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Supreme Court outlaws school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education

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Separate But Equal Doctrine

In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities were legal, so long as the facilities for Black people and whites were equal.

The ruling constitutionally sanctioned laws barring African Americans from sharing the same buses, schools and other public facilities as whites-known as "Jim Crow" laws -and established the "separate but equal" doctrine that would stand for the next six decades.

But by the early 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP) was working hard to challenge segregation laws in public schools, and had filed lawsuits on behalf of plaintiffs in states such as South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware.

In the case that would become most famous, a plaintiff named Oliver Brown filed a class-action suit against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1951, after his daughter, Linda Brown, was denied entrance to Topeka's all-white elementary schools.

In his lawsuit, Brown claimed that schools for Black children were not equal to the white schools, and that segregation violated the so-called "equal protection clause" of the 14th Amendment, which holds that no state can "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The case went before the U.S. District Court in Kansas, which agreed that public school segregation had a "detrimental effect upon the colored children" and contributed to "a sense of inferiority," but still upheld the "separate but equal" doctrine.

Brown v. Board of Education Verdict

When Brown's case and four other cases related to school segregation first came before the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court combined them into a single case under the name Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, served as chief attorney for the plaintiffs. (Thirteen years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson would appoint Marshall as the first Black Supreme Court justice.)

At first, the justices were divided on how to rule on school segregation, with Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson holding the opinion that the Plessy verdict should stand. But in September 1953, before Brown v. Board of Education was to be heard, Vinson died, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower replaced him with Earl Warren, then governor of California.

Displaying considerable political skill and determination, the new chief justice succeeded in engineering a unanimous verdict against school segregation the following year.

In the decision, issued on May 17, 1954, Warren wrote that "in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place," as segregated schools are "inherently unequal." As a result, the Court ruled that the plaintiffs were being "deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment."

Little Rock Nine

In its verdict, the Supreme Court did not specify how exactly schools should be integrated, but asked for further arguments about it.

In May 1955, the Court issued a second opinion in the case (known as Brown v. Board of Education II), which remanded future desegregation cases to lower federal courts and directed district courts and school boards to proceed with desegregation "with all deliberate speed."

Though well intentioned, the Court's actions effectively opened the door to local judicial and political evasion of desegregation. While Kansas and some other states acted in accordance with the verdict, many school and local officials in the South defied it.

In one major example, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas called out the state National Guard to prevent Black students from attending high school in Little Rock in 1957. After a tense standoff, President Eisenhower deployed federal troops, and nine students-known as the " Little Rock Nine"- were able to enter Central High School under armed guard.

Impact of Brown v. Board of Education

Though the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board didn't achieve school desegregation on its own, the ruling (and the steadfast resistance to it across the South) fueled the nascent civil rights movement in the United States.

In 1955, a year after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Her arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and would lead to other boycotts, sit-ins and demonstrations (many of them led by Martin Luther King Jr.), in a movement that would eventually lead to the toppling of Jim Crow laws across the South.

Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, backed by enforcement by the Justice Department, began the process of desegregation in earnest. This landmark piece of civil rights legislation was followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

In 1976, the Supreme Court issued another landmark decision in Runyon v. McCrary, ruling that even private, nonsectarian schools that denied admission to students on the basis of race violated federal civil rights laws.

By overturning the "separate but equal" doctrine, the Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education had set the legal precedent that would be used to overturn laws enforcing segregation in other public facilities. But despite its undoubted impact, the historic verdict fell short of achieving its primary mission of integrating the nation's public schools.

Today, more than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, the debate continues over how to combat racial inequalities in the nation's school system, largely based on residential patterns and differences in resources between schools in wealthier and economically disadvantaged districts across the country.

HISTORY Vault: Black History

Sources

History - Brown v. Board of Education Re-enactment, United States Courts.
Brown v. Board of Education, The Civil Rights Movement: Volume I (Salem Press).
Cass Sunstein, "Did Brown Matter?" The New Yorker, May 3, 2004.
Brown v. Board of Education, PBS.org.
Richard Rothstein, Brown v. Board at 60, Economic Policy Institute, April 17, 2014.

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Brown v. Board of Education: Summary, Ruling & Impact | HISTORY

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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional.

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Emmett Louis Till was murdered for speaking to a white woman in Money, MS.

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The Body Of Emmett Till | 100 Photos | TIME

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Rosa Parks arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to white woman in Montgomery, AL. Montgomery bus boycott begins

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Rosa Parks' Bus

In 1955, African Americans were still required by a Montgomery, Alabama, city ordinance to sit in the back half of city buses and to yield their seats to white riders if the front half of the bus, reserved for whites, was full.

But on December 1, 1955, African American seamstress Rosa Parks was commuting home on Montgomery's Cleveland Avenue bus from her job at a local department store. She was seated in the front row of the "colored section." When the white seats filled, the driver, J. Fred Blake, asked Parks and three others to vacate their seats. The other Black riders complied, but Parks refused.

She was arrested and fined $10, plus $4 in court fees. This was not Parks' first encounter with Blake. In 1943, she had paid her fare at the front of a bus he was driving, then exited so she could re-enter through the back door, as required. Blake pulled away before she could re-board the bus.

Did you know? Nine months before Rosa Parks' arrest for refusing to give up her bus seat, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested in Montgomery for the same act. The city's Black leaders prepared to protest, until it was discovered Colvin was pregnant and deemed an inappropriate symbol for their cause.

Although Parks has sometimes been depicted as a woman with no history of civil rights activism at the time of her arrest, she and her husband Raymond were, in fact, active in the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP), and Parks served as its secretary.

Upon her arrest, Parks called E.D. Nixon, a prominent Black leader, who bailed her out of jail and determined she would be an upstanding and sympathetic plaintiff in a legal challenge of the segregation ordinance. African American leaders decided to attack the ordinance using other tactics as well.

The Women's Political Council (WPC), a group of Black women working for civil rights, began circulating flyers calling for a boycott of the bus system on December 5, the day Parks would be tried in municipal court. The boycott was organized by WPC President Jo Ann Robinson.

Montgomery's African Americans Mobilize

As news of the boycott spread, African American leaders across Montgomery (Alabama's capital city) began lending their support. Black ministers announced the boycott in church on Sunday, December 4, and the Montgomery Advertiser, a general-interest newspaper, published a front-page article on the planned action.

Approximately 40,000 Black bus riders-the majority of the city's bus riders-boycotted the system the next day, December 5. That afternoon, Black leaders met to form the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). The group elected Martin Luther King Jr., the 26-year-old-pastor of Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, as its president, and decided to continue the boycott until the city met its demands.

Initially, the demands did not include changing the segregation laws; rather, the group demanded courtesy, the hiring of Black drivers, and a first-come, first-seated policy, with whites entering and filling seats from the front and African Americans from the rear.

Ultimately, however, a group of five Montgomery women, represented by attorney Fred D. Gray and the NAACP, sued the city in U.S. District Court, seeking to have the busing segregation laws totally invalidated.

Although African Americans represented at least 75 percent of Montgomery's bus ridership, the city resisted complying with the protester's demands. To ensure the boycott could be sustained, Black leaders organized carpools, and the city's African American taxi drivers charged only 10 cents-the same price as bus fare-for African American riders.

Many Black residents chose simply to walk to work or other destinations. Black leaders organized regular mass meetings to keep African American residents mobilized around the boycott.

Integration at Last

On June 5, 1956, a Montgomery federal court ruled that any law requiring racially segregated seating on buses violated the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That amendment, adopted in 1868 following the U.S. Civil War, guarantees all citizens-regardless of race-equal rights and equal protection under state and federal laws.

The city appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld the lower court's decision on December 20, 1956. Montgomery's buses were integrated on December 21, 1956, and the boycott ended. It had lasted 381 days.

Bus Boycott Meets With Violence

Integration, however, met with significant resistance and even violence. While the buses themselves were integrated, Montgomery maintained segregated bus stops. Snipers began firing into buses, and one shooter shattered both legs of a pregnant African American passenger.

In January 1957, four Black churches and the homes of prominent Black leaders were bombed; a bomb at King's house was defused. On January 30, 1957, the Montgomery police arrested seven bombers; all were members of the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group. The arrests largely brought an end to the busing-related violence.

Boycott Puts Martin Luther King Jr. in Spotlight

The Montgomery Bus Boycott was significant on several fronts. First, it is widely regarded as the earliest mass protest on behalf of civil rights in the United States, setting the stage for additional large-scale actions outside the court system to bring about fair treatment for African Americans.

Second, in his leadership of the MIA, Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as a prominent national leader of the civil rights movement while also solidifying his commitment to nonviolent resistance. King's approach remained a hallmark of the civil rights movement throughout the 1960s.

Shortly after the boycott's end, he helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a highly influential civil rights organization that worked to end segregation throughout the South. The SCLC was instrumental in the civil rights campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963, and the March on Washington in August of that same year, during which King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

The boycott also brought national and international attention to the civil rights struggles occurring in the United States, as more than 100 reporters visited Montgomery during the boycott to profile the effort and its leaders.

Rosa Parks, while shying from the spotlight throughout her life, remained an esteemed figure in the history of American civil rights activism. In 1999, the U.S. Congress awarded her its highest honor, the Congressional Gold Medal.

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Montgomery Bus Boycott - Facts, Significance & Rosa Parks | HISTORY

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For 382 days, almost the entire African American population of Montgomery, Alabama, including leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, refused to ride on segregated buses. The protests marked a turning point in the American civil rights movement.

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Congress passes first civil rights act since Reconstruction

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On this date, the House of Representatives passed the initial version of what eventually became the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Propelled by advocacy groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, as well as the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, Congress took up the issue of civil rights during the summer of 1957. "This is an hour for great moral stamina," Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., of New York, one of three African-American Members in first session of the 85th Congress (1957-1959) told his colleagues. "America stands on trial today before the world and communism must succeed if democracy fails." The House passed H.R. 6127 by a vote of 286 to 126. Under the direction of Senate Majority Leader and future President Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, the Senate passed a watered-down version of the House bill which removed stringent voting protection clauses. The House approved the compromise measure on August 27 by a wide margin, 279 to 97. On September 9, 1957, President Eisenhower signed P.L. 85-315. The resulting law-the first significant measure to address African-American civil rights since 1875-established the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for two years, created a civil rights division in the U.S. Justice Department, and authorized the U.S. Attorney General to seek federal court injunctions to protect the voting rights of African Americans.

Related Highlight Subjects

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The Civil Rights Act of 1957 | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

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On this date, the House of Representatives passed the initial version of what eventually became the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Propelled by advocacy groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, as well as the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, Congress took up the issue of civil rights during the summer of 1957.

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Black students stage sit-in at 'whites only' lunch counter, Greensboro, NC

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sit-in movement, nonviolent movement of the U.S. civil rights era that began in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960. The sit-in, an act of civil disobedience, was a tactic that aroused sympathy for the demonstrators among moderates and uninvolved individuals. African Americans (later joined by white activists), usually students, would go to segregated lunch counters (luncheonettes), sit in all available spaces, request service, and then refuse to leave when denied service because of their race. In addition to creating disruptions and drawing unwanted publicity, the action caused economic hardship for the owners of the businesses, because the sit-in participants took up spaces that normally were filled by paying customers. Although the first lunch-counter sit-in began with just four participants, the attention paid to the protest created a movement that spread across the South in 1960 and 1961 to include 70,000 Black and white participants. It affected 20 states and resulted in the desegregation of many local businesses in those communities.

Origins of the sit-in movement

During the Indian struggle for independence from the British, followers of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's teaching employed the sit-in to great advantage. A tactic similar to the sit-in, the sit-down strike, has been used by unions to occupy plants of companies that they were on strike against. The sit-down was first used on a large scale in the United States during the United Automobile Workers' strike against the General Motors Corporation in 1937. An early antisegregation sit-in was staged by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) at a Chicago coffee shop in 1942, and similar actions took place around the South.

The lunch-counter sit-in that began the movement, however, took place in Greensboro, North Carolina, on the afternoon of February 1, 1960. Four freshmen from the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina (North Carolina A&T; now North Carolina A&T State University), a historically Black college, made some purchases at the local F.W. Woolworth department store. They then sat down at the "whites only" lunch counter and placed an order but were refused service. They remained seated and were eventually asked to leave the premises; instead, they stayed until closing and returned the next day with more than a dozen other students. One of the students, David Richmond, acknowledged later that the action began "on impulse"-though the group, who were familiar with Gandhi's nonviolent protests against the British, had previously discussed taking action against Jim Crow laws-and that the students were surprised at the impact their local initiative had on the entire civil rights movement.

Interest in participating in the sit-in spread quickly among the students of North Carolina A&T. The large supply of local students increased the effectiveness of the tactic; as demonstrators were arrested by local law enforcement and removed from the counter, others would take their place. Soon, as word about the Greensboro movement spread across the upper South, African American students from other historically Black campuses began their own protests. In places such as Salisbury, North Carolina; San Antonio, Texas; and Chattanooga, Tennessee, local officials and business owners agreed to desegregate facilities after local sit-in movements took hold. The Woolworth in Greensboro was desegregated in July 1960.

The sit-in movement destroyed a number of myths and stereotypes about Southern Blacks that white segregationists had commonly used to support the Jim Crow system. For example, with widespread and spontaneous demonstrations across the South, it became clear to observers that Southern Blacks were not content with Jim Crow segregation. The grassroots nature of the protest, arising locally from local Black populations, also crushed the myth that all civil rights agitation came from outside the South. Moreover, the nonviolent and courteous behaviour of the Black sit-in protesters played well on local and national television and showed them to be responsible people. The cruelty of the segregated system was further exposed when local ruffians attempted to break up the sit-ins with verbal abuse, assault, and violence. The local people who cooperated in sit-ins provided a community of Black citizens willing to agitate for change and to suffer violence for a greater cause.

Growth of the sit-in movement

As the movement grew and more students, both Black and white, became involved, civil rights organizations such as CORE and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) organized training sessions in nonviolence for participants. Expecting violence from whites, arrest, and abuse, CORE held workshops to instruct the students in the tactics and ideas of nonviolence so as to increase the power and scope of the movement.

Key to the success of the sit-in movement was the moral high ground that the participants took. Their peaceful demonstrations for basic legal rights and respect increased favourable public opinion of their cause. Facing violence with nonviolent resistance required that the students take no action against white aggressors and police who physically harassed and assaulted them and arrested them on spurious charges. Student participants came to understand the higher moral purpose of their own movement, and they practiced those principles in hundreds of small encounters across the upper and middle South.

Knowledge of the sit-in movements spread rapidly across the South as the local nonviolent action took on a regional character. By the end of February 1960, lunch-counter sit-ins had occurred in North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland, Kentucky, Alabama, Virginia, and Florida. They spread in March to Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Georgia and later to West Virginia, Ohio, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Illinois, Kansas, and Missouri.

At nearly every historically Black college, students organized and met with local officials from CORE and SCLC in workshops and conferences on nonviolence. Those meetings often brought together hundreds of students from communities in several states, who then began to form coordinated efforts at civil rights action. The creation of such communities of students led to greater coordination in the civil rights movement as the sit-ins phased out.

In April 1960 Ella Baker, former executive director of the SCLC, organized a student leadership conference at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, that resulted in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Baker had long been active as a local leader in the civil rights movement, but she gained a new prominence with the student-led sit-in movement. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke at the conference, emphasizing his philosophy of nonviolence. Demonstrating through nonviolence would force federal intervention, he argued, yet would permit the ultimate reconciliation between the races after the scourge of segregation had passed away.

In an article published shortly after the conference, Baker crystallized the message of the students when she stated that those who participated in sit-ins were concerned with something "bigger than a hamburger." She encapsulated their goals by quoting a student newsletter of the historically Black Barber-Scotia College (Concord, North Carolina):

We want the world to know that we no longer accept the inferior position of second-class citizenship. We are willing to go to jail, be ridiculed, spat upon, and even suffer physical violence to obtain First Class Citizenship.

Although the sit-in movement demonstrated success, the participants at the Raleigh conference clashed about the proper strategies for the civil rights movement. Activist and minister James Lawson argued that the legal strategy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was too slow to effect the major social change needed to bring about justice. CORE and SCLC had assisted in the sit-in movement, but mostly after the fact, and Lawson saw the need for an organization focused on developing local leaders in local communities that could operate outside the mainstream organizations.

SNCC was formed with Lawson's advice serving as its founding principles. It began working to organize students and local Black communities to advance the civil rights movement, often in tandem but sometimes at odds with the other civil rights movements and leaders.

The legacy of the sit-in movement

The sit-in movement produced a new sense of pride and power for African Americans. By rising up on their own and achieving substantial success protesting against segregation in the society in which they lived, Blacks realized that they could change their communities with local coordinated action. For many white Southerners, the sit-in movement demonstrated Blacks' dissatisfaction with the status quo and showed that economic harm could come to white-owned businesses unless they desegregated peacefully. The sit-in movement proved the inevitability of the end of the Jim Crow system. Most of the success in actual desegregation came in the upper Southern states, such as in cities in Arkansas, Maryland, North Carolina, and Tennessee. On the other hand, no cities in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, or South Carolina desegregated as a result of the sit-in movement.

The sit-in movement marked the first major effort by thousands of local Blacks in civil rights activism. However, the sit-ins failed to create the kind of national attention necessary for any federal intervention. Although SNCC did develop out of the sit-in movement, becoming a permanent organization separate from CORE and the SCLC, the sit-ins faded out by the end of 1960. A new phase of Black protest arose in the form of Freedom Rides, and new coordinated white resistance changed the tactics of civil rights leaders, dramatically raising the level and degree of violence by white civil rights opponents.

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Sit-in movement | history & impact on civil rights movement

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Sit-in movement, nonviolent movement of the U.S. civil rights era that began in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960. The sit-in, an act of civil disobedience, aroused sympathy among moderates and uninvolved individuals. African Americans (later joined by white activists) would go to segregated lunch counters.

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Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) founded to promote youth involvement

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CNN: SNCC's legacy: A civil rights history

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UGA is desegregated after a federal judge orders black students admitted. White students chant "two, four, six, eight, we don't want to integrate."

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The Desegregation of the University of Georgia

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Civil Rights groups join forces to launch voter registration drive

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Founded during the civil rights era, the Voter Education Project (VEP) was an Atlanta-based voting rights and voter education organization that remained active for thirty years. The VEP granted funds to organizations throughout the southern states to administer voter education programs and voter registration drives.

Leslie Dunbar, the director of the SRC,

began planning in 1961 for the VEP, which became an official program of the SRC on April 1, 1962. The first executive director of the project was Wiley Branton. Initially, the VEP was meant to be a pilot program, lasting only two and a half years, and supported by donations from the Taconic Foundation, the Field Foundation, and the Stern Family Fund. The organization did not directly engage in any voter registration activities but granted funds to civil rights organizations to support their voter registration drives and any voting-related research. The VEP funded, among other programs, SNCC's voter registration project in Selma, Alabama, during 1962-63. This program led directly to the 1965 Selma protests and brought Martin Luther King Jr. to Alabama for the subsequent Selma-to-Montgomery march.

In 1964 the SRC proposed a permanent program with expanded goals, including maximum voter registration, citizenship education, and leadership training. The second executive director of the program, Atlanta attorney Vernon Jordan, established VEP offices in several southern states. From 1965 to 1970 the VEP continued to channel grant money to various voter registration projects throughout the South.

The

VEP became an independent organization on June 1, 1971, under the leadership of its third executive director, John Lewis, the former chair of SNCC. Its separation from the SRC was necessitated by the U.S. Tax Reform Bill of 1969, which limited supporting organizations from receiving more than 25 percent of their total budgets from a single organization. Because the SRC received more than 25 percent of its funding from a single organization, the easiest course of action was to separate it from the VEP.

Although the VEP primarily focused its efforts on poor African American communities in the South, it also awarded grants to many organizations throughout the country. Both under the SRC and independent of it, the VEP remained a nonpartisan organization. It also functioned as a research center and became known as an authoritative source for statistics on southern elections and voter registration in general, as well as for trend analysis, studies on specific issues, and statistics broken down by race and gender. The VEP emphasized the collection of evaluative statistics for its own programs and the communication of its findings and results to the public.

As

executive director, John Lewis worked to expand the mission of the VEP beyond providing financial support to groups focused on securing civil rights for African Americans. Lewis was a proponent of King's vision of a "beloved community," and he charged his own organization with expanding its services to poor and minority citizens outside the African American community. Lewis also forged the VEP into an activist organization, launching Voter Mobilization Tours with Georgia state legislator and civil rights advocate Julian Bond. The participants in the tours campaigned from town to town and from door to door, encouraging southerners to register to vote.

The economic recession of the early 1970s severely curtailed the VEP's activities and reduced office staff. During this time the organization held benefit dinners, streamlined administrative functions, created an executive committee, expanded its board of directors, and increased its direct involvement in programming, all as strategies for the survival of the VEP.

In the middle and late 1970s the VEP participated in several national voter registration campaigns, expanding into radio and television. In 1977 John Lewis resigned as executive director to run for the U.S. Congress and was replaced by Vivian Malone Jones. The years 1977 and 1978 were low points for funding of the VEP, and staffing and programs were cut. Jones resigned in 1978 due to poor health, and Sherrill Marcus became the fifth executive director of the VEP.

The

VEP's financial problems continued throughout the 1980s, and the organization came close to folding in 1981. In 1982 Geraldine Thompson took over as executive director, serving without pay for several months. She led a campaign to salvage the organization by attracting funding to expand the purview of the VEP; by coordinating major voting initiatives with other southern and national organizations, including the Black Women's Vote Project and the Southern Women's Civic Education Project; and by holding workshops all over the South.

Due to a lack of funding, the VEP closed its doors in January 1992. At that time executive director Ed Brown was the only employee, and he served his last months in that position unpaid. His final act was to transfer the records of the VEP to the library at Clark Atlanta University; the records are housed today at the Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center.

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Founded during the civil rights era, the Voter Education Project (VEP) was an Atlanta-based voting rights and voter education organization that remained active for thirty years. The VEP granted funds to organizations throughout the southern states to administer voter education programs and voter registration drives.

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Who is Bayard Rustin?

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Christina Greer: An unsung hero of the civil rights movement

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In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington to nearly a quarter million people. None of it would have been possible without the march's chief organizer - a man named Bayard Rustin.

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Civil rights leader Medgar Evers is assassinated

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Medgar Evers was a native of Decatur, Mississippi, attending school there until being inducted into the U.S. Army in 1943. Despite fighting for his country as part of the Battle of Normandy, Evers soon found that his skin color gave him no freedom when he and five friends were forced away at gunpoint from voting in a local election. Despite his resentment over such treatment, Evers enrolled at Alcorn State University, majoring in business administration. While at the school, Evers stayed busy by competing on the school's football and track teams, also competing on the debate team, performing in the school choir and serving as president of the junior class.

He married classmate Myrlie Beasley on December 24, 1951, and completed work on his degree the following year. The couple moved to Mound Bayou, MS, where T.R.M. Howard had hired him to sell insurance for his Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company. Howard was also the president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), a civil rights and pro self-help organization. Involvement in the RCNL gave Evers crucial training in activism. He helped to organize the RCNL's boycott of service stations that denied blacks use of their restrooms. The boycotters distributed bumper stickers with the slogan "Don't Buy Gas Where You Can't Use the Restroom." Along with his brother, Charles Evers, he also attended the RCNL's annual conferences in Mound Bayou between 1952 and 1954 which drew crowds of ten thousand or more.

Evers applied to the then-segregated University of Mississippi Law School in February 1954. When his application was rejected, Evers became the focus of an NAACP campaign to desegregate the school, a case aided by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Brown v. Board of Education 347 US 483 that segregation was unconstitutional. In December of that year, Evers became the NAACP's first field officer in Mississippi.

After moving to Jackson, he was involved in a boycott campaign against white merchants and was instrumental in eventually desegregating the University of Mississippi when that institution was finally forced to enroll James Meredith in 1962.

In the weeks leading up to his death, Evers found himself the target of a number of threats. His public investigations into the murder of Emmett Till and his vocal support of Clyde Kennard left him vulnerable to attack. On May 28, 1963, a molotov cocktail was thrown into the carport of his home, and five days before his death, he was nearly run down by a car after he emerged from the Jackson NAACP office. Civil rights demonstrations accelerated in Jackson during the first week of June 1963. A local television station granted Evers time for a short speech, his first in Mississippi, where he outlined the goals of the Jackson movement. Following the speech, threats on Evers' life increased.

On June 12, 1963, Evers pulled into his driveway after returning from an integration meeting where he had conferred with NAACP lawyers. Emerging from his car and carrying NAACP T-shirts that stated, "Jim Crow Must Go", Evers was struck in the back with a bullet that ricocheted into his home. He staggered 30 feet before collapsing, dying at the local hospital 50 minutes later. Evers was murdered just hours after President John F. Kennedy's speech on national television in support of civil rights.

Mourned nationally, Evers was buried on June 19 in Arlington National Cemetery and received full military honors in front of a crowd of more than 3,000 people, the largest funeral at Arlington since John Foster Dulles. The past chairman of the American Veterans Committee, Mickey Levine, said at the services, "No soldier in this field has fought more courageously, more heroically than Medgar Evers."

On June 23, Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and member of the White Citizens' Council and Ku Klux Klan, was arrested for Evers' murder. During the course of his first 1964 trial, De La Beckwith was visited by former Mississippi governor Ross Barnett and one time Army Major General Edwin A. Walker.

All-white juries twice that year deadlocked on De La Beckwith's guilt, allowing him to escape justice. In response to the murder and miscarriage of justice, musician Bob Dylan wrote the song "Only a Pawn in Their Game" about Evers and his assassin. Phil Ochs wrote the songs "Too Many Martyrs" and "Another Country" in response to the killing (Evers is also mentioned in the song "Love Me I'm a Liberal"). Matthew Jones and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Freedom Singers paid tribute to Evers in the haunting "Ballad of Medgar Evers." Malvina Reynolds mentioned "the shot in Ever's back" in her song "It isn't nice".

Evers' legacy has been kept alive in a variety of ways. In 1970, Medgar Evers College was established in Brooklyn, NY as part of the City University of New York. In 1983, a made-for-television movie, For Us the Living: The Medgar Evers Story starring Howard Rollins, Jr. was aired, celebrating the life and career of Medgar Evers, and on June 28, 1992, he was immortalized in Jackson with a statue.

In 1994, thirty years after the two previous trials had failed to reach a verdict, Beckwith was again brought to trial based on new evidence concerning statements he made to others. During the trial, the body of Evers was exhumed from his grave for autopsy, and found to be in a surprisingly excellent state of preservation as a result of embalming. Beckwith was convicted on February 5, 1994, after living as a free man for three decades after the murder. Beckwith appealed unsuccessfully, and died in prison in January of 2001.

Before his body was reburied, owing to his excellent state of preservation, a new funeral was staged for Evers. This permitted his children, who were toddlers when he was assassinated and had very little memory of him, to have a chance to see him. The new funeral was covered on HBO's Autopsy series.

The 1996 film Ghosts of Mississippi tells the story of the 1994 trial, in which a District Attorney's office prosecutor, Robert Delaughter, successfully retried the case, and won.

Evers's wife, Myrlie, became a noted activist in her own right later in life, eventually serving as chairwoman of the NAACP. Medgar's brother Charles returned to Jackson in July 1963 and served briefly in his slain brother's place. Charles Evers remained involved in Mississippi Civil Rights for years to come. He resides in Jackson.

In 2001, Myrlie and Medgar's oldest son, Darrell Kenyatta Evers, died of colon cancer. Their two surviving children are Reena Denise and James Van.

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Medgar Evers was a native of Decatur, Mississippi, attending school there until being inducted into the U.S. Army in 1943. Despite fighting for his country as part of the Battle of Normandy, Evers soon found that his skin color gave him no freedom when he and five friends were forced away at gunpoint from voting in a local election.

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250,000 Americans march on Washington for civil rights and where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his infamous "I Have a Dream" speech

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The March On Washington: 1963 Marchers Reflect on the 2020 Movement | NPR

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Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson. & Cynthia Wesley were killed in bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL.

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The Aftermath

Upon learning of the bombing at the Church, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. sent a telegram to Alabama Governor George Wallace, a staunch and vocal segregationist, stating bluntly: 'The blood of our little children is on your hands." The brutal attack and the deaths of the four little girls shocked the nation and drew international attention to the violent struggle for civil rights in Birmingham. Many whites were as outraged by the incident as blacks and offered services and condolences to the families. Over, 8,000 people attended the girls' funeral service at Reverend John Porter's Sixth Avenue Baptist Church.

The deaths of the four girls was followed two months later by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, causing an outpouring of national grief, galvanizing the civil rights movement and ensuring the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Why This Church?

16th Street Baptist was a large and prominent church located downtown, just blocks from Birmingham's commercial district and City Hall. Since its construction in 1911, the church had served as the centerpiece of the city's African American community, functioning as a meeting place, social center, and lecture hall. Because of its size, location, and importance to the community, the church served as headquarters for civil rights mass meetings and rallies in the early 1960s.

Birmingham was the most segregated city in the United States and in April 1963, after an invitation by Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth to come help desegregate Birmingham, the city became the focus of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The desegregation campaign conceived by Shuttleworth was known as "Project C" and was to be a series of nonviolent protests and boycotts.

Despite resistance from some of the church's leadership and members of the congregation, the 16th Street Baptist Church joined the SCLC in their campaign. The church became the departure point for many of the demonstrations that took place in the city. On May 2, 1963, students ranging in age from eight to eighteen gathered at the church to march downtown and talk to the new mayor about segregation. After leaving the church they were met by police and many were jailed. By the time the "Children's Crusade" and the ensuing demonstrations ended on May 10th, thousands of children and adults had been injured by fire hoses and attack dogs and incarcerated by order of"Bull" Connor, Commissioner of Public Safety.

The church came to be viewed by many as a symbol and a rallying place for civil rights activists; and it became the focal point for racial tensions and white hostility towards the civil rights movement in Birmingham.

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16th Street Baptist Church Bombing (1963) (U.S. National Park Service)

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16th Street Baptist Church Bombing (1963)

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President Johnson signs Civil Rights Act of 1964

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The original version of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of race, sex, color, religion, and national origin. The Act now prohibits discrimination in recruitment, hiring, wages, assignment, promotions, benefits, discipline, discharge, layoffs and almost every aspect of employment. The EEOC investigates discrimination or harassment on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age, disability, pregnancy, genetic information, and retaliation for reporting or participating in and/or opposing a discriminatory practice. Title VII does not prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. As a result, many states have stepped in to protect sexual orientation at the state level.

Title VII applies to private employers, labor unions and employment agencies, and the federal government. Originally, the federal government was exempt from the Act but now only Native American tribes, private nonprofit organizations, and religious groups are free to discriminate.

Small businesses with fewer than 25 employees were originally allowed to continue discriminating under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Equal Opportunity Employment Act of 1972 changed the law to require all businesses with 15 or more employees to adhere to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Private establishment loophole -Title II of the Act makes it illegal to discrimination in hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, and all other public accommodations but it exempts private clubs without defining the word "private." This creates a loophole for organizations that want to continue to discriminate legally.

83-day filibuster -A filibuster is a procedure that allows senators to delay or entirely prevent a vote on a proposed bill by talking about any topic they wish for as long as they want unless three-fifths of the Senate votes to end it.

The 83-day filibuster that precipitated the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is still the longest filibuster in Senate history. On the last day of the filibuster, June 10, 1964, Democratic segregationist Senator Robert Byrd spoke for 14 hours straight.

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional in the landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education. For nearly a decade after the Court's ruling, hundreds of black applicants applied to study at the University of Alabama only to be consistently denied admission. In fact, with the help of local police all but one applicant, Autherine Lucy, was denied admission for one invented reason or another. Even in her situation, Autherine Lucy was removed on the third day of school after the University claimed that it could not protect her from angry mobs bent on seeing her removed from the school. Shortly after that incident she was expelled for allegedly slandering the school.

During his campaign for governor in 1962, George Wallace promised that he would personally "stand in the schoolhouse door" to block integration in Alabama public schools. To help solidify his promise, Wallace called for "segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever" at his inaugural speech.

Governor Wallace was able to follow up on his promise to stand in a schoolhouse door when two well-qualified black candidates - Vivian Malone and James Hood - decided to try to register for classes on June 11, 1963 after obtaining a federal court order demanding that the university admit black students. Seizing on the opportunity to gain political capital with fellow racist constituents, Governor Wallace arrived at the school with a cadre of state troopers and proceeded to block the doorway into Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama.

When Malone and Hood arrived at the school with federal marshals in tow, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach asked Wallace to step aside. Instead of complying, Wallace began delivering a speech about states' rights. Katzenbach had to call President John F. Kennedy, who then federalized the Alabama National Guard. A reluctant General Henry Graham of the Alabama National Guard was then required to command Governor Wallace to step aside under the orders of the President of the United States. Wallace continued his speech for some time but then eventually moved and Malone and Hood were able to register as students.

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The original version of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of race, sex, color, religion, and national origin. The Act now prohibits discrimination in recruitment, hiring, wages, assignment, promotions, benefits, discipline, discharge, layoffs and almost every aspect of employment.

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Congress Passes Voting Rights Act of 1965

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President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 with Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders in attendance
National Archives (NARA)

On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Voting Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 expanded the 14th and 15th amendments by banning racial discrimination in voting practices. The act was a response to the barriers that prevented African Americans from voting for nearly a century.
Background:
On March 30, 1870 the 15th amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed. It stated that a citizen's right to vote could not be taken away based on their race. Following the Compromise of 1877, the infamous Jim Crow Laws were introduced. These laws were barriers at the state and local level that prevented African Americans from voting. White supremacists used intimidation, literacy tests, and poll taxes to scare away African American voters. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law on July 2. This law focused on segregation and employment discrimination. It failed to fully address voting issues faced by African Americans. On June 23, 1964, the 24th amendement to the constitution was passed. This amendment addressed fair voting and barred poll taxes. It was now illegal to make anyone pay to have the right to vote. Despite these new laws, only 2 percent of African Americans were registered to vote. In March 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. led marches in Selma, Alabama to dramatize the voting issue. Selma had a record of using violence to prevent African Americans from voting. Shortly after the marches, President Johnson sent a voting rights bill to Congress to remove race-based restrictions. This bill was quickly adopted by Congress and signed into law. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 made discriminatory voting practices illegal. It is considered to be one of the most far-reaching pieces of Civil Rights legislation.

Theme Study, Civil Rights in America: Racial Voting Rights

In 1999 the U.S. Congress directed the National Park Service to conduct a multi-state study of civil right sites to determine the national significance of the sites and the appropriateness of including them in the National Park System.

Theme Study, Civil Rights Framework

Completed in January 2002 (rev. 2008), Civil Rights in America: A Framework for Identifying Significant Sites, represents the first chapter in a larger study on the history of civil rights that will help the National Park Service evaluate proposals fro new units in the park system.

Teaching with Historic Places, The Selma to Montomery Voting Rights March: Shaking the Conscience of the Nation

Learn how people in Selma, Alabama and national civil rights organizations worked together to end the unconstitutional denial of voting rights to African Americans in the South.

Historic Trail, Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail

Listen to the stories behind the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Subject Site, Civil Rights in America

To live freely and participate in society is a right many take for granted. Achieving and maintaining those civil rights have been a struggle for different groups throughout U.S. history. Civil rights mean more than the protests of the 1950s and 1960s and reach beyond racial and ethnic groups.

National Historical Park, Lyndon B. Johnson

The Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park tells the story of our 36th President beginning with his ancestors until his final resting place on his beloved LBJ Ranch. This entire "circle of life" gives the visitor a unique perspective into one of America's most noteworthy citizens by providing the most complete picture of any American president.

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Voting Rights Act of 1965 (U.S. National Park Service)

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On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Voting Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 expanded the 14th and 15th amendments by banning racial discrimination in voting practices. The act was a response to the barriers that prevented African Americans from voting for nearly a century.