Robinson, Jackie(1919–
72): Broke baseball’s
color bar in 1947, open-
ing the door to integrat-
ing other sports.
United Auto Workers: An
influential labor union
that sponsored civil rights
activism.
appealed to white teenagers through Elvis Presley and other white rock ’n’
roll singers. Before long, black performers Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and
Little Richard developed their own following on white radio stations. As
blacks became more visible to whites, they began to seem more deserving of
their constitutional rights.
By mid-century, black southerners were on the cusp of achieving racial
justice, but the task of defeating what amounted to a police state was her-
culean. To make America live up to its promises of equality and justice for
all, the civil rights movement would have to develop black consciousness,
mobilize black churches and colleges, enlist northern white opinion, divide
the white southern elite, capture the national Democratic party, and win over
the Supreme Court, the White House, and Congress. Ultimately, justice
could be achieved only when urban blacks applied enough pressure to force
the federal government to impose change from above. Such pressure would
be developed by trial-and-error and demand steep sacrifices over many
years. One of the early martyrs was schoolteacher Harry Moore, who was
blown to bits by the Klan in 1951 as he slept. As Florida’s NAACP executive
director, Moore had filed anti-discrimination lawsuits, helped register an
astounding 116,000 black voters, and demanded state investigations of
police violence.
This Second Reconstruction was made possible by a remarkably changed
black community. Racial pride received a boost from Carter G. Woodson,
whose Journal of Negro Historyand Negro History Week trumpeted the un-
recognized contributions that blacks had made in American history. Other
scholars, including E. Franklin Frazier, Charles Johnson, and Ralph Bunche,
knocked the intellectual underpinnings from segregation. As blacks migrated
in large numbers from plantations to the New South’s industrial cities, where
segregation was overt and onerous, the region’s caste system was questioned
as never before. Boll weevils that destroyed the cotton crop pushed millions
more to northern cities, where they found higher-paying jobs, joined the
NAACP, and constituted a significant voting bloc. They were helped along
by color-blind industrial unions, such as the United Automobile Workers
and Congress of Industrial Organizations. Northern black publications, espe-
cially the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, Jet, and Ebony, reached the
South, carrying bolder stories about injustice than timid local newspapers.
Black southerners attended college in record numbers because of the GI Bill
and scholarships from the United Negro College Fund, along with the post-
war boom that doubled black income. A new crop of educated and articulate
leaders emerged, notably Martin Luther King, Jr.Meanwhile, the NAACP
won milestone legal victories in desegregating juries, housing, interstate
transportation, and higher education, as well as removing impediments to
black voting, especially the white primary in Smithv. Allwright(1944). The20 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
King, Martin Luther, Jr.
(1929–68): Charismatic
Southern Baptist minis-
ter who was America’s
most prominent nonvio-
lent civil rights champion
until his murder.