Quick questions on US civil rights movement 1954-1968: VCE Modern History Unit 4

After Reconstruction collapsed (1877), Southern states built a legal system of racial segregation. Plessy v Ferguson (18 May 1896) endorsed "separate but equal" public facilities. Black voters were disenfranchised through literacy tests, poll taxes, white primaries, and violence. Around 4,400 lynchings of Black Americans were recorded between 1877 and 1950.

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, under Thurgood Marshall, brought a coordinated challenge to school segregation. Five consolidated cases were argued before the Supreme Court. The unanimous opinion of Chief Justice Earl Warren in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka (17 May 1954) declared that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal" and overturned Plessy in the field of public education.

Rosa Parks's arrest on 1 December 1955 was not spontaneous: Parks was a trained NAACP secretary; the Women's Political Council had drafted a boycott plan months earlier. The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), led by 26-year-old Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr, called a boycott that continued for 381 days.

Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard on 4 September 1957 to prevent nine Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School. President Eisenhower federalised the National Guard and deployed the 101st Airborne Division on 24 September 1957. The Little Rock Nine attended classes under federal protection.

Four Black students sat at the segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina on 1 February 1960. The sit-in movement spread to around 100 cities within months. By the end of 1960 around 70,000 people had participated and around 3,000 had been arrested.

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) under James Farmer organised Freedom Rides to test the Supreme Court ruling in Boynton v Virginia (5 December 1960) that segregation in interstate bus terminals was unconstitutional. Black and white riders left Washington DC on 4 May 1961 in two buses.

Birmingham, Alabama under Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor was a flagship target. The SCLC's Project C began on 3 April 1963. Children marched from 2 May 1963 (the Children's Crusade); Connor responded with fire hoses and police dogs. The televised images shocked national opinion.

The Civil Rights Act, signed by Johnson on 2 July 1964, banned discrimination in public accommodations (Title II), in publicly funded programs (Title VI), and in employment (Title VII, enforced by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission).

Around two per cent of Selma, Alabama's eligible Black voters were registered. SCLC and SNCC ran a voter-registration campaign from January 1965. Demonstrators attempted to march from Selma to Montgomery on 7 March 1965 ("Bloody Sunday"); state troopers attacked them at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Television coverage produced a national outcry.

The movement turned north from 1965. The Watts riot in Los Angeles (11 to 17 August 1965) killed 34 and exposed the depth of urban Black poverty. The SCLC's Chicago Freedom Movement (1966) targeted housing segregation; King was injured by a rock in Marquette Park on 5 August 1966. The Fair Housing Act would not come until April 1968.

King's Riverside Church speech (4 April 1967) opposed the Vietnam War, breaking with Johnson. The Poor People's Campaign (announced December 1967) aimed at economic justice across racial lines.

Taylor Branch (Parting the Waters, 1988; Pillar of Fire, 1998; At Canaan's Edge, 2006) is the standard narrative history of "America in the King Years."

Brown was a legal landmark, but enforcement was minimal until federal intervention. By 1964, fewer than 2 per cent of Southern Black children attended desegregated schools.

The movement was disproportionately led by women on the ground (Ella Baker, Diane Nash, Fannie Lou Hamer, Septima Clark, Daisy Bates). Public spokespersons were mostly male, but organising was not.