Changes

The resistance to Jim Crow reached a fever pitch by the 1950s. The context for that shift is important to understand. Legal scholar, Derrick Bell, is perhaps prescient when he argues that it was “interest convergence.” That is to say, it there was an alternative benefit that accrued to the United States that motivated attempts to protect the civil rights of African Americans. For Bell, it was the ongoing conflict with the Soviet Union, which had utilized Jim Crow in its propaganda wars with the United States.  As a result, by the late 1940s, federal laws began to shift, a Civil Rights Commission was formed in 1947, and the Supreme Court formally abolished Jim Crow in 1954, with ''Brown v. Board of Education''. But there was still more to be done, particularly with the question of enforcement as Brown II mandated segregation but with “all deliberate speed.” In 1957, a minor law was passed to create a civil rights division in the Department of Justice and nominally protect Black voting rights. It became the first Civil Rights Act since the Reconstruction period. And in 1960, these protections were strengthened with the Civil Rights Act of 1960.