Civil rights movement (1896–1954)
[2] This was an era of new beginnings, in which some movements, such as Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, were very successful but left little lasting legacy; while others, such as the NAACP's legal assault on state-sponsored segregation, achieved modest results in its early years, as in, Buchanan v. Warley (1917) (zoning), making some progress but also suffering setbacks, as in Corrigan v. Buckley (1926) (housing), gradually building to key victories, including in Smith v. Allwright (1944) (voting), Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) (housing), Sweatt v. Painter (1950) (schooling) and Brown.
Why may it not, upon like grounds, punish whites and blacks who ride together in street cars or in open vehicles on a public road or street?The Plessy decision did not address an earlier Supreme Court case, Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886),[6] involving discrimination against Chinese immigrants, that held that a law that is race-neutral on its face, but is administered in a prejudicial manner, is an infringement of the Equal Protection Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.
The writer Michael Fauntroy contends that the effort was coordinated with Democrats as part of a larger movement toward disenfranchisement of black people in the South at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century by increasing restrictions in voter registration rules.
Despite repeated legal challenges and some successes by the NAACP, the Democrats continued to devise new ways to limit black electoral participation, such as white primaries, through the 1960s.
Leonidas C. Dyer, a white Republican Representative from St. Louis, Missouri, worked with the NAACP to introduce an anti-lynching bill into the House, where he gained strong passage in 1922.
[13] Mississippi passed a new constitution in 1890 that included provisions for poll taxes, literacy tests (which depended on the arbitrary decisions of white registrars), and complicated record keeping to establish residency, which severely reduced the number of blacks who could register.
[citation needed] One device which the Democratic Party began to use more widely in Southern states in the early 20th century was the white primary, which served for decades to disfranchise the few blacks who managed to get past barriers of voter registration.
The KKK's revival was inspired in part by the movie Birth of a Nation, which glorified the earlier Klan and dramatized the racist stereotypes concerning blacks of that era.
The Klan focused on political mobilization, which allowed it to gain power in states such as Indiana, on a platform that combined racism with anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic and anti-union rhetoric, but also supported lynching.
In 1900 Reverend Matthew Anderson, speaking at the annual Hampton Negro Conference in Virginia, said that "...the lines along most of the avenues of wage earning are more rigidly drawn in the North than in the South.
There seems to be an apparent effort throughout the North, especially in the cities to debar the colored worker from all the avenues of higher remunerative labor, which makes it more difficult to improve his economic condition even than in the South.
In response, Congress enacted the second Morrill Act of 1890, which required states that excluded blacks from their existing land grant colleges to open separate institutions and to equitably divide the funds between the schools.
Publicly, he accepted the continuation of Jim Crow and segregation in the short term, but privately helped to fund national court cases that challenged the laws.
They issued a manifesto calling for universal manhood suffrage, elimination of all forms of racial segregation and extension of education—not limited to the vocational education that Washington emphasized—on a nondiscriminatory basis.
It also gained a Supreme Court ruling striking down Oklahoma's grandfather clause that exempted most illiterate white voters from a law that disfranchised African-American citizens in Guinn v. United States (1915).
The NAACP operated primarily at the local level, providing as forum that brought black religious, professional and business elites in most large cities.
Baltimore was a pioneer in battling for issues that dominated the agendas of the post-World War II civil rights and Black Power movements.
[46] It investigated the serious race riots in numerous major industrial cities throughout the United States in what was called the "Red Summer of 1919," catalyzed by postwar economic and social tensions.
The NAACP led the successful fight, in alliance with the American Federation of Labor, to prevent the nomination of John Johnston Parker to the Supreme Court.
[52]: 2 The NAACP's legal department, headed by Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, undertook a litigation campaign spanning several decades to bring about the reversal of the "separate but equal" doctrine established in the Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).
[52]: 2 The NAACP's first cases did not challenge the principle directly, but sought instead to establish factually that the state's segregated facilities in transportation, public education and parks, for instance, were not equal.
In Topeka, Kansas, the local NAACP branch determined that Oliver Brown would be a good candidate for filing a lawsuit; he was an assistant pastor and the father of three girls.
Unusually, they pushed the case back by a year, to allow the lawyers involved to research the intention of the framers who drafted the "Equal Protection Clause" of the 14th Amendment.
Justice Stanley Reed was swayed after Warren suggested that a Southerner's lone dissent on this issue could be more dangerous and incendiary than the court's unanimous decision.
The experience of fighting in World War I along with exposure to different racial attitudes in Europe influenced the black veterans by creating a widespread demand for the freedoms and equality for which they had fought.
In addition, during the Great Migration, hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved to northern industrial cities starting prior to World War I and through 1940.
The Transport Workers Union of America, which had strong ties with the Communist Party at the time, entered into coalitions with Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the NAACP and the National Negro Congress to attack employment discrimination in public transit in New York City in the early 1940s.
The CIO was particularly vocal in calling for elimination of racial discrimination by defense industries during World War II; they were also forced to combat racism within their own membership, putting down strikes by white workers who refused to work with black co-workers.
[58] On December 28, 1951, T. R. M. Howard, an entrepreneur, surgeon, fraternal leader and planter in Mississippi, founded the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL) together with other key blacks in the state.
Attendance was a life-transforming experience for many future civil black leaders who became prominent in the 1960s, such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Amzie Moore, Aaron Henry, and George W. Lee.
