Increased Understanding Among Whites
The desire of black Americans to win a victory over fascism abroad and racism at home was expressed in the so-called Double-V campaign, which also revealed an undercurrent of black discontent. Allied rhetoric about the fight for the ";four freedoms" (of expression and worship; from want and fear) encouraged blacks to feel these ideals might be realized in the U.S. The growing acceptance among whites of racial equality was strengthened by the writings of numerous scholars, including the Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal, author of An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). Other scholarly and literary publications during the 1930s and '40s increased understanding of the black experience, notably Richard Wright's novel Native Son (1940); Black Metropolis (1945), an important sociological study, by St. Clair Drake (1911-90) and Horace Cayton (1903-70); and From Slavery to Freedom (1947), by the historian John Hope Franklin (1915- ).

The nonviolent sit-ins conducted by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), formed in 1942, signaled a new willingness on the part of both white and black reformers to challenge racial segregation. White racial attitudes were affected by the entry of Jackie Robinson and other black athletes into baseball; even before, such men as the boxers Jack Johnson and Joe Louis and the track-and-field athlete Jesse Owens had notable impact on sports. Less noticed were the achievements of black scientists, such as Charles R. Drew (1904-50), who developed a widely used system for storing blood plasma. The tradition of black scientific achievement, however, can be traced back to Benjamin Banneker in the 18th century; Norbert Rillieux (1806-94) who, in the 19th century, perfected a system for refining sugar; and George Washington Carver in the early 20th century.

THE STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM
After the war a period of rapid change in American race relations followed. As more blacks left the rural South for urban areas, the relative economic status of blacks improved. From 1948 to 1961, the proportion of blacks earning less than $3000 a year declined from 78 to 47 percent; at the same time, blacks earning more than $10,000 increased proportionally from less than 1 to 17 percent. (Nevertheless, the median income for whites in 1948 was higher than that of blacks in 1961.) Related to these economic changes was a rapid increase in the number of blacks attending college—from 124,000 in 1947 to 233,000 in 1961.

Early Gains
The existence of a growing affluent and educated black population in urban areas made possible major political gains. Black urban voters provided decisive support for liberal Democratic candidates, who in turn backed civil rights reforms. In 1954, three blacks—Augustus Hawkins (1907- ) of California, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (1908-72) of New York, and William L. Dawson (1886-1970) of Illinois—were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, the largest number since Reconstruction.

A pattern of black influence on national politics was clearly established in 1948, when Harry Truman was elected president, even though he received only a minority of white votes. Truman had gained the support of blacks by issuing an executive order that eventually desegregated the armed forces and by supporting a pro-civil rights policy for the Democratic party over strong opposition from southern Dixiecrats. Although Truman's actions had little immediate impact on blacks, they indicated responsiveness by the federal government. Vigorous political dissent among blacks was discouraged during the so-called McCarthy era (c. 1950-55), as black leaders, such as Du Bois and Robeson, came under government attack, but cold war anticommunism also provided leverage for blacks to demand that the U.S. live up to its democratic claims.

The Brown Decision
Although neither President Dwight Eisenhower nor Congress was willing to take action on behalf of black civil rights during the first half of the 1950s, new presidential appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court prepared the way for a reversal of the separate-but-equal doctrine established by the Plessy decision. In 1954 a unanimous Court ruled, in Brown v. Board of Education, that ";separate educational facilities are inherently unequal" and the next year ordered public schools to desegregate ";with all deliberate speed." Although southern white officials sought to obstruct implementation of the Brown decision, many southern blacks saw the ruling as a sign that the federal government might intervene on their behalf in other racial matters. Unwilling to wait for firm federal action, however, some began their own desegregation efforts. In 1957, black children defied white mobs in Little Rock, Ark., until Eisenhower sent troops to protect their right to attend an all-white high school. Nevertheless, ten years after the Brown decision, less than 2 percent of southern black children attended integrated schools. During the early 1960s, it was necessary to maintain federal troops and marshals on the University of Mississippi campus to ensure the right of a black student to attend classes.

Desegregation Struggle
The Brown decision also encouraged southern blacks to launch a sustained movement to integrate all public facilities. It began in Montgomery, Ala., in December 1955, when a black woman named Rosa L. Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man and was arrested. Led by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., black residents reacted to the arrest by organizing a bus boycott that lasted more than a year, before a federal court declared Alabama's bus segregation laws unconstitutional. King's commitment to nonviolence garnered favorable press for his protests.

Although King remained the best-known black leader, protest activities soon moved beyond the control of any single individual or group. King's supporters organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, but when black college students began widespread lunch counter sit-ins in February 1960, most of the young activists rejected leadership by SCLC and older civil rights groups, such as the NAACP or CORE. They formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was often more militant than other civil rights groups.

Voter Registration
The CORE-initiated Freedom Rides of 1961, designed to end segregation in facilities dependent on interstate commerce, demonstrated the ability of civil rights protesters to force federal intervention in the South. They brought many young activists into Mississippi, where white officials firmly resisted any concessions to the civil rights movement. Black civil rights leaders in Mississippi, who had long struggled for gains with the help of the NAACP, encouraged young civil rights workers affiliated with the SNCC to concentrate their efforts on achieving voting rights. By 1962 Robert Moses (1935- ), a Harvard-educated schoolteacher, had brought together a staff of organizers who worked closely with local residents seeking to register as voters. White resistance, however, remained intense. In 1964, after the murder of three of the organizers, a major national effort led to the unsuccessful challenge by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party, led by Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-77), to unseat the all-white Mississippi delegation at the Democratic National Convention.

Although the voting-rights movement in Mississippi made slow progress, civil rights protests in southern urban centers achieved important gains. Massive demonstrations were held in Albany, Ga., during 1961 and 1962, and the following year more than a million demonstrators kept up the pressure in numerous cities. This wave of protests reached a peak during the spring of 1963, when federal troops were sent into Birmingham, Ala., to quell racial violence. President John F. Kennedy reacted to the widespread demonstrations by introducing civil rights legislation designed to end segregation in public facilities. On Aug. 28, 1963, more than 200,000 protesters gathered in Washington, D.C., for a peaceful demonstration, calling for congressional action in civil rights and employment legislation. The civil rights bill remained deadlocked in Congress until 1964, however, when it was passed in the aftermath of the assassination of President Kennedy. In 1965 another series of protests in Selma, Ala., prompted President Lyndon B. Johnson to introduce new voting-rights legislation, which was passed that summer and had a dramatic impact on black voter registration; in Mississippi, the percentage of blacks registered to vote increased from 7 percent in 1964 to 59 percent in 1968.

Black Pride
The years of civil rights activism in the South led to an upsurge in racial pride and militancy among blacks throughout the nation. In 1966 the SNCC announced that the goal of the black movement was no longer civil rights but "black power" which could be achieved only when black people developed a more positive image of themselves. Such sentiments coincided with a trend toward black militancy in northern urban centers spearheaded by Black Muslims. Although the best-known advocate of black nationalism, Malcolm X, had attracted only modest support at the time of his assassination in 1965, his ideas became increasingly popular after his death. His calls for armed self-defense reflected widespread anger among urban blacks that burst forth in extensive racial violence in Los Angeles in August 1965. During the following three years, nearly every major urban center in the U.S. experienced similar black rebellions. The Kerner Commission, set up by President Johnson and headed by Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner (1908-76), reported in 1968 that the ";nation is moving toward two societies, one white, one black—separate and unequal." New militant organizations, such as the Black Panther party, sought to provide leadership for discontented urban blacks. The outspoken radicalism of many black leaders resulted in considerable federal repression, and by the late 1960s most of the black militant groups had been weakened by police raids as well as internal dissension. Before his assassination in 1968, even Martin Luther King, Jr., became a target for government surveillance and harassment, as he responded to the new mood of militancy with forceful attacks on U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and with calls for economic reforms.

Blacks attending college launched a movement to introduce black studies into the curriculum, which resulted in better knowledge of the African-American experience. A new spirit of racial assertion was especially evident in sports; in the 1960s black athletes brought into college and professional sports a distinctive, individualistic, and spontaneous style of play, often over the objections of white coaches and sportswriters. For example, the heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali's refusal to be inducted into the army temporarily cost him his world championship but also made him a hero to many blacks.

An article from Funk & Wagnalls® New Encyclopedia. © 2005 World Almanac Education Group, A WRC Media Company