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The Civil Rights Movement is among the most chronicled events in African American history. It is one subject that is almost universally encountered in American history classrooms. While the general narrative of protest leading to massive changes is known, there are also many more complex stories that are often not told. One of those complex stories is the very origin of the movement itself.
===Origins of the Legal Battle===
Almost immediately, Black activists began to battle for the restoration of their civil rights. In ''Defining the Struggle'', Susan Carle argues that this began in the 1880s with groups like the Afro-American League, under the leadership of Howard Law School graduate, T. Thomas Fortune, pressuring the state through legal test cases. The strategy was to utilize incidents of racial discrimination as “tests” to bring to the courts to get them to rule on the legality of segregation. In the 1890s, another organization, the Afro-American Council continued this strategy. However, with the ''Plessy v. Ferguson '' decision of 1896, it seemed things would get a bit more difficult.
===Early Twentieth Century Movements===
''Plessy '' might be understood amid the strategies of Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Machine. In his famous speech a year before the legal case, known as the “Atlanta Compromise,” Washington argued that social agitation for rights should be pushed to the side in favor of separate development. It immediately allowed him access to philanthropic funds and , gained the purchase of many Southern leaders and Tuskegee University became a model for Black institutions in the South. But some Black leaders retorted that the question of rights should not be subordinated to separate development of the races and that rights were required to make that development happen.
[[File:Niagara.jpg|thumb|The Niagara Movement]]
Those who believed that Washington’s program was flawed continued to organize using the model of the test case. Many of the lawyers in the Black community joined their work to formations like the Afro-American Council and won many important victories for desegregation of public accommodations throughout the country. This strategy was followed by the Niagara Movement, which emerged to oppose the political tactic of the Tuskegee Machine in 1905. Their “Declaration of Principles” essentially affirmed their alignment with civil rights struggles of the past and foreshadowed the future.
In 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded amid the outcry and fallout from the Springfield Race Riot in 1908. A collection of moderate white liberals, the group was fused out of the settlement house movement and American progressivism. They felt strongly that progress would be made by appealing to inherent morality of the nation and getting it to see that racism was an impediment to human flourishing. Equality, it was understood, was foundational to the nation and could only be made real with the advancement of Black people.
W.E.B. Du Bois was invited to join the group as editor of ''The Crisis'', the NAACP’s main organ. Du Bois had been part of the Afro-American Council and the Niagara Movement. Eventually, the NAACP would begin to adopt many of the legal strategies that these groups had pioneered. In addition to confronting the issue of lynching, the organization developed a legal arm that would begin to undermine the legal foundations of Jim Crow. Pioneered by Howard University School of Law dean, Charles Hamilton Houston, would became the Legal Defense Fund began a long assault on segregation.
===School Desegregation===
The Legal Defense Fund began its work in the 1930s and looked toward desegregating professional schools as a way to confront the environment of Jim Crow. It was believed that in opening doors for Blacks in these settings would allow the expansion of Black professionals that would then serve the Black community. In a series of cases, they were able to undo the segregationist policies of law schools in Maryland (''Murray v. Maryland''), Missouri (''State ex rel. Gaines v. Canada''), and eventually Oklahoma (''McLaurin v. Oklahoma'') and Texas (''Sweatt v. Painter'').
[[File:houston.jpg|thumb|Charles Hamilton Houston]]
All the while, the desegregation of public school resources was on the agenda. Houston passed away in 1950, leaving the work to a group of young attorneys, including eventual Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall. Together, they led the legal strategy that eventuated in the school desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education. A collection of five cases of educational discrimination and inequality from around the country, the strategy pivoted on demonstrating that segregation was inherently unequal, which demanded the remedy that there should not be two separate school systems. Their argument won and on May 17, 1954, the Court declared segregation unconstitutional. A year later, the Court demanded, however, that integration could proceed with “all deliberate speed.” This meant that integration would not be immediate.
In order to make civil rights a reality, more than the legal shift had to occur. Direct action was seen as a way of making an opening and pressuring the government to ensure that the laws on the books were changed and then enforced, providing the ultimate protections of Black citizenship. Among the most effective targets for direct action were public accommodations, and those spaces that received the earliest moments of civil rights agitation were public transportation. The “right to ride,” as framed by historian Blair L.M. Kelley, was critical for it allowed the vast majority of Black people to be able to navigate the cities and towns where they often worked, many times in white neighborhoods. The irony is that residential segregation provided the context for the need for desegregation of public transportation. Black people were forced into the backs of buses and trains, and in the cases of interstate travel, they were relegated to the Jim Crow car. It was a source of both shame and denigration and deeply inconvenient, if not absurd.
While the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott is an important case study of these issues, with the indigenous leadership, the national attention, and the eventual Supreme Court case as key nodes, there is a long history of public transportation direct action work as well as boycotts that preceded it and set the stage. An influential one was the Baton Rouge Bus Boycott of 1953. Much of this work can be traced to the 1940s, with institutions like the Highlander school, providing training to those would eventually take up the struggle. It was at Highlander where Rosa Parks, the heroine of the Montgomery Bus Boycott was trained. Even in cities like Montgomery, there were previous attempts to raise this question and what it demonstrated was that people were thinking about these questions and seeking solutions long before the national attention of the late 1950s. Out of these moments, Black churches, became the base for many much of civil rights activity throughout the south, ministers like Martin Luther King, Jr. were then thrust into the leadership positions that they were known for during the period. But without the spark of ordinary people, they would not have had anyone to lead. With the Freedom Rides, young activists began to take center stage on these questions, by . By the 1960s, they would be firmly ensconced in the movement.
===Young Activists and Civil Rights===
Providing a new spark and energy to the tradition of direct action, young activists during the early 1960s helped expose the nation to the evils of segregation executing a number of sit-ins that made public accommodations a key issue in the fight for civil rights. These students were products of complex histories. One group of students were was Southern-born and bred and came to the movement out of a deep antipathy for the environments that fostered the hate that underpinned segregation. They were the products of the inadequate schools, their parents were the laborers who were cheated out of economic opportunity. But in 1955, when Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi, they felt the call to do something. Calling themselves, “The Emmett Till generation,” they joined their local NAACPs and many of them attended local HBCUs and used those spaces as the launching pad for the sit-in movement.
Another group came to the movement from the north. They were Black and experienced levels of poverty and dispossession, but did not experience Jim Crow in the same way until they came south to attend college. Many of them, however, did come with a previous understanding of socialism and pacifism and other radical ideologies that they picked up from various Northern environments. They saw ways to immediately apply these tactics to the Southern struggle.
[[File:sitin.jpg|thumb|The Greensboro Four]]
The fusion of these two groups created a prime opportunity to develop a national struggle. After the Greensboro Four, sparked a new way wave of sit-ins on February 1, 1960, Black students across the nation begin to emulate their example. Seeing the need to organize this fervor , longtime activist and current organizer of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Ella J. Baker sent out a call for a meeting on Easter Weekend. The result of that call was the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
===Conclusion===
