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There were more protests against segregation during World War II (1939–1945).
African Americans fought bravely in separate military units around the world. But they got only the worst jobs at home. More and more people joined the NAACP. Labor leader A. Philip Randolph threatened to lead a march on Washington. The march would protest discrimination in the military and in jobs. After the war, African Americans kept demanding their constitutional rights. The civil rights movement was born.
▲ In 1947, the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson to their team. He was the first African American since 1889 to play major league baseball. Robinson knew about civil rights protests. As a soldier during World War II, he didn’t accept the segregated seating on a military bus. He was court-martialed for not obeying. But the charges were dropped. Robinson got an honorable discharge from the army.
In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled against segregation in schools. That was the case of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. “Brown” was the family of Linda Brown. She’s shown below in her segregated classroom. The court said separate schools for African Americans were in fact unequal. Keeping black students apart from white ones was wrong. It created “a feeling of inferiority ... that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” It took years for this ruling to be put into practice. ▼
◀ After the Brown ruling, White Citizen Councils formed to fight desegregation. Harry Byrd was a senator from Virginia. He called for “massive resistance” to the ruling. Some school systems even closed so they wouldn’t have to desegregate.
The U.S. government was slow to end segregation. President Harry Truman was embarrassed by what people around the world said. Some asked how the U.S. could be a democracy if African Americans were treated so badly. In 1948, he ordered an end to segregation in the military. ▶
▲ Rosa Parks was a loyal member of the NAACP chapter in Montgomery, Alabama. She argued against the public library’s segregation rule. On December 1, 1955, she was tired after a long day of work. She got on a crowded city bus and sat down. The driver told her to give her seat to a white man. She said no and was arrested. After a few days, the African Americans of Montgomery showed their support for her. They stopped riding the buses. This went on for over a year. Young and old walked or shared rides to and from their jobs. In December 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Montgomery buses had to desegregate. The African Americans of Montgomery went back to riding the buses. Their year of protest had shown that they were well organized and would face hardships to fight segregation. Parks died in October 2005. She was the first woman to lie in state at the U.S. Capitol building.
The head of the Montgomery NAACP chapter needed someone to organize the bus boycott. A new minister in town agreed to do it. His name was Martin Luther King Jr. It was his first civil rights protest, but far from his last. African American churches soon became the main support of the movement. In 1957, King and others formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or SCLC. This group fought segregation. ▼
Check It Out!
Who was Marian Anderson and how was she discriminated against?
Marian Anderson was a famous African American singer. In 1939, she was not allowed to perform at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. It was owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt left that group in protest. She helped Anderson get to sing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial instead.
