slave states. When the balance tipped in favour of anti-slavery, the now-minority
slave states asserted their rights to maintain a social institution – slavery – which
they held to be central to their life and culture.
The Union defeated the Confederacy and in 1866 Congress passed the Civil Rights
Act (which followed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery),
which declared that all persons born in the United States were citizens and so entitled
to ‘full and equal benefit of the laws’. However, white Southerners, while forced to
accept the abolition of slavery, used state power – through the Democratic Party –
to deny newly emancipated blacks their voting rights, educational opportunities and
other benefits ‘of the laws’. The so-called ‘Reconstruction’ (1865–77) was a failure.
So by the beginning of the twentieth century most blacks in the South had lost the
right to vote, and there was widespread legally enforcedsegregation of education,
transport and other services. In the first half of the twentieth century American
blacks were divided over the correct tactics to adopt against discrimination: Booker
T. Washington (1856–1915) advocated abandoning politics in favour of economic
advancement; W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) founded the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which demanded full equality in
accordance with the US Constitution; after the First World War Marcus Garvey
(1887–1940) advocated separation from white society, and even emigration to
Africa.The Civil Rights Movement
After the Second World War the pressure for change increased. We will focus on
particular events and tactics, rather than provide a narrative (several of the books
listed in the further reading at the end of the chapter and the weblinks on the
Companion Website provide useful timelines).
Discrimination was so widespread – deeply institutionalised – in the South that
it is difficult to pinpoint particular laws that were the object of civil disobedience.
However, among the more blatantly discriminatory laws were: the denial of the
right to vote (through a wide range of mechanisms); segregated schooling; segregated
services, such as seats on buses and places at lunch counters; denial of entry to
many facilities, such as libraries, cinemas and swimming pools; denial of places at
colleges and universities; illegitimate restrictions on the right to protest; failure
on the part of the police to protect blacks against violence from white racists such
as the Ku Klux Klan.
Not all the actions of the civil rights activists would fall under the category of
civil disobedience. In fact, three strands can be discerned: (a) legal protests and
actions, such as the Montgomery bus boycott (although, in fact, such actions soon
became ‘illegal’ as legal devices were deployed against the participants); (b) actions
through the courts, using or testing federal law against state law; (c) acts of peaceful
lawbreaking – that is, civil disobedience – such as refusing to obey police orders to
disperse, and sitting at segregated lunch counters, where the proprietors could
appeal to state law to enforce segregation. It is extremely important to understand
how the Civil Rights Movement took place within a context of constitutional
conflict, which mirrored the federal versus states conflict of the nineteenth century.436 Part 4 Contemporary ideas