World War history and global impact

¶ … scholars say that because the framers of the U.S. Constitution were a relatively group of white men, many of whom had been educated at the country's best schools and were from some of the best families, the document produced was biased in various ways. For example, in 1987 Justice Thurgood Marshall said that the Constitution was "defective from the start," that its first words -- "We the People" -- excluded "the majority of American citizens," because it left out blacks and women. Regardless of whether or not one agrees with this sentiment, it is true that equal rights for "all" has been a concern throughout U.S. history. It can easily be said that the decade of the 1960s was one of the most momentous, since major anti-discrimination laws were passed to clarify the rights of all people.

Howard Zinn in A People's History of the United States says, "The black revolt of the 1950s and 1960s -- North and South -- came as a surprise. But perhaps it should not have" (443). Repressed individuals cannot forget their slavery and continued humiliation, segregation and even lynching over the decades. For example, notes Zinn, the 14th and 15th Amendments of the Constitution gave the President rights to completely wipe out discrimination, but no President used these rights (449).

Small actions were made over time. Truman, four months before the presidential election of 1948, issued an executive order asking that the armed forces, segregated in World War II, institute policies of racial equality "as soon as possible." It took over a decade to complete the desegregation in the military (Zinn 448).

In 1944 the Swedish researcher Gunnar Myrdal received a grant of $300,000, a huge sum of money at that time, to examine American democratic politics. His book, An American Dilemma, concluded that "the masses are impervious to rational argument." He proved by statistics that America was too deeply a racist country for the wrongs of the blacks ever to be put right by Congressional action and points to the Supreme Court to step in where democracy failed and apply "the spirit of the Reconstruction Amedments" to end segregation (Johnson 952). Even today, many people say that the book had a profound impact on the thinking of the times.

In 1954, explains Johnson, "many American liberals had been dismayed by the fact that despite emancipation, and despite the 15th Amendment, guaranteeing all citizens the right to vote, blacks had failed to participate fully in American political life, especially in those states where they were most numerous, and the black community remained poor, badly educated, downtrodden and supine" (952).

Myrdal's book became, according to Johnson (952), "the bible of Thurgod Marshall, then head of the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Education Fund."

The result, says Johnson, "was perhaps the most important single Supreme Court decision in American history, Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, where the Court on May 17, 1954, unanimously ruled that segregated schools violated the 14th Amendment guaranteeing equal right protection under the law, and thus was unconstitutional (953).

Adds Tindall and Shi (1242-1242), the Court cited current sociological and psychological findings that were presented by Kenneth Clark, a noted black psychologist. "It might as well have cited historical evidence that Jim Crow facilities had been seldom equal and often not available to blacks at all." A year later, the Court further directed "a prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance" where the process should move "with all deliberate speed." The white South's first response was "relatively calm," says Tindall & Shi 1243). "Eisenhower refused to take any part in leading white southerners toward compliance. Privately he remarked: 'I am convinced that the Supreme Court decision set back progress in the South at least fifteen years. The fellow tries to tell me that you can do these things by force is just plain nuts'" (1243).

In the early 1960s, blacks rebelled throughout the South, and in the late 1960s they were engaged in wild insurrection in a hundred cities in the North. "It was all a surprise to those without the deep memory of slavery, that everyday presence of humiliation, registered in the poetry, the music, the occasional outbursts of anger, the more frequent sullen silences. Part of that memory was of words uttered, laws passed, decision made, which turned out to be meaningless" (Zinn 450).

Congress began reacting and civil rights laws were passed in 1957, 1960 and 1964. They promised voting and employment equality, but were enforced poorly or ignored. In 1965, President Johnson sponsored and Congress passed an even stronger Voting Rights Law to ensure federal protection of the right to register and vote. As a result, the number of Southern blacks who voted in 1952 versus 1964 was one million to two million and by 1968 it was three million, the same percentage as white voters. Says Zinn, "the federal government was trying -- without making fundamental changes -- to control an explosive situation, to channel anger into the traditional cooling mechanism of the ballot box..." (457).