came to talk to the student leaders. It was also a success in thatmany of the student leaders went on to become successful activists helping other Chicanos. However,the walkouts failed to achieve their aims. There were violent clashes as the school boards called in thepolice to force the students back to school. There were no substantial changes to educationalconditions for Chicanos. In fact, there were more walkouts in 1971, 1972 and 1974 but many of thecomplaints which inspired the protests of 1968 can still be heard today.

What did the Hispanic Americans achieve in their campaign?

The Chicano civil rights movement is much less well known than the black civil rightsmovement. Write a report or create a presentation on the Chicanos comparing theirmovement with the black civil rights movement you studied on pages 10–23. Youshould consider:◆ aims and motives◆ methods◆ impact◆ long-term legacy.Add a final section indicating whether you think that the Chicano movement deservesto be overshadowed by the black civil rights movement to such a great extent.

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SOURCE 1It is not good enough to know why we areoppressed and by whom. We must join thestruggle for what is right and just. Jesusdoes not promise that it will be an easy wayto live life and His own life certainly pointsin a hard direction; but it does promise thatwe will be ‘satisfied’ (not stuffed; butsatisfied). He promises that by giving life wewill find life – full, meaningful life as Godmeant it.

Until the chance for politicalparticipation is there, we who are poor willcontinue to attack the soft part of theAmerican system – its economic structure.We will build power through boycotts,strikes, new unions – whatever techniqueswe can develop. These attacks on the statusquo will come, not because we hate, butbecause we know America can construct ahumane society for all its citizens – andthat if it does not, there will chaos.

Those who are willing to sacrifice and beof service have very little difficulty withpeople. They know what they are all about.People can’t help but want to be near them.They help them; they work with them. That’swhat love is all about. It starts with yourheart and radiates out.

Cesar Chavez explaining his views onaction in the 1960s.

SOURCE 2

Police arrest a Chicano demonstrator in1971.

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Case study 2: Native Americans inthe 1970sOne November day in 1972 a 26-year-old Native American woman walked into the office of Dr ConniePinkerton-Uri in Los Angeles and asked for a womb transplant because she and her husband wishedto start a family. Dr Pinkerton-Uri had to explain that there was no such operation. She also enquiredas to why the woman had no womb. Some years earlier a doctor from the Indian Health Service(HIS) had been treating her for alcoholism. In the process he had given her a hysterectomy. It wasnot related to her treatment and the IHS doctor had told her the process was reversible. The NativeAmerican woman was completely devastated and left the doctor’s office in tears.

In some ways this story sums up many of the grievances which Native Americans had in the early1970s. Ever since their defeat by the emerging USA in the 1800s most Native Americans had beenforced to live on reservations. Here their opportunities were few. There were few decent jobs andeducation was poor. Through the twentieth century conditions for Native Americans got worse so thatby the 1950s they had some of the highest rates of alcoholism, mental health problems, economicdeprivation, illiteracy and lack of opportunity of any racial group in the USA. This was partly theresult and partly the cause of the US government’s policy of trying to assimilate Native Americansinto mainstream US society.

This policy began unofficially in the 1870s and it became official policy in the 1920s under thegovernment’s Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). By the 1950s it had had a devastating effect on NativeAmerican people. Their traditions and culture were under attack. They were often denied the fullvalue of resources such as timber or minerals which were taken from their lands by big corporations.Even their existence was under attack – the example of sterilisation which you read about at the startof this section was far from unusual. Native American organisations claimed that the IHS sterilisedaround 25 per cent of Native American women of child-bearing age during the 1970s.

Why did Native Americans begin to protest?One of the reasons for the sterilisation policy was that after the Second World War the NativeAmerican birth rate rose. By 1980 there were nearly 1 million Native Americans. Many began tomigrate to US towns and cities in search of opportunities. There was a government programme whichhelped them to do this. Here they met the same discrimination and problems as other ethnicminority groups in the USA and around a third of all those who relocated eventually returned to theirtribal homelands. Some of those who remained did flourish in the urban environment and gained aneducation. Many of these Native Americans began to organise themselves to protest about thehardships faced by Native Americans. It was generally the younger ones who protested, partly becausein the towns they were no longer constrained by the more conservative tribal elders.

SOURCE 4

American Indian Movement protesters at a rally in 1970.

SOURCE 3Traditional tribal governing systems,particularly justice systems, came understrong attack. The Bureau of Indian Affairsestablished tribal police forces and courtsunder the administrative control of itsagents, the reservation superintendents andother efforts designed to erode the powerand influence of Indian leaders andtraditions. Everything Indian came underattack. Indian feasts, languages, certainmarriage practices, dances and anypractices by medicine or religious personswere all banned by the Bureau of IndianAffairs.

An extract from the Native Americannewsletter Wotanging Ikche. This extract

was published in October 1995.

Activity

1 Use Source 3 and the other informationon this page to write a more detailedcaption for Source 4 to go in this book.

2 Now try writing captions for otherpublications, such as a sympathetic or ahostile newspaper from the time.

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Radical protestIn 1969 a young Sioux writer Vine Deloria published a book called Custer Died For Your Sins. Thebook attacked US policy towards Native Americans and also called for an uprising of Red Power, alongthe same lines as the Black Power protests you read about on page 18. In the same year NativeAmerican demonstrators of the American Indian Movement (AIM) occupied Alcatraz Island andoffered to buy it from the government for $24. The point they were making was that this was the sumthat European settlers had originally paid for New York in the 1600s. More protests followed.

In 1972 a Native American march on Washington ended with the protesters taking over the officesof the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Even more seriously, AIM activists occupied the trading post atWounded Knee on 27 February 1973 claiming it on behalf of Native Americans to be run free of USgovernment control. They chose Wounded Knee because it had been the site of an infamous massacreof Native Americans by US government forces in 1890, effectively marking the end of the strugglebetween Native Americans and the settlers for control of a vast area of central USA. They wereprotesting against discrimination generally, but they also had specific complaints.

• They accused the local BIA head agent, Dick Wilson, of mishandling federal funds which weresupposed to be spent on the welfare of local Native American people.

• They also accused Wilson of using the reservation police force as his own private army. • They also wanted to draw attention to the disastrous environmental and health effects of the

mining operations being carried out in the Dakota hills.

The result was a siege which lasted 71 days and resulted in 2 deaths. Eventually the protestersabandoned the siege, but the huge scale of the government operation attracted nationwide publicity. Native Americans used other tactics too. They hired lawyers to press their claims for land ownership,claiming that in the 1800s the Native peoples had been forced or tricked into giving up their landsand should now be compensated.

SOURCE 6

A US government armoured vehicle at Wounded Knee, 1973.

All this activity forced President Richard Nixon to act. In 1969 he appointed Louis R Bruce (aMohawk-Sioux) as Commissioner for Indian Affairs. Nixon returned 48,000 acres of sacred triballands to the Taos Pueblo Indians. Further measures followed in the 1970s, including the Indian ChildWelfare Act 1974 (to prevent government agencies taking children away from Native Americanterritories to be brought up elsewhere) and the Indian Self Determination Act 1975. This Acteffectively ended the US policy of trying to assimilate Native Americans and guaranteed that theywould be free to govern themselves while still receiving aid from the US government.

SOURCE 5The equipment maintained by the militarywhile in use during the siege includedfifteen armored personal carriers, clothing,rifles, grenade launchers, flares, and133,000 rounds of ammunition, for a totalcost, including the use of maintenancepersonnel from the national guard of fivestates and pilot and planes for aerialphotographs, of over half a million dollars.

Extract from the Wounded KneeInformation Booklet published by the AIM

after the siege.

What were the issues faced byNative Americans in the 1970s?

The year is 2013. You have been askedto create a podcast to be broadcast onthe 50th anniversary of the takeover ofWounded Knee in February 1973. Yourpodcast needs to explain why this eventis significant. Your podcast is limited to2 minutes.It should summarise:a) why Native Americans were

protesting in the early 1970sb) how their situation compared with

the situation of other ethnicminorities

c) why the protest of the 1970s wassignificant.

You could emphasise its symbolicsignificance (why Wounded Knee wassuch an important site) or its practicalsignificance in the Native Americancampaign for civil rights.

Focus Task

1 Why do you think the AIM published theinformation in Source 5?

2 How reliable do you think Source 5 is as asource of information about events atWounded Knee in 1973?

3 How does Source 6 help you decide how faryou think Source 5 is reliable?

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Case study 3: The women’smovementOne of the most important protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s was the women’s movement,which aimed to win equal rights for women. Since the Second World War women’s role had beenchanging. This change was resisted by conservative Americans, who thought it was a woman’s role tomake a home and bring up a happy family, and a man’s role to work. But by the 1960s that view wasvery clearly out of date. It was being undermined by two trends.

Activity

Write sentences or draw a diagram to showhow each of the following factors helpedcreate the women’s movement:a) the Second World Warb) the struggle for black civil rightsc) actions of individualsd) availability of educatione) opportunities to work.Use the evidence on the next four pagesand include your evidence in your sentencesor chart.

Trend 1: more women workers The Second World War had increased the number of working women.That trend continued after the war.

• In 1940 women made up 19 per cent of the workforce.• In 1950 women made up 28.8 per cent of the workforce.• In 1960 women made up almost half of the workforce.

In 1960, Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of President Roosevelt,pressured President Kennedy to set up a commission on the status ofwomen and particularly on their status at work. It reported in 1963.Women were almost half of the workforce, yet:

• 95 per cent of company managers were men.• 88 per cent of technical workers were men.• Only 4 per cent of lawyers and 7 per cent of doctors were women.• Women earned around 50–60 per cent of the wages of men, even for

the same work.• Work for women was overwhelmingly low paid, part time and low

level with no responsibility.• Women could still be dismissed when they married.

SOURCE 7You are asking that a stewardess be young, attractive andsingle. What are you running, an airline or a whorehouse?

Congresswoman Martha Griffiths asked the directors ofNational Airlines about its policy on air stewardesses, who

were fired when they married or reached the age of 32.

Trend 2: changed expectationsAfter the Second World War, there had been a mass rush by women toget married and have babies. Fifteen years later, many of these womenwere extremely disillusioned. In 1963 Betty Friedan described theproblem in her influential million-copy best-seller, The FeminineMystique. The ‘feminine mystique’ was her term for the set of ideasthat said that women’s happiness came from total involvement in theirrole as wives and mothers.

Friedan said that married women must be helped to continue inpaid employment, if they were not to get bored, frustrated anddeskilled. Friedan asked hundreds of college-educated women whatthey wished they had done differently since graduating in the 1940s.She found a generation of educated and capable women who felt likedomestic servants – there simply to meet the needs of their families,with little chance to develop their own careers or expand theirhorizons. They felt undervalued and depressed.

SOURCE 8As the American woman made beds, shopped for groceries,matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches withher children, chauffered Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay besideher husband at night, she was afraid to ask even of herself thequestion: ‘Is this all?’

From The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan, 1963.

Friedan called women’s deep sense of dissatisfaction with theirtraditional role ‘the problem that had no name’.

The women’s movementThese trends led to what was called the women’s movement. It was not a single organisation. There werethousands of different groups, all with different angles but with similar aims – to raise the status ofwomen and end discrimination against women in all areas of life.

Following the Status Commission’s report in 1963, the government passed the Equal Pay Act. Equallyimportant was the Civil Rights Act in 1964 which outlawed discrimination against women. However,women’s groups felt these Acts were not being fully implemented, so Betty Friedan founded the NationalOrganisation for Women (NOW) in 1966.

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SOURCE 9Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique changed my life and that of millions of otherwomen who became engaged in the women’s movement and jettisoned empty hours ofendless housework and found work, and meaning, outside of raising their children andfeeding their husbands. Friedan’s argument was that women had been coaxed into sellingout their intellect and their ambitions for the paltry price of a new washing machine.

Anna Quindlen’s introduction to a new (2002) edition of Betty Friedan’s The FeminineMystique.

NOWBy the early 1970s NOW had 40,000 members. It co-operated with a wide range of other women’smovements, such as the National Women’s Caucus, the Women’s Campaign Fund, the NorthAmerican Indian Women’s Association and the National Black Feminist Organisation. NOW learnedsome tactics from the civil rights movement and organised demonstrations in the streets of Americancities. They also challenged discrimination in the courts. In a series of cases between 1966 and 1971,NOW secured $30 million in back pay owed to women who had not been paid wages equal to those ofmen. In 1972 the Supreme Court ruled that the US Constitution did give men and women equalrights.

SOURCE 10While few were students, all were under 30 and had received their political education asparticipants in the student movements the last decade. Many came direct from . . . civilrights organizations where they had been shunted into traditional roles and faced with theself-evident contradiction of working in a ‘freedom movement’ but not being very free. In1964, Stokely Carmichael, later Chairman of SNCC, made his infamous remark that: ‘Theonly position for women in SNCC is lying down.’

From a talk on the early days of the women’s movement given in 1971 by Jo Freeman.

‘Women’s Lib’NOW was at one end of a broad spectrum of women’s movements. Friedan, for example, was afeminist but she still believed in traditional family values and marriage. NOW used conventionalmethods, such as political pressure and court cases.

At the other end of the spectrum were younger feminists with more radical objectives and differentmethods to achieve them. They became known as the Women’s Liberation Movement (or Women’sLib).

Feminists ran ‘consciousness-raising’ groups, where women could talk about their lives in depthand discuss how to challenge discrimination in their lives. They said that ‘the personal was political’– everything you did in your personal life could affect the way people treated all women. Forexample, it was an act of protest against male supremacy to go out without make-up. It was likesaying, ‘Look at me – I don’t care if you think I am pretty or not.’ Some of the most radical membersof Women’s Lib were lesbians who regarded men as surplus to requirements. One saying went: ‘Awoman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.’

Some groups hit the headlines with their bra-burning protests. Bras were burned as a symbol ofmale domination – women only wore them to look pretty for men, they said. In 1968 radical womenpicketed the Miss World Beauty contest in Atlantic City. They said that the contest treated women likeobjects not people. To make their point, they crowned a sheep as Miss World. Demonstrations such asthis raised the profile of the feminist movement – the media loved them – but some critics felt theydid not help their cause because the protests were not taken seriously.

1 Can books change people’s attitudes or theirlives?

2 What is Source 9 saying about the impact ofthe civil rights movement on the attitudes ofwomen who participate in it?

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SOURCE 12It’s interesting to speculate how it developed that in two of the most anti-feministinstitutions, the church and the law court, the men are wearing the dresses!

Flo Kennedy, who was both a leader of the civil rights movement and a leading feminist.As a black woman when she applied to law school she was refused and was told this was

not because she was black but a woman. She threatened legal action and was enrolledand was the only black woman on the course – alongside seven white women.

SOURCE 13a) We are coming down from our pedestal and up from the laundry room. We want anequal share in government and we mean to get it.b) A woman’s place is in the house! The house of Representatives!

Statements by Bella Abzug, US Congresswoman and feminist leader

Roe v. Wade – the right to abortionOne of the most important campaigns for radical feminists was the campaign to legalise abortion.Abortion was illegal in the USA but feminists believed this law discriminated against women. Theysaid they should not be forced to bear a child they did not want. They said that a woman had theright to choose what happened to her body and so should have the right to have an abortion if shewished to.

The struggle over abortion began in the early 1960s. A young medical technician, EstelleGriswold, challenged the anti-abortion laws in her home state of Connecticut. In Connecticut, notonly abortion but contraceptive devices, too, were illegal. Even giving information aboutcontraception was illegal. Griswold’s lawyers challenged Connecticut’s laws. They handled their casecleverly. They did not argue directly against the abortion laws. They argued that these laws were anillegal restriction on the privacy of ordinary Americans. The right to privacy was contained in theFourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court. In1965 the Supreme Court judges ruled 7–2 in favour of Griswold.

SOURCE 15

Proportion of women in the workforce ofselected occupations in the USA.

1980

100

01960 1970

50

10

1950

20

30

40

60

70

80

90

Key ProfessionalManagerialClericalSalesCrafts

OperativesLabourersDomesticOther servicesFarm workers

Per

cent

%1 Study sources 14 and 15. In your view,

where have the largest changes taken place?2 In what areas have the least changes taken

place?3 Do these sources support the view that there

was little change in the role of women in theUSA in this period?

Read Sources 11–13. These threespeakers emerged as significant leaders ofthe women’s movement. Work in threes.Choose one woman each: Gloria Steinem,Bella Abzug or Flo Kennedy, and use theinternet to find out more about her and towrite a Profile in the style of the Profiles onpage 20.

SOURCE 11This is no simple reform. It really is arevolution. Sex and race, because they areeasy, visible differences, have been theprimary ways of organizing humanbeings into superior and inferior groups,and into the cheap labor on which thissystem still depends. We are talking abouta society in which there will be no rolesother than those chosen, or those earned.We are really talking about humanism.

Address to the women of America in1971 by Gloria Steinem who became the

leader of what was known as secondwave feminism.

SOURCE 14

Reported number of abortions, 1972–90.

1.6

0

0.8

1972

0.2

0.4

0.6

1.0

1.2

1.4

Repo

rted

num

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of le

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ions

(milli

ons)

400

0

350

Repo

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of le

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ions

per

1000

live

birt

hs300

250

200

150

100

50

1990

1988

1985

1980

1976

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Opposition to the women’s movementAt a time when attacking Communists had gone out of fashion, many right-wingers enjoyedattacking the extremes of feminism. This may help to explain the success of some of the anti-feminist movements. The most high profile was STOP ERA led by Phyllis Schlafly.

ERA stood for the Equal Rights Amendment, which was a proposal to amend the US Constitutionspecifically to outlaw sex discrimination. In the reforming climate of the 1960s, Congress was infavour of ERA, and so were 63 per cent of the population. However, Phyllis Schlafly led a successfulcampaign to prevent its becoming law.

She argued that feminists devalued the woman’s role by making it equal with a man’s and thatthey denied the rights of the unborn child by their support for abortion. She compared the feministwoman’s complaints with the ‘positive’ woman’s approach (see Source 16).

The Equal Rights Amendment became bogged down in Congress as a result of Schlafly’scampaigning. The measure was finally defeated by three votes in 1982.

Schlafly was helped by the fact that by 1980 the pendulum was swinging away from radicalismonce again. The anti-abortion movement was growing stronger. Economic problems for poor womenwere getting worse not better – feminism did not seem to be relevant to their lives. Even mainstreamfeminists were prepared to accept that women had their own values and that equal rights might be afalse objective.

SOURCE 16The Positive Woman starts with the assumption that the world is her oyster. She rejoices inthe creative capability within her body and the power potential of her mind and spirit. Sheunderstands that men and women are different and that those differences provide the keyto her success as a person and fulfilment as a woman.

Phyllis Schlafly, The Power of the Positive Woman, 1977.

What methods did American womenuse to achieve equality?

Below are the methods of campaigningused by black civil rights activists:◆ court case/legal challenge◆ non-violent direct action◆ empowering ordinary people◆ marches and demonstrations◆ violent protest.a) Which of these were also used by

feminists? Give examples.b) Which do you think was most

important for the Women’sLiberation Movement?

Focus Task

Activity

Study Source 17. This poster was made by a group of feminists in 2001 to satirisethe attitudes of the film industry to women and to the women’s movement inparticular. You can find their reasons for doing this on the internet. This Activity is intwo stages:

Stage 1: discussion1 What is this poster saying about the way that the women’s movement is seen in

the 21st century?2 Choose one of these words to describe this poster and explain your choice (or

choose another word of your own): rude; clever; demeaning.3 What would be the reaction of Gloria Steinem, Flo Kennedy or Bella Abzug to

this poster (see sources 11–13)?

Stage 2: your interpretationNow get serious! Create or describe your own film poster that sums up the originsand methods of the women’s movement.

SOURCE 17

A fake film poster prepared by the feminist groupGuerilla Girls in 2001.

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