1. Identity Politics & Liberation Ideologies
MLK Jr. and the
Black Civil Rights Movement

2. Background Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
Attended and graduated from racially segregated school high school and colleges in Atlanta
Received doctorate from Boston U in 1955
Executive Board of NAACP in 1953
Began pastoral work in Montgomery, Alabama in 1954

3. Background
Elected leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Council in 1957
Led the March on Washington, 1963

4. Background
In 1964, became the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize
Assassinated in 1968

5. Overview Historical Background to the Civil Rights Movement
Liberalism and Liberation
King’s Arguments

6. Civil War & Reconstruction
Union army occupies south
14th Amendment (1868)
15th Amendment (1870)
Civil Rights Enforcement Act (1870)
Civil Rights Act (1872)
Civil Rights Act (1875)

7. Reconstruction First black political leaders elected to Congress
Hiram Revels (MS) first black senator
6 blacks elected to serve in House in 41st and 42nd Congress

8. Reconstruction 1876 Presidential Election Rutherford B. Hayes (R)
Samuel Tilden (D)

9. 1876 Presidential Election

10. Reconstruction
In exchange for Hayes winning electoral college vote, Republicans agree to end occupation of the South
1877 Reconstruction essentially ends with end of occupation
Southern governments and vigilante groups move to disenfranchise black voters

11. Rise of Segregation Voter intimidation (e.g., KKK activity)
Change voting requirements
poll tax, literacy test, “white” primaries, grandfather clause
Civil Rights cases (1883)
Supreme Court invalidates the 1875 Civil Rights Act
Plessy vs Ferguson (1896)

12. Plessy vs Ferguson
“The object of the [Fourteenth] Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.” -- Justice Henry Billings Brown
Homer Plessy

13. Plessy v. Ferguson
"We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”
Justice Henry Billings Brown

14. Jim Crow

15. Jim Crow
Jim Crow statutes by state

16. Jim Crow
For black civil rights leaders, segregation posed difficult questions of strategy and how to combat legal (de jure) inequality

17. Response to Segregation
Booker T. Washington and “Accomodationism”
Take whatever opportunities white America provides and do best you can until conditions change

18. Response to Segregation
W.E.B. Dubois and the founding of the NAACP
Legal strategy of challenging of “separate but equal” provision

19. Separate, but Equal?
Classroom in black school
Seat Pleasant, Maryland

20. Separate, but Equal?
Black school,
Camden, MS

21. Separate, but Equal?
Black school, Louisa County, VA

22. Response to Segregation
Key desegregation cases:
Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938)
Sweatt v. Painter (1950)

23. Response to Segregation
McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education (1950)

24. Response to Segregation
1954 Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, KN

25. Modern Civil Rights
Emergence of Modern Civil Rights Movement

26. Modern Civil Rights
In wake of Brown v. Board of Education, combination of further legal challenges, political mobilization, civil disobedience (peaceful and other)

27. Liberalism Revisited
Liberalism focuses on the primacy of the individual
The liberation and identity movements we will be examining make two types of claims:
Some groups have been treated as “individuals” legally, and that’s neither fair nor just
Because of this historical treatment, government policy should be used to advance the collective group well being