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The University High School Band
The History and Theory of Music

The Civil Rights Movement

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929 - 1968)

Although slavery had ended with the Thirteenth Amendment, black Americans continued to face economic poverty, social exclusion, and legal discrimination.

In 1896, the Supreme Court supported legal segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, which allowed states to keep blacks and whites apart as long as they provided “separate but equal” services and facilities. People began to protest the injustice of this social inequality, and the movement gained traction during World War II. Black labor unions under A. Philip Randolph successfully pushed for desegregation of the American defense industry and armed services. In 1946, schools were desegregated in California, with a federal court ruling that separate schools could not be equal.

California’s governor, Earl Warren, eventually became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer who argued the case, eventually became a Supreme Court justice himself.

Nevertheless, discrimination and segregation continued across the country, and especially in the South. Some groups on both sides actually advocated violently for the continuation of segregation, such as white supremacists in the Ku Klux Klan and black supremacists like Malcolm X, a leader of the Nation of Islam and Black Panther movements. Most protests, however, were peaceful.

In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, leading to a year-long bus boycott until the Supreme Court ruled that discrimination on buses was also unconstitutional. Two years later, in 1957, the governor of Arkansas refused to integrate schools in his state, prompting President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send the National Guard to escort the students to school. Protests continued throughout the next decade, with the goal of removing legal racial segregation from all aspects of American life. Peaceful protests such as the Greensboro Sit-In, where a group of young black students sat down at a local restaurant and waited (all day) to be served for six months gained media attention and made many people sympathetic to the civil rights cause.

In 1963, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist pastor and leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, protested the treatment of demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, as police turned water cannons and canine units against peaceful protestors. Dr. King was arrested and sent to jail, where he wrote the "Letter from the Birmingham Jail", which became a manifesto of the civil rights movement. Dr. King became one of the most visible representatives of the movement, giving speeches across the country, most famously the “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C.

In response to all this, the U.S. Congress eventually passed the Civil Rights Act (1964), which made racial discrimination illegal at all public facilities, and the Voting Rights Act (1965), which prohibited measures that made it difficult for targeted groups to vote.

Race riots continued to take place throughout the rest of the 1960s; Malcolm X was killed in 1965, and Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. Although Americans of all races have legal equality today, the struggle for social and economic parity and the effort to overcome the psychological effects of centuries of racial prejudice continue.

Open-Ended Question

Read Letter from the Birmingham Jail.