American Civil Rights Movement 1940-1960

Honors U.S. History

The Double V Campaign

• Victory against Fascism abroad with victory against racism at home

• Treatment of African-Americans unfair given what they did during the war

President Harry S Truman

• From Missouri• Believed in Civil

Rights• 1946 - Creates

Committee on Civil Rights

• 1948 – Desegregates army

• Can’t go too far due to southern Democrat support

Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

• Plessey v. Feruson (1896) – Segregation is legal as long as facilities

• Linda Brown, eight year old African-American girl, was forced to attend a school over a mile away– Despite their being a

school closer to her home

• Supreme Court rules school segregation as “inherently unconstitutional”

Central High School and the Little Rock Nine

• “Brown v. Board” decision infuriates South

• Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus and National Guard block entrance

• President Eisenhower send in military to escort students inside

Civil Disobedience

• Rosa Parks, 1955 - Refuses to move to the back of a Montgomery City Lines bus

• Her arrest lead to a boycott of the buses

• Lead by a young Martin Luther King

• Practice of civil disobedience/nonviolence