EOTO 2: Civil Rights Era- What I Learned

 

Even today the Civil Rights Movement has a lasting impact. The civil rights movement was a struggle for social justices that took place during the early 1950s to late 1960s for African Americans to gain equal rights under the law in America. With a movement as great as this one, there had to be some negative and positive things in a reaction to the movement. 

 

One positive event that I thought I knew a lot about but learned something new was the Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. After Rosa sat on the front of the bus, refusing to give up her seat to a white man leading to her arrest. Parks’ courage led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott lasting 381 days. By December 21, 1956, buses were fully integrated. Approximately 40,000 Black bus riders boycotted the bus system. African Americans represented about 75 percent of the Montgomery bus ridership. 

 

One negative event during the civil rights movement that I learned about was the murders of civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. They were tortured and murdered by the KKK with help from the deputy sheriff near Philadelphia in Neshoba County, Mississippi. The three young men had traveled to Neshoba County (from the Freedom Summer orientation in Oxford, Ohio) to investigate the burning of Mt. Zion Methodist Church, which had been a site of a CORE Freedom School.

President Johnson and civil rights activists used the outrage over the activists' deaths to gain passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which Johnson signed on July 2. This and the Selma to Montgomery marches of 1965 contributed to passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which Johnson signed on August 6 of that year.

 

 

 

Mock Trial: Brown v. Board of Education

  

After the Civil War, the first legislation providing rights to African Americans was passed. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, also known as the Reconstruction Amendments, which were passed between 1865 and 1870, abolished slavery, guaranteed citizenship and protection under the law, and prohibited racial discrimination in voting.

 

 Now millions of formerly enslaved African Americans hoped to join the larger society as full and equal citizens. Although some white Americans welcomed them, others used people’s ignorance, racism, and self-interest to sustain and spread racial divisions. 

New laws and old customs in the North and the South had created a segregated society that condemned African Americans to second-class citizenship.

 

The practice of Jim Crow was firmly established in the Southern US. Under Jim Crow, virtually all public spaces were rigidly and legally segregated across racial lines. These laws were to marginalize Black people, keep them separate from white people and erase the progress they’d made during Reconstruction. 

 

During World War 2, Black men and women served heroically in World War II, despite suffering segregation and discrimination during their deployment. The Tuskegee Airmen broke the racial barrier to become the first Black military aviators in the U.S. Army Air Corps and earned more than 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses. Yet many Black veterans met with prejudice and scorn upon returning home. This was a contrast to why America had entered the war to begin with—to defend freedom and democracy in the world.

 

In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an Executive Order 8802, forbidding racial discrimination by any defense contractor and establishing a Fair Employment Practices Committee as a regulatory agency to investigate charges of racial discrimination. 

                                        

     

In 1944, a NAACP lawsuit challenging the Democratic Party’s all-white primaries led to a decision striking down the practice in Texas that ultimately ended segregated primaries in all Southern states.

 

In 1946, the Supreme Court declared state segregation laws unconstitutional as applied to interstate bus travel in Morgan v Virginia.

 

In 1947, Major League Baseball saw its first black player, Jackie Robinson. 

 

In 1948, President Harry S. Truman ordered the desegregation of the armed forces, which had already seen black and white Americans fighting side by side in World War II. As the Cold War began, President Harry Truman initiated a civil rights agenda, and in 1948 issued Executive Order 9981 to end discrimination in the military. 

                                          

 

Now in 1951, high schools and junior high schools in Topeka were integrated, but elementary schools were not. Topeka operated eighteen elementary schools for whites and four for blacks.

 

To keep the importance of education as a foundation of a democratic society, to vote for segregated schools as a standing norm of this country goes against the sentiments of Thomas Jefferson that publicly funded education was to be the primary mechanism to develop a natural elite and to ensure that the new republic remained literate regardless of social class. Education is the foundation of good citizenship and good citizenship is essential to good government.

 

Segregation was rooted in the need to keep “the people who were formerly in slavery as close to that stage as possible.” in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” as segregated schools are “inherently unequal.”

 

As this country is moving towards integration of African Americans in equality in work, voting, transportation, sports, and even war, a state such as Kansas should be able to integrate all their school systems in a public educational setting.