The post-World War II period brought immeasurable advances for African Americans, as the Civil Rights movement helped to guarantee blacks equal status under the law, and the coupling of the black arts movement and rise in black nationalism during the 1960s cultivated a sense of African-American pride.
During World War II, large numbers of African-American men served the United States in the armed forces, fighting the threat of fascism in Europe and the Pacific. They returned home in 1945, however, to a country where blacks still suffered from legal SEGREGATION and discrimination in the South, and were relegated to squalid ghettos of de facto segregation in the North.
Though most northern states had adopted public policies that outlawed racial discrimination, the South in the 1940s was still guided by a collection of policies referred to as “Jim Crow laws” that reinforced segregation practices. The segregation principle in the South subjected African Americans to second-class public transportation, schools, parks, theaters, restaurants, and even cemeteries. Those blacks who violated the social norms laid out by Jim Crow risked the threat of lynching, a form of vigilante justice, which persisted from the Reconstruction era through the mid-20th century, despite pleas from the National Association fOR the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to make the practice a federal crime.
The hostile racial tensions of the South prompted large numbers of African Americans to migrate during the early 20th century to northern urban centers such as New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, in a population shift known as the Great Migration. Living conditions in the North for migrants were incredibly poor, however. Unfair housing and employment practices served to segregate blacks from whites in northern cities, creating predominantly African-American communities. The flood of migrants from the South overwhelmed many African-American communities such as the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago and Harlem in New York, which prior to the war had become thriving and economically diverse centers of black culture and business. By the 1940s, many African-American neighborhoods in the North had deteriorated into urban ghettos.
Efforts to end legalized racial discrimination in the South and to improve the quality of life for northern blacks were spearheaded by the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, which was independently established in 1939 as the legal arm of the NAACP. The earliest successes in the Civil Rights movement came as a result of the war effort, with the outlawing of discrimination in defense industries in 1941 and the desegregation of the armed forces in 1948. In the early 1950s, the NAACP legal team began pressing a series of civil rights-related cases before the U. S. Supreme Court in which the lawyers argued that segregation affirmed inherently unequal educational and other public facilities for African Americans. The landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954), in which the majority opinion declared that separate, segregated educational facilities were unequal and unconstitutional, was a tremendous victory for the NAACP, and sparked a mass movement among African Americans and liberal whites to end segregation and racially unjust practices across the country.
Protest took other forms as well. In 1955, Rosa Parks, an African-American seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat and move to the black section at the back of a city bus. Parks’s arrest prompted a one-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system, and the boycott movement then continued under the leadership of a young Montgomery minister, Martin Luther King, Jr., until Montgomery felt the economic pressure and capitulated. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), founded in 1957 by King, brought the resistance movement to cities across the South. The passive acts of civil disobedience advocated by King and the SCLC aimed to undermine the system of segregation and racial discrimination through nonviolent means.
The early 1960s brought a new practice of resistance in the form of sit-ins. African-American college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, staged the first sit-in at a local lunch counter that did not serve blacks. Despite verbal and physical harassment, the students demanded service, and they refused to leave. Similar sit-ins were carried out at restaurants, theaters, and department stores across the nation, largely under the leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In the summer of 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality (core) expanded the sit-in movement by coordinating a group of “freedom riders” who traveled across the South, testing segregation policies in interstate transportation. More than 70,000 young people, both white and African-American, participated in the freedom rides. The nonviolent protests of the early 1960s prompted the desegregation of a wide range of private businesses, and fueled the optimism of the Civil Rights movement.
Perhaps the most dramatic moment of the movement came in August 1963, as hundreds of thousands of people rallied in the nation’s capital for the March on Washington, a sign of support for the major civil rights legislation that was pending in Congress. The passage of that legislation, in the form of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination in public accommodations, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed prejudicial voter registration tactics, marked the climax of the movement for equality and integration.
The effects of the growing sense of black identity found their way into the African-American artistic and literary landscape as well. While black writers in the 1930s and 1940s, such as Native Son author Richard Wright, focused on literature as a means of protesting racial injustice, the progress of the Civil Rights movement and the decline of segregation tended, in the words of writer Arthur P. Davis, “to destroy the protest element in Negro writing.” James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, who were both proteges of Wright, broke away from the tradition of the protest novel and called for a body of literature that more completely reflected the complexity of the African-American experience. Baldwin’s novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) portrayed the experiences of migrant blacks in Harlem and the role of the black church in their lives. Ellison drew on a variety of subjects ranging from segregated education to competing political ideologies in his deeply resonant novel Invisible Man (1952). In 1959, playwright Lorraine Hansberry became the first African-American woman to have a play produced on Broadway with Raisin in the Sun, her depiction of the struggles of a working-class black family living in Chicago.
Prior to World War II, even the playing fields of professional sports had been divided along segregated lines. Though black athletes such as boxer Joe Louis and Olympian Jesse Owens had achieved national popularity in the 1930s, they were exceptions to the rule, and most African Americans, such as the stars of the Negro baseball leagues, played in relative anonymity, excluded from allwhite professional leagues. The racial line was crossed in 1947, however, when Jackie Robinson became the first black player in modern major league baseball, signing a contract with general manager Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Robinson endured steady abuse from white spectators and opposing players, but, spurred on by the support of his white teammates, he won the 1947 Rookie of the Year Award and helped carry the Dodgers to the National League championship. The success of Robinson paved the way for other black baseball players such as Willie Mays and Henry (Hank) Aaron, who, starring during the 1950s and 1960s, became household names and beloved national icons.
As more and more African-American athletes achieved stardom, some, such as heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali (formerly known as Cassius Clay), used their status to address racial injustice and take a political stand. Ali first attracted notice by winning the gold medal at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome, and he subsequently became the world heavyweight champion by defeating Sonny Liston in 1964. That same year, he joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali. Ali adored the spotlight and became famous for his proclamations of invincibility, often delivered in poetic verse, and his personal slogan “I am the greatest!” The image of an articulate and boastful black athlete angered many whites, and his taunting of black opponents, often calling upon slave stereotypes such as stupid and illiterate, drew the ire of many in the black community. Nonetheless, Ali’s popularity was unmatched by any black athlete of his time, and he fascinated the media and public alike, even more so in 1967, when he refused induction into the U. S. Army on the basis of his religious convictions. Ali called upon other blacks to refuse induction rather than fight in the Vietnam War for a country that oppressed them. He was convicted of violating the Selective Service Act and stripped of his heavyweight title, though the U. S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 1971.
The sense of promise that the early years of the Civil Rights movement brought African Americans gradually declined into disappointment, frustration, and unrest during the mid-1960s as it became clear that the overall political and economic welfare of blacks had been changed little by civil rights legislation. Younger blacks sparked a sense of radicalism in the movement; they grew impatient with the slow rate of progress and called for a more militant approach in demanding change. Violent riots in Harlem during the summer of 1964 were followed by similar demonstrations in predominantly black urban ghettos across the country over the next two years. In addition, the tragic murders of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in Mississippi and four young black girls in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, shocked many African Americans into rethinking the established principles of the Civil Rights movement.
Notions of nonviolence and racial harmony were increasingly replaced by ideas such as Black Power and “separatism” during the middle and late 1960s. Stokely Carmichael, a longtime civil rights activist who became the chair of SNCC in 1966, became frustrated with the nonviolence doctrine and, while leading a march in Mississippi in 1966, he rallied demonstrators around the concept of “Black Power.” Carmichael associated Black Power with self-defense, the ability to defend the black community, political and economic power, and racial pride. African-American leaders who had been critical of King’s pragmatic and nonviolent methods, such as Black Muslim leader Malcolm X, found an alert national audience calling for black separatism, pride, and self-dependence. Malcolm X had risen to power within Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam before breaking off and establishing his own organization. His assassination in 1965 was followed soon after by publication of The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley, which became an inspiration for numerous young black radicals.
In 1966, African-American activists Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panthers in Oakland, California, a militant organization that epitomized the separatist movement. The Black Panthers advocated the use of violence to protect African-American communities from police brutality. The party gradually developed into a Marxist political organization, calling for all blacks to arm themselves and demanding that African-American prisoners be released from jail.
A sense of black nationalism pervaded the artistic world by way of the Black Arts Movement, which was characterized by dramatic artistic and literary development during the 1960s. Proponents of the movement called for the destruction of traditional Eurocentric cultural norms and the creation of a “black aesthetic.” The Black Arts Movement encouraged African Americans to embrace their cultural ancestry and helped coin familiar slogans, such as “black is beautiful,” in the desire to cultivate a sense of racial pride. Adherents to the movement broke away from traditionally white artistic institutions and established African-American publishing houses, theater troupes, and even repertory schools. Author and playwright Leroi Jones, who changed his name to Amiri Baraka in 1968, was a leader in the movement. Baraka’s play Dutchman (1964) appeared Off Broadway and drew considerable critical acclaim. The play focused around the interaction between a white woman and a black intellectual, highlighting the anger of African Americans toward the dominant white culture. In 1965, Baraka founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre in Harlem, which encouraged young black playwrights to create a stronger black aesthetic in theater.
Further reading: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cornel West, The African-American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Country (New York: Free Press, 2000); James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
—Guy R. Temple
World History
