How the Civil Rights Movement Worked

Explore the complicated history of the civil rights movement in this HowStuffWorks podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candice Getson, joined by staff writer Jane mcgram paybook.
We love getting listener feedback, especially when it's complimentary, but

(00:23):
we also like it when you guys ask very deep
and probing questions or something make requests of us. And
we have one such request from Mike, who unfortunately did
not include his last name. But Mike, if you hear
this email and know it to you write us back
and we'll say your full name on our next podcast. So,
Mike Rights, I really enjoyed listening to this podcast. I'd
like to hear more topics about American history. However, why

(00:46):
not try how reconstruction worked or how slavery worked. These
topics might be more contentious, but I think the discussions
would be interesting to listen to. Well, Mike, we love
American history here and we try to spread the law
between all different continents, all different eras and civilizations, etcetera, etcetera.
As long as we mentioned Thomas Jefferson in every podcast,
but we are going to talk about civil rights today

(01:07):
at the civil rights movement in particular because US. As
most of you know, this was sort of a burgeoning
movement beginning when people started noticing the the inherent evil
in slavery. But it took a really, really long time
for things to come full scale and for blacks to
be given their full civil rights. So it's a very

(01:29):
complicated history, and we're gonna do our best to cover
most of it. That's right, And we're gonna start back
about with the gym crow laws. UM. During reconstruction, Uh,
the Southern States instituted rules basically that prevented blacks from
taking advantage of the um the freedom that they had
just got. And uh so they made rules that that

(01:52):
separated blacks and whites and restaurants, parks, and theaters, you
name it, basically. And uh this was later legitimized by
a super in court case called plus e versus ferguson
In and it really made it said, it said like
separate but equal is constitutional. It's fine, you can make
laws about it. And that's really sad and it's also

(02:12):
really scary too, because the Constitution added the fourteenth Amendment,
which made clear that citizenship was to be bestowed on
freed slaves and equal and that's where we have equal
and that's where they get the little nitpicky like right, sorry,
I mean Truman, You're fine. But the problem with the
fourteen Amendment is that it was never ratified by most

(02:33):
of the Southern states, and during reconstruction, the South actually
had military members who came in to oversee that they
were upholding universal male suffrage, and they weren't. And the
problem with the Jim Crow laws that Jay was alluding
to earlier is that they made things inherently difficult for
freed black men. Sure, they were supposed to be enfranchised,

(02:56):
but they couldn't vote because when they got to the
voting booths they were hit with poll tech says, or
they would hit with literacy tests or all these other
tricks that white Southerners had up their sleeves to keep
them from participating in society. It's written, obviously these blacks
were at a disadvantaged um at a disadvantage because they
were deprived of the education that it took to have

(03:17):
literacy at that time. So the Southern Southerners knew exactly
what they were doing and did is completely unfair rules.
And it wasn't just about voting. They also banned interracial marriages,
and they segregated public places like schools and parks and
different modes of transportation. And I'm sure you're all incredibly
familiar with the Rosa Park story, and we'll get to

(03:37):
that in a little bit. But another example of that,
like like buses and and vehicles people would take essentially
to get to these locales that when they arrived they
would find we're separate but not equal. And we know
that lynching was a constant thread. The ku Klux Klan
was alive and well. And the problem with these these
lynch mobs and uh other violent members of white society,

(04:00):
it was that when they were called to court, they
were essentially refused by all white juries who typically found
them innocent. So it was just a constant cycle. And
a lot of this violence stemmed from just the strict
rules even in their society that they formed, Like if
you but black person looked at a white person the
wrong way, you could instigate violence that would later be

(04:20):
acquitted by an all white jury. So I want to
get back to white Jane was saying earlier about Plessy
versus Ferguson, because this is such an important precedent to
the whole civil rights movement, and that happened back in Louisiana.
Law had forced blacks to ride and segregated rail cars,
and under the fourteen the Amendment, that really didn't make

(04:40):
a lot of sense because blacks were supposed to have
access to all the civil you know, rights and civil
liberties that the whites had to. So plus you tested
this boarding a car that was intended for white people.
Plus it was just one eighth black. Yeah, that's very interesting,
the fact that he's just only one eight, one eighth
but was still arrested and a local judge declared him guilty,

(05:03):
and the US Supreme Court, wildly enough upheld that decision.
And they were the ones who said that separate but
equal accommodations did not infringe upon Fourteenth Amendment rights. And
how many times have we heard that refrain throughout you know,
civil rights history, Separate but equal, separate equal. That was ultimately,
you know, this thing that's upt all the wheels in

(05:24):
motion for the whole movement, and that was not overturned
until ninety four, which I'm sure you will have heard
of the Brown versus Board of Education case, and that finally, um,
the nail in the coffin the plus E saying that
separate uh is inherently unequal, and so it violated the
fourteenth Amendment. And the thing about these historic cases is
really that the people behind them and you know, again

(05:46):
Brown versus Board of Education probably a court name you've
heard tossed around, but to really know that the backstory
an eight year old girl named Lynda Brown. She had
to ride a school bus about five miles to a
segregate at school and her her hometown of Topeka. Meanwhile,
a school for white children was just a few blocks
away from her house, and it was better staffed, had

(06:07):
better equipment, better books, things like this. And so her father,
the Reverend Oliver Brown, decided he was going to try
to enroll her at that school. It just made sense,
and he was denied. So he went to the Double
A c P. And they essentially kept taking the case
a little bit further, and when they got other families
involved to to help um with the case as well,

(06:29):
they did. And again this was ruled on the precedent
of PLUSY versus ferguson separate not being equal. And here
was a very very stark example of how it's not
I mean, you could look at these two schools side
by side, the staff that was there, Um, what the
children were entitled to the type of education they were getting,
And it couldn't be more obvious, that's right. And um

(06:50):
it delivered sort of a final blow against Plessy because
there were court cases beforehand that sort of chip away
at plus e and um. Giving example, there was a
case in forty six where they banned segregation on interstate
bus travel. That's going to come into play later, but
it didn't quite. It wasn't quite the nail of the
coffin that Brown versus Board was. So when Brown and

(07:10):
the n double a CP appealed the local judges decision
that a pow plus the versus frecus and they went
to the Supreme Court, and like Jane said, in May
nineteen fifty four, that was when they said the separate
but equal was unconstitutional and thus began the desegregation of schools.
And you think, I mean, obviously this was a major
step in the civil rights movement, but it didn't immediately

(07:33):
make things better. If anything, it's sort of made hostilities
worse between the South, at least between blacks and whites.
And give you example, if you've heard of the Emmett
Till case. It's an extremely sad case. It happened just
a few months after the decision was released about Brown
for support of education. It had to do with a
just a fourteen year old African American boy whom he
lived in Chicago at that time, but he was visiting

(07:55):
the South in Money, Mississippi, UM to visit relatives. And
he was there for a few days and he was
hanging out with his friends UM and teasing them. He
showing them picture of this white girl and saying, Oh,
that's my girlfriend, blah blah blah. They didn't believe him,
and they said, oh, why don't you go flirt with
the white girl inside the store there, And so he did.
And this caused a lot of problems, it really did,

(08:18):
because just a couple of nights later, he was kidnapped
from the house where he was staying and he disappeared
until his body was found drowned in the river, and
there was barbed wire around his neck, there was a
bullet hole and his skull. He had been so badly
mutilated and then tortured that his body was unrecognizable except

(08:39):
for a ring that he was wearing and That's how
they identified him. And it was very obvious who and why,
Uh this murder happened. Um, somebody was knocking on the
door in the middle of the night asking to see
the boy and the uncle the person he was visiting. Uh,
you know, he couldn't resist them. And uh. And it
was the husband of the girl that the that Emmett

(08:59):
had been earning with, and he had come back from
a trip and found out what happened and found out
the story and immediately went over and took the boy
and put him in the car and drove away. And
this man for Bryant, he was breaking conjunction with the
owner of this store where the incident took place. And
that was J. M. Millum. And to be specific for
what we know exactly what uh Emmett said to the

(09:21):
woman was bye bye baby when he turned to leave.
So again not exactly damning words, but in this case,
you know, they really were for him. And again this
is another instance of an all white jury not finding
the guilty party is guilty. And if you look at
pictures from you know, Roy Bryant and J. M. Millam
in court, I think Roybrian is sitting there, you know,

(09:43):
looking completely nonchalant smoking his cigarette. Is that he hasn't
a care in the world. He woun he knew that
he would be acquitted, and Emmett told his mother obviously,
you know when one can assume she must have just
been heartbroken. But she, I think, very valiantly turned this
into an opera tunity to advance the civil rights movement.
And at the boy's funeral, she insisted upon an open casket.

(10:06):
And again remember his body was start mutilated and they
found out the couldn't recognize him. He'd been in the
river for a couple of days. It must have been
a horrific site to see. And I think that that
is really what starred, especially younger generations of black Americans
to say this is wrong. I mean, the year, it
was wrong all along. But there's a big difference between
a schoolgirl being denied entrance to his school and this

(10:28):
sort of very violent atrocity that's occurring under a lot
that's right. I think it really awakened everybody, the whole nation, really,
because I remember reading that the image of his mutilated
body was printed in a magazine at the time, so
not even just the people who went and saw his
body in person, but all around the country, people who
thought that magazine could see, um, how disgusting this was.

(10:48):
And it's interesting also to compare Emmett Till himself growing
up in Chicago was not used to the ways of
the South and the unspoken rules that were going on there,
and so really, you know, it illustrated for everyone very
clearly the difference and how not even a teenage boy
is safe from the violence but the South. And you know,
we're we're Southerners, and we live in the South today,

(11:10):
and the House of Works is in Atlanta, and so
you know, we're we're aware of Southern culture and attitude.
So we don't mean to constantly be pointing fingers at
the South, but this is where all the activity was brewing.
It's important to note too that it was a very
very stalwart section of the country even though these laws
were being passed, even though desegregation in schools was made mandatory,
like like you saw or heard when Jane and I

(11:33):
podcasted about the Emancipation Proclamation. Takes a long time for
these things to seep into the collective mindset. And even
if people know it's the law and black and white
trying to get people to embrace something, you know, with
their minds and with their attitudes takes a really long time.
And especially when you have general unrest among populations, you know,

(11:53):
that sort of boils up into a mob situation. And
that's why, very famously, back in September seven, President Dwight
Eisenhower sent one thousand paratroopers to oversee nine black students
entering a little Rock high school and arkansob because he knew,
he knew what happened, that's right. And this was again
a very dramatic scene like on the on the television

(12:14):
and everything for the whole nation to see how bad
things were. Yes, and so we see the sort of
violence being committed against the black community, and how did
they respond well with civil disobedience. And this is perhaps
one of the wisest maneuvers I think any group of
people has has really made, because to fight back with

(12:35):
violence with non violence is a very shocking and a
brave thing to do. It sort of inherited the ideas
of Gandhi uh very popular at that time. And one
of the examples of civil disobedience that was very popular
and effective were these things called students, where um black
youths usually we go into all white establishments, or at

(12:57):
least establishments that had all white sections, such as a
counter that will what's good, tod it, and they would
ask to be served um. And they had a code
of non violence, where like even if they were being
hit or whatever, they could not respond with any violence,
and they couldn't insult anyone else, etcetera, etcetera. One of
the most famous cases of civil disobedience that we mentioned

(13:17):
earlier and stuff we'd come back to is Rose Apart
and this happened in Montgomery, Alabama. It was December first,
nineteen after a day of work. She sat down on
the bus and when enough white sported that she was,
you know, being forced by code to give up her seat,
she refused. And I think a lot of people think
that she did this on the spur of the moment,

(13:39):
and there was no sudden floyda and thinking that she
very you know, resolutely refused to give up pro seed,
I think paints her as at a larger than life figure.
And while she certainly was a heroic figure in the movement,
she had gone to courses on civil disobedient I don't know.
I think that raises her estimation in my eyes is like,
oh that's you know, this is just planned out and
she had the guts to do This wasn't just she

(14:01):
was having a bad day, you know exactly. Yeah, from
that perspective, she's even even larger or larger life. So
and this was actually part of a bus boycott movement
Bliss's started. Yeah, so UM activists in Montgomery, the city
where this happened, they started a Montgomery Improvement Association and

(14:22):
this I started a boycott and this lasted for over
a year, UM until the courts finally made the city
UM desegregate, and it was a huge success. UM. You know,
it was one of the first big successes for the
civil rights movement, especially the UM civil disobedience movement as well.
And this is when a famous figure Martin Luther King Jr.
Came into play as well. He was a pastor in

(14:43):
a church in Montgomery during the time of the boycott
and UM when that was successful. Actually, I should mention
that during the boycott he was faced with a lot
of dangers. Well, his home was actually bombed that year
when he wasn't there, I believe. And Um, once the
boycott was finally successful, he was elected the first president
of the Southern Christian Leadership Council and this focus on
peaceful poet protest and became a major force in the movement.

(15:07):
And King didn't stay in Montgomery, ended up moving to
Atlanta for a while, and then we know that eventually
he went over to Birmingham. But while he was starting
and and it was the sort of burgeoning effort of
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we really see this rolling
effort with with bus boycotts and nationwide protests and and

(15:28):
sit in and all of this to sort of gently
buck the Supreme courts, you know, ruling and decisions and
to really draw attention to what was happening in the
South and to point out, you know, we're the ones
who have these rides that are being taken away from
us or not being honored, and we're not fighting back
like the white community. You know, we're doing this very

(15:48):
very gently as it were. Yeah, that's true. And he
faced a lot of criticism from both sides. Um was
surprising to me, Uh, was the fact that fellow pastors
in Birmingham were attacking him for being too extremist. And
he wrote, um, one time he was arrested while he's
arrested a few times, but at one point he was
in the Birmingham jail. He wrote the infamous letter from
Birmingham Jailed to his fellow pastors who were criticizing him.

(16:12):
And one of my favorite lines from that famous document is,
so the question is not whether we will be extremists,
but what kind of extremists we will be? And I
think that's very inspiring UM personally. And one of my
favorite lines, my favorite line is justice too long? Is
justice tons? Yeah? And I think it really speaks to
King's perspective on the movement. So while we have King

(16:34):
and civil disobedience going on and all of the followers
that are following him, we also should mention another group,
the freedom writers. And on May fourth nine, this was
there a group of people I've several different races, and
they were going to make sort of a cross country
or across south really statement that's right, And they were
testing some rules that were recently instituted. Like I mentioned before,

(16:56):
this for as early as there was a was a
ban on segregation on interstate bus travel. Well in nineteen
sixty there was another decision related to this where they
extended the role to bus terminals. UM and so the
terminals themselves had to be desegregated as well. And so
this group of freedom writers that Kandis was talking about,
um whites and blacks banded together to really test this ruling.

(17:18):
And they kind of knew what they were doing. They
knew that the South is not ready for this. They
knew they were getting into and they rowed from Washington,
d C. To New Orleans and along the way they
were beaten. Their busses were stoned, their tires were slashed.
Three hundred of them were arrested, and the bus never
finished the trap. That's right. It sounded like such a scary,
uh thing to go on, this crusade that they went

(17:39):
on because they were beaten. You know, the bus was firebombed.
They can't even imagine like how scary was to be there.
But the bright side is that their efforts caught the
attention of the Kennedy administration. So after Kennedy started turning
an eye to what was going on, he decided that
he was going to take a more active role. You know,
as we know, the Supreme Court hadn't been exactly up

(17:59):
to off. So Kennedy comes into play and he proposed
it the civil Rights spell and just share support for
the spell. Two d fifty thousand people of all races
participated in They marched on Washington and that is when
King made the famous I have a dream speech. That's
right and UM. Actually JFK was assassinated before the bill
could finally go through, but luckily his successor L. B.

(18:20):
J Um, he helped push it along because he knew
it was important. And not only a civil rights Act
of four UM, but the Voting Rights Act of the
year later UM, the first one forbid discrimination of in
public accommodations and so likely said before this this happened
sort of with the Supreme Court cases, but it was
up to the executive branch to really enforce it, and

(18:42):
so these were really important UM. And also what they
did was they threatened to withhold federal funds from communities
where they persisted in segregation. And that was a real
key in getting things moving. So as all of this
is happening, Jane mentioned before media coverage, and I think
it's really important to mention that that was a valuable
tool in the civil rights movement, having those pictures splashed across,

(19:03):
you know, the front pages of newspapers, having them on TV,
being able to see all of those people in Washington
there to support the bill. And as we know, the
graphic images of of Emmett Hill help, the images of
Martin Luther King, the images of the arrests and the protests,
and people's minds really I think began to change about

(19:24):
the Black community and the bills that were coming across
to support them. And something else that I think really
helped out were the children's protests that took place. And
it came to a point at which there just wasn't
enough time and enough manpower to have adults constantly protesting,
because after all, you know, these these are parents, these

(19:45):
these are workers, but with homes and bills to pay.
So they asked children to participate in the protests, and
even children were arrested, if you can believe that. And
at one point the city came in with fire hoses
and tried hosing them down to get them, you know,
off off the grounds and the forest. The fire hoses
was so strong, so much water pressure that children like

(20:06):
swept to their feet, they were knocked down. And people
saw these images and were just outraged. So when the
time came that the bills were passed by by Johnson.
I think people were more ready to accept that, yeah,
it is time for this, because you're committing atrocities not
only toward grown people, but young children as well. Another
really interesting story that had to do with the young
black children has to do with a church that was

(20:27):
bombed in Birmingham. This happened and sixty three was a
year before the Civil Rights Act. But um in Birmingham,
there's this major church and it was a target because
it was a meeting place for a lot of civil
rights leaders like Martin Luther King and members of the
KKK actually threw bombs inside. I think it only killed
four people, but those before people happened to be young

(20:47):
girls like eleven and fourteen, I believe, And it's it
was also a terrible image, a very starking image to see.
And so I think that there was a time when
the black community was really trying to uphold Martin Luther
King's standards of civil disobedience and non violence. But after
a while, after these atrocities continue to, you know, pummel

(21:08):
their efforts and try to break away at their morale
and their cause. There came a point when people said
this this might not be working for us anymore. And
keep in mind, this isn't the entire community that we're
talking about, a subset that's right. And like I said before,
King actually faced criticism from both sides. Some people thought
he's too extremist, some people thought he wasn't extremist, n

(21:30):
right exactly. And Um Malcolm X was one such person
represented the more radical side of the movement. Um he
actually called some of King's tactics criminal. He said it
was criminal for for King to teach non violence in
the face of violence. And you can see his point
that it's like it seems to be ineffective. And you
can look at the progress and you can say, oh,

(21:50):
look at these acts that were passed, etcetera, etcetera, but
look at all the violence that that's happening too, and
we need to do more. And I think there came
appointment violence was with out with violence. We think of
the Watts riots that occurred in l A. And so
we have these two almost competing legacies. If you look
at the Malcolm X legacy and the Martin Luther King

(22:10):
legacy and compare them side by side, this violence versus
non violence. And we know that even though these bills
were passed in the late sixties or the mid sixties,
even that wasn't the end, and there were still in
justice going on. And going back to your favorite line
from from King just as too long delayed as justice
to nine. You know, it to a lot of people,
all this violence going on was justice delayed, you know,

(22:30):
and they felt that we needed to do more. And
that's an understandable, uh sentiment to have. And I don't
think you can never wrap up any discussion about the
civil rights movement, because I think that there are still
plenty of arguments to exist that it's still a movement
that is going on today. I think that when Obama
was elected President of the State, I think that really
clinched a lot of people's minds. Maybe we are moving

(22:53):
towards the end the civil rights movement. Maybe this is
an end cap to a struggle for true equality. So
I think it will be really interesting to to watch
how our nation continues to embrace other other races and
and evolve together. And I certainly don't want to, you know,
project any of my beliefs onto this. I think it's
up for our listeners ultimately to decide how they feel

(23:15):
about you know how history has ended or just begun
or still evolving. I think, you know, history is a
very organic and living thing, and maybe the civil rights
movement isn't over. Maybe the timeline is only in the middle,
as long as we're not going backwards, I think, yeah,
that's important exactly. But obviously there's so much more to
learn about civil rights and Martin Luther King and other

(23:36):
famous historical figures like Malcolm X, so you can read
much more about them at how stuff works dot com.
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