America in the 1950s was a place of deep division. Racism reigned supreme, with the Deep South having legalised racial segregation through the Jim Crow laws. Since the late 19th century, the southern states had clung to the mantra of “separate but equal” – and when it came to separating facilities for black and white Americans, they excelled.
Every aspect of life – from the schools children could attend, to the water fountains people could drink from – was separated by race. In Florida, for instance, black and white children’s textbooks couldn’t even be kept in the same building.
Brown vs Board of Education Ruling, 1954
The US Supreme Court transformed the situation in 1954. After hearing about Linda Brown, a black girl who couldn’t enrol at her local school in Kansas because of segregationist policies (as well as hearing other cases concerning school segregation), the court unanimously ruled that separating public schools based on race was unconstitutional.
The “Brown vs Board of Education” ruling instructed schools to integrate with “all deliberate speed” (which many southern institutions used as an excuse to stall their desegregation efforts). Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling that segregation was unconstitutional, Alabama’s white officials avoided integrating schools until 1963.
The children involved in the Brown vs Board of Education lawsuit, including Linda Brown (third from left).
The Lynching of Emmett Till, August 1955
14-year-old black teenager Emmett Till was a fish out of water when he travelled from his home in Chicago to visit his family in rural Mississippi in the summer of 1955.
Unschooled in the ways of the South, his interaction in Bryant’s grocery store in Money, Mississippi, with a local white woman called Carolyn Bryant put a target on his back.
It’s still unknown exactly what transpired between them, as eyewitness accounts vary wildly. But whatever took place, it resulted in two men – Carolyn’s husband Roy Bryant, and his half-brother JW Milam – driving to where Emmett was staying in the middle of the night and dragging him away.
Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie.
They took him to a remote plantation shed, where they beat the boy almost to death, gouged out one of his eyes, shot him in the head and then dumped his body, weighted by an enormous cotton-gin fan tied with barbed wire, into the Tallahatchie River near Glendora.
His mutilated body didn’t surface until three days later.
Emmett’s mother, Mamie, was horrified by the brutal violence of her son’s death. But she was determined to show the world what had happened to him, and insisted his casket be left open. Tens of thousands filed past his body, and the press published photographs of his destroyed face.
The murder became emblematic of the injustices faced by black Americans, and outrage grew around the world. But there was still a glimmer of hope that his attackers would be brought to justice, as Bryant and Milam were put on trial for murdering the teenager.
An all-white jury declared them innocent within 67 minutes. The pair later confessed to the crime, knowing they were protected by the rule of double jeopardy.
Mamie Till became a hugely effective spokeswoman and fundraiser for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and taught for more than 20 years in the Chicago school system. She died of heart failure on 6 January 2003, aged 81.
On 25 July 2023 – which would have been Emmett Till’s 82nd birthday – President Joe Biden signed a proclamation designating the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument (which includes the site where Emmett’s body was retrieved from the Tallahatchie River).
Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955
In December 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, a 42-year-old black woman named Rosa Parks insisted on sitting in the front of a bus after a long shift at work.
The segregation laws in America’s deep south reserved the front section of public buses for whites, although most bus passengers in Montgomery were blacks and the front section was often almost empty.
Rosa Parks was arrested and jailed, which led to mass protests and a boycott of the buses, led by local black minister Martin Luther King.
Attorney-General Robert Kennedy sent Federal marshals to Montgomery, where Dr King had pledged to continue the struggle for equal rights, insisting that “passive resistance and the weapons of love” were the most effective means of fighting bigotry and racism.
On 21 December 1956, 381 days after the boycott started, the city’s buses were formally desegregated.
The Little Rock Nine, 1957
After Brown vs Board of Education, Arkansas began the process of integrating the state’s schools. One of the first to open its doors to both black and white pupils was the formerly all-white Central High School in the town of Little Rock.
Only nine black students actually transferred – they’d had to pass a vetting process organised by the Arkansas branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. But that was nothing compared to the hell that waited for them outside the school gates.
On 4 September 1957, Elizabeth Eckford – one of the so-called “Little Rock Nine” – arrived alone at the school. According to historian Professor Rebecca Brueckmann: “Eckford (pictured below) was set upon by hundreds of white segregationist rioters who spat at her, shoved her and called for her lynching.”
Elizabeth Eckford walks to school on 4 September 1957, defiantly ignoring the torrents of racial abuse from white protesters.
The National Guard were also in attendance and prevented the nine students from entering the building at the instruction of Arkansas Governor Faubus.
Photographs of the abuse the students faced circulated around the globe, drawing widespread condemnation, especially from the Soviet Union, which seized upon the Civil Rights Movement as ammunition during the Cold War.
On 23 September, President Dwight D Eisenhower himself stepped in and sent more than 1,000 federal troops to protect the students and escort them to the school. With their new guards, the Little Rock Nine could now step inside the building – but the harassment continued.
Minnijean Brown was expelled for eventually responding to the bullies, calling a classmate “white trash”. The other eight students managed to last the school year, though, and Ernest Green became the first to don the graduate cap and gown in May 1958.
Student Sit-ins, 1960
On 1 February 1960, four well-dressed black college students walked into a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina. After some light shopping, they sat down at the lunch counter, waiting to be served.
At the time, Woolworth’s didn’t allow black customers to use their lunch counters. That day, the students sat patiently and waited for service that never came.
Instead, the manager arrived and asked them to leave. But the next day they returned, with more protesters in tow: this time, 24 black students sat quietly at the lunch counter.
The sit-in ballooned at an astonishing rate, with 1,400 coming to the store that weekend.
The sit-ins triggered a wave of aggression: white supremacists loomed over the protesters, spitting and throwing eggs at them. But despite this response, sit-ins soon spread across the nation, with students as far north as Wisconsin staging them.
And they proved effective: on 25 July 1960, Woolworth’s opened its lunch counters to all customers.
The “Freedom Riders”, 1961
A group of anti-racist campaigners from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), calling themselves the “freedom riders”, toured the southern United States, travelling on bus services to test whether Federal orders to integrate public transport were being obeyed.
Starting from Washington DC, the riders planned to travel all the way to New Orleans. They were met with violent opposition, with some of the ugliest scenes taking place in the town of Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, where white segregationists (who included members of the notorious Ku Klux Klan) tried to burn and block the path of buses.
When one of the buses rolled into Anniston, Alabama, a white mob surrounded it and threw a bomb inside. The vehicle erupted in a fireball, and the fleeing riders were savagely beaten. The driver refused to continue the journey, and a replacement had to be found.
When the riders finally arrived in Jackson, Mississippi, on 24 May 1961, those who attempted to use whites-only facilities were arrested. But it wasn’t over – hundreds of protesters flooded into the area, ready to join the cause.
Although the Freedom Riders never reached New Orleans, they still brought about lasting change. That autumn, President John F Kennedy worked with the Interstate Commerce Commission to ensure that the law would actually be followed to the letter.
James Meredith, 1962
In 1962, Federal troops were called out again, this time to escort James H Meredith when he became the first black student to enrol at the University of Mississippi. Meredith’s entrance was blocked by State Troopers who were sent by Governor Ross Barnett. President John F Kennedy, however, ordered the Federal marshals to escort Meredith safely to class.
Two men were killed and 50 people were injured in the ensuing riots as angry whites, stirred up by Barnett’s actions, stormed the university in protest against Meredith’s admission. 3,000 Federal soldiers were eventually used to quell the riots.
Meredith ultimately graduated with a degree in political science.
The March on Washington and Martin Luther King Speech, 1963
On 28 August 1963, over 250,000 people walked the streets of Washington and gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in the biggest civil rights march to date.
Designed to pressure President John F Kennedy into passing the civil rights legislation he had long been promising, the ‘March for Jobs and Freedom’ was the brainchild of veteran labour organiser A Phillip Randolph and Martin Luther King Jr.
Dr King delivered a speech to the gathering, which included the likes of Judy Garland, Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster and Bob Dylan.
President Kennedy said that Dr King’s actions – and those of other activists – had sped up the “cause of 20 million Negroes”, and henceforth undertook a great deal of work towards civil rights reform. Following his assassination in 1963, his work was continued by Lyndon B Johnson, who worked hard to ensure Congress did not dilute the proposed reforms.
Civil Rights Act of 1964
On July 2 1964, President Lyndon B Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the most radical civil rights law in US history.
The Act prohibited racial discrimination in employment, public facilities, places of public accommodation, union membership and federally funded programs.
CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) workers murdered in Mississippi, 1964
Three young Civil Rights workers – Michael Schwerner (24), Andrew Goodman (20) and James Chaney (22) – who had been missing since 21 June, were discovered on 4 August 1964, murdered and buried in a partially constructed dam on a farm outside Philadelphia, Mississippi.
It emerged that the three men had been arrested by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price on 21 June, then released from Neshoba jail in the middle of the night and attacked and killed by the Ku Klux Klan as they drove out of town. There was evidence that white activist Andrew Goodman was buried alive.
The death of a white civil rights activist in such brutal circumstances backfired on those fighting change as it attracted national headlines. Deputy Sheriff Price received six years in jail, while KKK leader Sam Bowers and KKK member Wayne Roberts were sentenced to 10 years each.
A film based on the FBI investigation was made in 1988 called Mississippi Burning.
Malcolm X Assassination, 1965
Black nationalist leader Malcolm X was shot dead at a rally for the OAAU (Organisation of Afro-American Unity) at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights, New York, on 21 February 1965.
The three gunmen, one of whom was caught, were connected with a group called the Nation of Islam (NOI) – the group in which Malcolm X was formerly a leading figure. This group believed that black Americans were Allah’s chosen people, and wanted to build a separate society for black people that was free from the influence of the “white devils”.
Selma to Montgomery marches, 1965
In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, it was clear that there was one area in which the legislation had fallen woefully short: voting rights.
Southern states were still using a range of underhanded tactics to keep black voters away, from literacy tests to poll taxes.
Activists were keenly aware of this, and one of the battlegrounds was Selma, Alabama, where black voter numbers were dismally low. To force the government’s hand over the issue, Dr Martin Luther King organised his last great civil rights march.
Protesters were set to walk from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama’s capital. It was meant to be peaceful – but white supremacists had other plans.
On Sunday 7 March 1965, around 600 activists gathered in Selma, ready to march.
But they didn’t even leave the town’s limits before running into a squadron of state troopers and police, who unleashed an assault so brutal it became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’.
The attack was captured on camera, and it shocked the nation.
A second failed attempt was again ended prematurely by state authorities, and it wasn’t until 21 March that the marchers could actually leave the town. This time, they had federal protection on their side.
Five days later, thousands clambered up the marble steps of the grand Alabama State Capitol building in Montgomery.
The moment was especially sweet: by this time, their dream for new voting rights legislation was mere months away from coming true. President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on 6 August.
Black Power and the Black Panthers
Some black Americans began to seek new solutions to continuing injustice and poverty. In Oakland, California, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded a new political organisation, the Black Panthers.
The Panthers aimed to protect the ghetto community from racist police but also hoped to organise clinics, community centres and free breakfast schemes. Their violent language disturbed many of the older campaigners for black rights, but it reflected a new attitude among young black Americans.
The Black Panthers were part of the growing “Black Power” movement – a phrase initially coined by black leader Stokely Carmichael. Instead of trying hard to be accepted by white American society, Black Power supporters wanted revolutionary change in the USA.
The growing fashion for natural afro hairstyles was an indication of the popularity of the new militancy.
At the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, black American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos used the Games to protest against racism in the USA.
During their medal ceremony for the 200-meter sprint in the Olympic Stadium, gold medallist Smith and bronze medallist Carlos raised their black-gloved clenched fists high above their heads in a salute identified with Black Power during the playing of the US national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner.
Black Power activists were targeted by the FBI, and by the mid-1970s, tactics such as spying, wire-tapping, and even assassination had drawn the sting out of the movement.
Martin Luther King Assassination, 1968
On 4 April 1968, revered Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King was assassinated on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee.
Across the United States, black Americans took to the streets in grief and rage. A national day of mourning was declared, and riots broke out in 167 cities and on innumerable campuses.
More than 150,000 mourners attended his funeral at his old Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, where Mahalia Jackson sang Precious Lord, Take My Hand.
The intensive television coverage did not subside until, on 8 June 1968, James Earl Ray, the assassin, was arrested at Heathrow Airport in London, England.
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The segregation laws in America’s deep south reserved the front section of public buses for whites, although most bus passengers in Montgomery were blacks and the front section was often almost empty.
The growing fashion for natural afro hairstyles was an indication of the popularity of the new militancy.
