The Origins of the African-American Civil Rights Movement

Ai-min Zhang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317794653
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The historical relationship between American urbanization, industrialization and the emergence of the civil rights movement is examined in this thesis in order to establish why the African-American Civil Rights Movement occurred. The book discusses many factors that were fundamental to causing the rise of the civil rights movement. It begins with a brief introduction to the African-American's political, economic and social conditions since the American Civil War and goes on to consider the effects of the two Great Black Migrations in which millions of black Americans moved to the big industrial cities and began to learn how to make effective use of their voting rights to protect their own interests. Finally the book examines the effect of the Second World War and also the role of the Supreme Court.

Chapter One
The Legacy of the Civil War

In the year of 1865, the American Civil War ended with the victory of the North, and the Reconstruction of the South began. For nearly one-third of the 19^th century thereafter, the conditions of African Americans was improved to a certain degree. When Reconstruction ended, white supremacists launched a vindictive counterattack against the recently freed blacks, making their conditions deteriorate dramatically. Some rights that they had obtained were again taken away from them. So civil rights became the key issues of the later African American civil rights struggles and movement. In a sense, we may say that the civil rights movement began immediately after the end of the American Civil War. Initially, blacks had attempted to make active responses, but limited by the historical conditions and the degrees of the African Americans' awakening, an ideological trend called "adaptivism" which stressed conforming to the current situation took the upper hand among the African Americans.

The African Americans' Rights were not Secured by the Reconstruction

The victory of the American Civil War won the African Americans' personal freedom, but it could not be called genuine freedom were they not allowed to enjoy their basic civil rights. In order to reinforce its war fruits and its political domination, with an alliance of Republicans in the North and some radical Democrats in the South, the U.S. Congress passed between 1866-1875 a series of acts and two Amendments to the Constitution.¹ For example, "An Act to Protect all Persons in the United States in their Civil Rights, and Furnish the Means of their Vindication," was adopted by the Congress on March 13, 1866 and was vetoed by President Andrew Johnson and passed again on April 9 of the same year; the second Civil Rights Act passed on May 21, 1866 was designed to prohibit kidnapping blacks to force or sell them to be slaves; "An Act to abolish and forever prohibit the System of Peonage in the Territory of New-Mexico and other Parts of the United States" passed on March 2, 1867; the Mandated Enforcement Act of May 31, 1870; the Ku Klux Klan Act was adopted on April 20; the acts enacted by the Congress respectively on March 2,1870 and June 26, 1873 providing that "the respected" passengers should be received in the hotels and other public accommodations regardless of their race and color of skin in Washington D.C.; the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which provided African Americans' equal economic, political, and social rights, was passed on March 1,1875.

Of special importance was the passing into law of the Fourteenth and the Fifteenth Amendments to the U. S. Constitution, which legally acknowledged and protected the African Americans' basic rights. The Fourteenth Amendment, passed on July 28, 1868, enacted three extremely important articles, i.e. "privileges or immunities," "Due process of law," and "Equal protection of laws." These had a very significant impact on the later social life and destinies of African Americans', and they also provided that the Federal government was empowered to enforce the various acts.

The Fifteenth Amendment, passed on March 30, 1870, was designed to protect the right of African Americans to vote. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 provided that the blacks, whites and tax-exempted Indians born in the United States were all American citizens, who would equally enjoy economic, legal and testifying rights. The Mandated Enforcement Act of 1870 provided that blacks were endowed with equal rights to vote with whites, and specified that African Americans would have access to voter registration and to polls. It also sought to ensure that African Americans would enjoy equal civil rights with whites. The Ku Klux Klan Act of 1870 was designed to guarantee the implementation of the civil rights act and stipulates that the U.S. President should be responsible to take all measures including using forces to enforce the laws. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 provided that all American citizens were entitled to the equal use of public facilities. ²

The adoption and implementation of the above mentioned acts guaranteed the African Americans' rights in a certain degree. African Americans were active politically, with many becoming state legislators, and several blacks were elected as the secretaries of the states. These included Jonathan Gibbs in Florida (1868-1872); Francis Cardozo in South Carolina (1868-1872), later as the treasurer inl872-1876; James Lynch (1868-1872) and James Hill (1872-1878) in Mississippi. From 1868 to 1877, there were altogether two black United States Senators and 14 black Representatives.³

Economically, only a few African Americans got their own land. Former slave owners bestowed some of the land as a favor. However, most southern blacks remained landless after the Reconstruction.

With the assistance of the Freedmen's Bureau, the philanthropists in the North set up some private schools soon after the end of the Civil War. During the Reconstruction period, the public school system was adopted in the states. Such well-known institutions as Atlanta University, Fisk University, and Howard University were all started during this period. These, and other public and private schools, began to enable blacks to acquire some scientific and cultural knowledge that would be critical to their fate.

In 1868, General Samuel C. Armstrong, a graduate from the Williams Institute in Massachusetts, established the Hampton Institute in Virginia. The principles of industrial education advocated enthusiastically by Armstrong and by his student Booker T. Washington, who later founded Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, had far-reaching influence over the progress of blacks. Armstrong and Washington established these institutes with the aims "to train selected youth who shall go out and reach and lead their people, first by example, by getting land and homes, to give not a dollar that they can earn for themselves; to teach respect for labor; to replace stupid drudgery with skilled hands; to these ends to build up an industrial system for sake of character."⁴

During the Reconstruction, the situation of African Americans was improved in a degree, but because of the strong opposition to it, the Freedmen's Bureau was forced to close. At the same time, the Federal government was protecting the civil rights of only a small part of the African Americans who were in possession of land and farm tools. When the Freedmen's Saving's and Trust Company announced its bankruptcy in 1874, some freedmen lost their first sum of savings. To make matters worse for blacks, the National Labor Union adopted a policy of racial segregation in 1869, and black workers were obliged to organize in the same year the National Colored Labor Union.

However, the heaviest blow to the African Americans was the series of decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Slaughter House cases were not directly concerned with the African Americans' civil rights issue, but the Supreme Court's decision turned the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment designed to protect the rights and immunities of blacks into empty paper. In the decision on this case, the Supreme Court distinguished between the state citizen and the U.S. citizen, arguing that the states had the right to decide who was the citizen of the state, and the rights and immunities of the state citizens were not protected by the Fourteenth Amendment and the Federal Government, they were protected by the state government instead. The states were authorized to promulgate the privileges and immunities of their citizens. In 1876, the Court invalidated in U.S. v. Reese and U. S. v. Cruikshank, Section 3, 4, and 6 of the Civil Rights Enforcement Act of May 31, 1870. This posed a further threat to the ability of African American to enjoy the rights and privileges provided in the American Constitution and laws. In the following two cases of U.S. v. Harris in 1883 and Baldwin v. Franks of 1887, the American Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the Article II of the Ku Klux Klan Act, which prohibited the deprivation of anyone's equal legal rights and immunities.⁵ Also in 1883, in a collection of five cases involving civil rights the Supreme Court ruled that the articles ensuring that whites and others enjoyed equal rights in hotels and theaters went against the Thirteenth and the Fourteenth Amendments, and were therefore unconstitutional. Although this decision caused the bitter condemnation of many people, especially by some black leaders, and despite the classic dissent of Justice of the Supreme Court John Marshall Harlan, it became American law.⁶

From then on, the situation of African Americans deteriorated badly. Together with other decisions of the Supreme Court after 1873, this decision provided adequate legal justification for the pattern of racial segregation and discrimination that eventually emerged in America.

In addition to what was happening in the courts, in order to prevent the newly freed blacks from resettling in northern and southern cities and to ensure the adequacy of labor needed on plantations, the southern states enacted certain regulations to limit the black labors' freedom of activities. In November of 1865, the first Black Code of the United States came into existence in the state of Mississippi.⁷ Following the example of Mississippi, other states from the former Confederacy amended their constitutions and enacted and implemented black codes of their own. Although there were differences among these codes both in contents and forms, all of them contained the following basic aspects: (1) Intermarriage was banned; (2) Master and Apprentice: male under 21, female under 18 will not be competent to make a contract; (3) Contract for Service: Blacks were not allowed to engage in certain trades and occupations, and were denied the right to form partnerships; (4)Regulations of Labor on Farms: On farms or in Out-door service, the hours of labor, except on Sunday, shall be from sun-rise to sun-set, with a reasonable interval for breakfast and dinner, ...All lost time...and all losses...may be deducted from the wages of the servants...(5)Rights of Servants as Between Himself and Master; (6)Rights of master as Between Himself and His Servant; (7)Mechanics, Artisans and Shop-keepers: No person of color shall pursue or practice the art, trade or business of an artisan, mechanic or shop-keeper, or any other trade, employment or business on his own account and for his own benefit, or in partnership with a white person, or as agent or servant of any person, until she shall have attained a license therefor from a judge of the District Court; (8)Vagrancy and Idleness.⁸

Obviously the black codes of the states were designed to reestablish the master-servant relationship between the whites and the blacks. In practice, they were the "visible product" of the southern white chauvinists' efforts to reconstruct the slavery system.⁹ The southerners held that the "Black Codes" were the only feasible way of reconstructing an effective working relationship after the Civil War.

The Establishment and Development of the Racial Segregation System

The long history of the fight against segregation and discrimination in the United States began before the Civil War. By 1865, the U.S. Congress had put an end to the Act of 1825 that prohibited blacks from being mailmen, and it provided that the blacks had the right to testify before Federal courts. In 1865 and 1866, the states of Illinois and Indiana annulled one after another their testimony and immigration laws that operated against blacks.

The phenomenon of racial segregation was first found in the field of education. As early as in 1857, led by famous protesting leader George Thomas Downing from New Port, blacks in Rhode Island waged the struggle against segregation system in schools, and this struggle was won in 1866. Legislation establishing racial segregation first appeared in the field of education, too. By the year of 1878, most of the southern and the frontier states legalized the racial segregation practices, which had long been in fashion. The rest states followed their examples in succession during the 1880s and the 1890s. The phenomenon of discrimination in the allocation of the school funds was getting increasingly serious. By the end of the 19^th century, in many places, the money spent on schools for African Americans was being reduced dramatically, while the gap between the education funds obtained by white and black students was gradually widening.

Blacks also worked against the use of segregated buses. In 1867, under the great pressure from the broad black masses and some sympathetic whites in Philadelphia, the legislatures of some states passed laws prohibiting racial segregation actions in public vehicles.

In the South, the racial segregation system was gradually extended as a replacement for slavery. This development was to serve the goal of white domination. But in this period, many of the aspects of racial segregation were customs, which were not built on legal foundations. Meanwhile, the measures adopted by the southern whites encountered strong resistance and opposition. The aforementioned civil rights acts were the products of such struggles. In New Orleans in 1867, streetcars that practiced segregation were blocked, and in Charleston, South Carolina, and Richmond, Virginia attempts were made to do away with the system of segregation on public buses. There were even violent conflicts in Richmond.

Early in the post Reconstruction era, segregation in the transportation sector was not pervasive. In 1881, the first law was promulgated in the state of Tennessee requiring implementing the racial segregation system in the tramcars. Between 1887 and 1891, all the southern states except three adopted similar legislations. After 1890, almost all the southern states promulgated laws which sought to implement racial segregation in the tramcars in rural areas. With the textile mills reaching into the mountainous region, in order to protect low-income whites against the competition from blacks, some states sought to apply the racial segregation system to factories. Beginning in 1910, housing segregation regulations were promulgated in many cities including Baltimore, New Orleans, Louisville, Atlanta, Augusta and Richmond. Until then, the racial segregation system had developed into a common phenomenon; it had penetrated into the areas of education, transportation, parks, housing and other public entertaining accommodations. The racial segregation had become a kind of group action of the southern whites.

In the developing process ot the racial segregation system in the South, the U.S. Supreme Court played a very important role as an accelerator. In ruling the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the racial segregation doctrine of "separate but equal" was first acknowledged. This decision greatly influenced the future of African Americans.

Louisiana State Legislature adopted the "Louisiana Railway Accommodations Act" in 1890, pr...