The Mountaintop

The American Civil Rights Movement is largely remembered as occurring in the 1950s and 1960s, but its roots began in the earliest days of the transatlantic slave trade in 1501—and Black Americans have fought for their rights ever since. Throughout nearly four centuries of legalized slavery, almost 13 million people were abducted from Africa and trafficked into slavery, and millions more were born to enslaved people. They were denied both human rights and civil rights, as enslaved humans were legally treated as livestock. Abolitionist movements, rebellions, and escapees sought to deliver as many enslaved people as possible to places where slavery had been abolished. When Congress ratified the 13th Amendment on December 6, 1865, chattel slavery became illegal—except for the incarcerated. Owning nothing but themselves, many newly freed people remained stuck in the sharecropping system. The 14th Amendment in 1868 granted these people citizenship and equal protection under the law, and the 15th Amendment in 1869 granted Black men the right to vote. Former slave states fought to keep the spirit of slavery alive, and in 1896, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy vs. Ferguson determined providing “separate but equal” facilities to Black Americans did not violate the 14th Amendment—paving the way for legal segregation.

During this period, facilities were separate, but certainly not equal. Segregation was legally codified in southern states via statutes known as Jim Crow laws, but it also occurred tacitly in northern states via the expected social order, often policed by white people. Black people were punished for real and imagined crimes with prison (often considered legal slavery), corporal punishment, or even lynching. For Black Americans, access was limited in all aspects of life—including education, employment and union membership, transportation, and housing. Voting, a right now protected by the constitution, was guarded with literacy tests deliberately designed to be confusing. The fight for civil rights was reenergized in the 1940s, when Black soldiers returned from World War II: They questioned why they were allowed to fight and die for America, but barred from sitting at the same lunch counter as white people. In 1942, a Black newspaper (the Pittsburgh Courier) started the Double V Campaign: Victory Abroad and Victory at Home, the latter victory being for Black civil rights. A significant target of this movement was school segregation, since inadequate educational facilities and opportunities were both intellectually and psychologically damaging to young Black students. In the Supreme Court case Brown vs. the Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) challenged inequality in separate-but-equal schooling and won. Later, six-year-old Ruby Bridges became the first Black student to enroll in an all-white elementary school in a southern state. School systems balked at desegregation, some even closing their public schools for several years.

In 1954, activist Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to cede her bus seat to a white man. Segregation on buses was strict, often enforced with violence or even death by bus drivers. Civil rights leaders chose Parks as the face of a bus boycott, which lasted 381 days until the city, having taken a financial hit, gave in and desegregated buses. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began to rise in the ranks of civil rights leaders, preaching nonviolent integration throughout the 1950s. Meanwhile, in 1952, Malcolm X was paroled after a seven-year prison stint. Becoming a leader in the Nation of Islam (NOI), he joined the battle for civil rights—specifically, Black independence and self-determination. He argued against King’s nonviolence, and people began to defect from King—especially after four young girls died in the 1963 bombing of a Black church in Birmingham. Both King and Malcolm X’s organizations were full of student activists, who risked their lives in nonviolent protest or radical self-love. Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, but his legacy continued through the Black Power movement and Black Panther Party formed after his death. In 1968, King was also assassinated.