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,...
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).
It was not enough for those involved with the black power movement. In 1965, riots erupted in
Los Angeles,
Chicago, Cleveland, Newark and Detroit. One of the most influential leaders at this time was Malcolm X, who stated "Yes, I'm an
extremist. The black
race in the United States is in extremely bad shape" (Tindall & Shi 1286). Malcolm X was assassinated soon after in 1965.
The fight for
equal rights for all individuals regardless of race, creed,
religion or color, continued and continues in the United States today, and during that same period of the 1960s, the rights for
women also rose, and that continued and continues to this day as well. This decade of the '60s will surely always be known of one of change and
evolution.
Books Cited
Johnson, Paul. History of the American People. New York: Harper Collins, 1997.
Tindall, George Brown and Shi, David.
America. A Narrative History. New…
