1. The Civil Rights Movement
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
Martin Luther King. Jr.
The Civil Rights Movement

2. Make Up of the Civil Rights Movement N.A.A.C.P. Grass Roots Movements
Legal battle in the courts against segregation & discrimination
Grass Roots Movements
Everyday people standing up to fight injustice.

3. Background

4. African-American activism
N.A.A.C.P.
W.E.B. du Bois
James Weldon Johnson
Marcus Garvey
A. Philip Randolph
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
March on Washington

5. Changes after world War II
Defense Plants under orders to hire regardless of race
African-American G.I.’s
Segregated battalions with few Black officers
Red Cross segregated blood
Greeted as heroes by Europeans
G.I. Bill enable African-Americans veterans to go to college, own their own business, own their own home, but discrimination blocked their way

6. The Movement began…

7. N.A.A.C.P. legal defense Fund
N.A.A.C.P.’s Legal Defense Fund
Walter White head of NAACP
Charles Houston head of Legal Defense Fund
Howard University Law School Professor
Began to challenge Plessy v. Ferguson in the courts

8. Truman desegregated the army, 1948: Executive Order #9981

9. Brown v. Board of education of topeka, 1954
Case based on 3 lower court decisions
Oliver Brown in Topeka, Kansas
Barbara Johns & fellow students in Virginia
Parents in Clarendon County, South Carolina
Warren Court reversed Plessy’s Separate but Equal decision
Segregation is unconstitutional
Schools must desegregate with “all deliberate speed

10. Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-56
Rosa Parks arrested for sitting in white section
Martin Luther King, Jr. organized boycott using nonviolent protest
lasted 381 days
Montgomery, Alabama busses desegregated
King was 26 years old
Influenced by Howard Thurman friend of his fathers who had been a missionary and met & worked with Gandhi

11. Civil Rights Act of 1957
Set up congressional committee to investigate voting violations in the south.