You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
The five years between the March on Washington and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. produced the most important civil rights legislation in American history. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed most forms of discrimination in employment and public accommodations; the Voting Rights Act of 1965 suspended the literacy tests and registration practices that had kept African Americans out of the ballot box in the South; the Fair Housing Act of 1968 extended federal protection to housing. Taken together, these laws dismantled the legal architecture of Jim Crow that had stood since Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.
Yet the period was also defined by frustration. Dr King's campaigns in Selma in 1965 and in Chicago in 1966 showed how much further the movement had to go, particularly in the North, where de facto segregation of housing, schooling and employment proved far more resistant to change than de jure segregation in the South. The assassination of Malcolm X in February 1965 and of King himself on 4 April 1968 marked the end of a particular phase of the movement. By the time this lesson ends you should be able to explain both what the civil rights movement achieved and why, by 1968, it had clearly reached the limits of what legal reform alone could deliver.
President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on 22 November 1963. His Vice-President, Lyndon B. Johnson — a former Senate majority leader from Texas — became the 36th President. Johnson's domestic record in the Senate had been mixed on civil rights, but as President he devoted extraordinary political skill to passing Kennedy's stalled civil rights bill. "We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights," he told a joint session of Congress on 27 November 1963. "It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law."
Southern senators led by Richard Russell of Georgia filibustered the bill in the Senate for 57 working days — the longest filibuster in Senate history to that point. Johnson worked Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois to secure Republican votes for cloture, which was invoked for the first time in the Senate's history against a civil rights filibuster on 10 June 1964. On 2 July 1964 Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in the East Room of the White House, handing one of the pens to Martin Luther King Jr.
| Title of the Act | What it did |
|---|---|
| Title I | Strengthened protection of the right to vote (but left literacy tests largely in place — hence the need for the Voting Rights Act) |
| Title II | Banned discrimination by "public accommodations" — hotels, restaurants, theatres, sports facilities — engaged in interstate commerce |
| Title III | Required desegregation of publicly owned facilities (parks, swimming pools, libraries) |
| Title IV | Authorised the federal government to sue school districts that failed to desegregate |
| Title VI | Allowed federal funds to be withdrawn from programmes that practised discrimination |
| Title VII | Banned employment discrimination on grounds of race, colour, religion, sex or national origin; created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) |
Title VII's inclusion of "sex" was added late in the process by a Southern congressman, Howard Smith of Virginia, who believed it would make the bill impossible to pass. He was wrong; its inclusion provided the statutory basis for much of the women's rights activism that followed. The Supreme Court upheld the Act's ban on segregation in public accommodations in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States (December 1964), citing the Commerce Clause. Within months, signs reading "Whites Only" were being removed across the South — slowly and grudgingly in some places, but steadily.
The Act did not end school segregation. In 1964, a decade after Brown, only 2.3% of Black students in the Deep South attended integrated schools; not until Title VI was actively used to threaten the loss of federal funds did integration accelerate. Nor did it address the core issue of voting rights: most of the literacy tests, poll taxes and registration practices that kept African Americans off the voter rolls remained legal.
Even before the Civil Rights Act was signed, SNCC, CORE and the NAACP had agreed to concentrate on the hardest target in the South: Mississippi, where only 6.7% of eligible Black voters were registered in 1962. In the summer of 1964 they launched Freedom Summer, a project led by SNCC's Robert Moses that brought roughly 1,000 volunteers — most of them white college students from the North — to Mississippi to work on voter registration, teach in Freedom Schools, and support the new Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP).
The project began with murder. On 21 June 1964, three young civil rights workers — James Chaney (a 21-year-old Black Mississippian from CORE), Andrew Goodman (a 20-year-old white college student from New York), and Michael Schwerner (a 24-year-old white CORE organiser from New York) — were stopped by police in Neshoba County, Mississippi, while investigating the burning of a Black church. They were detained, released after dark, ambushed on the road and murdered by a Ku Klux Klan group that included the deputy sheriff. Their bodies were found buried in an earthen dam six weeks later.
The publicity surrounding the search, and the presence of white Northern volunteers, brought national attention to the violence African Americans in Mississippi had faced for generations. Over the course of the summer there were 4 murders, 4 critical injuries, at least 80 beatings, 1,000 arrests, 37 churches bombed or burned and 30 homes bombed. At the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City in August 1964, the MFDP demanded to be seated in place of the all-white Mississippi delegation. Johnson, fearing the loss of the white South, offered two at-large seats; Fannie Lou Hamer — whose televised testimony on the beatings she had received for attempting to register to vote had stunned the country — rejected the compromise. The MFDP lost the immediate battle but helped force the party's rules to change, and the experience radicalised SNCC activists who would push towards Black Power in the years that followed.
By the end of 1964 King and the SCLC had decided that a decisive voting rights campaign was needed to push Johnson into action. They chose Selma, Alabama — a town where, of an adult Black population of around 15,000, fewer than 400 were registered to vote. The sheriff, Jim Clark, was expected to respond in the way Bull Connor had in Birmingham.
Protests began in January 1965. On the night of 18 February 1965, during a march in nearby Marion, an Alabama state trooper shot an unarmed 26-year-old Black deacon, Jimmie Lee Jackson, as he tried to shield his mother from being beaten. Jackson died eight days later. In response, the SCLC and SNCC organised a march from Selma to the state capital, Montgomery, 54 miles away.
On Sunday 7 March 1965 — the day known as "Bloody Sunday" — around 600 marchers led by John Lewis of SNCC and Hosea Williams of SCLC set out from Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma. At the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge they were met by state troopers in gas masks and a mounted posse. After a two-minute warning the troopers charged the marchers with clubs and tear gas; Lewis's skull was fractured. ABC News interrupted its evening broadcast of Judgment at Nuremberg to show fifteen minutes of footage.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.