Until 1954, racial segregation in education was not only legal but was required in seventeen states and permissible in several others. Utilizing evidence from the sociological research of Kenneth Clark and Gunnar Myrdal, however, Thurgood Marshall, then chief counsel for the NAACP, successfully argued the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas before the Supreme Court of Chief Justice Earl Warren. Marshall showed that the practice of segregation in public schools made African American students feel inferior. Even if the facilities provided were equal in nature, the Court noted in its decision, the very fact that some students were separated from others on the basis of their race made segregation unconstitutional.

Figure 1. This map shows those states in which racial segregation in public education was required by law before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. In 1960, four years later, fewer than 10 percent of southern African American students attended the same schools as white students.

Thurgood Marshall on Fighting Racism

As a law student in 1933, Thurgood Marshall was recruited by his mentor Charles Hamilton Houston to assist in gathering information for the defense of a Black man in Virginia accused of killing two White women. His continued close association with Houston led Marshall to aggressively defend Black people in the courts and to use the legal system as means of securing equal rights in accordance with the Constitution. Houston also suggested that it would be important to establish legal precedents regarding the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling of separate but equal.

Figure 2. In 1956, NAACP leaders (from left to right) Henry L. Moon, Roy Wilkins, Herbert Hill, and Thurgood Marshall present a new poster in the campaign against southern white racism. Marshall successfully argued the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education (1954) before the U.S. Supreme Court and later became the court’s first African American justice.

By 1938, Marshall had become “Mr. Civil Rights” and in 1940 formally organized the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund to garner the resources necessary for challenging entrenched race-based inequalities in the American justice system. A direct result of Marshall’s energies and commitment was his 1940 victory in a Supreme Court case, Chambers v. Florida, which held that confessions obtained by violence and torture were inadmissible in a court of law. His most well-known case was Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which held that state laws establishing separate public schools for Black and White students were unconstitutional.

Later in life, Marshall reflected on his career fighting racism in a speech at Howard Law School in 1978:

Be aware of that myth, that everything is going to be all right. Don’t give in. I add that, because it seems to me, that what we need to do today is to refocus. Back in the 30s and 40s, we could go no place but to court. We knew then, the court was not the final solution. Many of us knew the final solution would have to be politics, if for no other reason, politics is cheaper than lawsuits. So now we have both. We have our legal arm, and we have our political arm. Let’s use them both. And don’t listen to this myth that it can be solved by either or that it has already been solved. Take it from me, it has not been solved.

When Marshall says that the problems of racism have not been solved, to what was he referring?

Though Plessy v. Fergusson had been overturned, the challenge now was to integrate schools. A year after Brown, the Supreme Court ordered southern school systems to begin desegregation “with all deliberate speed.” Some school districts voluntarily integrated their schools. For many other districts, however, “deliberate speed” proved to be very slow.

Figure 3. In 1957, U.S. soldiers from the 101st Airborne were called in to escort the Little Rock Nine into and around formerly all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

It soon became clear that enforcing Brown v. Board of Education would require presidential intervention. Eisenhower did not agree with the Supreme Court’s decision and did not wish to force southern states to integrate their schools. However, as president he was responsible for doing so. In 1957, Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, was forced to accept its first nine African American students, who became known as the Little Rock Nine. In response, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus called out the state National Guard to prevent the students from attending classes, removing the troops only after Eisenhower told him to do so. A subsequent attempt by the nine students to attend school resulted in mob violence. Eisenhower then placed the Arkansas National Guard under federal control and sent the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division to escort the students to and from school as well as from class to class. This was the first time since the end of Reconstruction that federal troops were required to protect the rights of African Americans in the South.

Throughout the school year, the Little Rock Nine were insulted, harassed, and physically assaulted; nevertheless, they returned to school each day. At the end of the year, the first African American student graduated from Central High. At the beginning of the 1958–1959 school year, Faubus ordered all Little Rock public schools closed. In the opinion of White segregationists, keeping all students out of school was preferable to having them attend integrated schools. In 1959, the Supreme Court ruled that the school had to be reopened and that the process of desegregation had to proceed.

White Responses

Efforts to desegregate public schools led to a backlash among many southern Whites, who greeted the Brown decision with horror. Some World War II veterans questioned how the government they had fought for could betray them in such a fashion. Some White parents promptly withdrew their children from public schools and enrolled them in exclusively White private academies, many of which had been newly created for the sole purpose of keeping White children from attending integrated schools. Often, these “academies” held classes in neighbors’ basements or living rooms.

Other White southerners turned to state legislatures or courts to solve the problem of school integration. Orders to integrate school districts were routinely challenged in court. When the lawsuits proved unsuccessful, many southern school districts responded by closing all public schools, as governor Faubus had done after Central High School was integrated. One county in Virginia closed its public schools for five years rather than see them integrated. Besides suing school districts, many southern segregationists filed lawsuits against the NAACP, trying to bankrupt the organization. Many national politicians supported the segregationist efforts. In 1956, ninety-six members of Congress signed “The Southern Manifesto,” in which they accused the Supreme Court of misusing its power and violating the principle of states’ rights, which maintained that states had rights equal to those of the federal government.

Emmett Till

Unfortunately, many White southern racists, frightened by challenges to the social order, responded with violence. When Little Rock’s Central High School desegregated, an irate Ku Klux Klansman from a neighboring community sent a letter to the members of the city’s school board in which he denounced them as communists and threatened to kill them. White rage sometimes erupted into murder.

In the summer of 1955, two White men in Mississippi kidnapped and brutally murdered fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. Till, visiting from Chicago and perhaps unfamiliar with the “etiquette” of Jim Crow, allegedly whistled at a White woman named Carolyn Bryant. Her husband, Roy Bryant, and another man, J. W. Milam, abducted Till from his relatives’ home, beat him, mutilated him, shot him, and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River. Emmett’s mother, Mamie, held an open-casket funeral so that Till’s disfigured body could be shown in national news coverage. The men were brought to trial. Though the evidence was damning, an exclusively White jury found the two men not guilty. Mere months after the decision, they boasted of their crime, in all of its brutal detail, in Look magazine. “They ain’t gonna go to school with my kids,” Milam said. They wanted “to make an example of [Till]—just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.”^[1]

At the trial, Mamie Till delivered emotional testimony, but the all-white jury set the men free. White juries rarely enforced the rule of law in the segregated South, and Whites accused of heinous crimes were usually acquitted. So Till’s killers confessed to the crime but were never punished, and Look magazine paid them for their story. Television, too, was increasingly making Northern Whites more aware of the gross injustices suffered by African Americans in the South, such as the violence in Birmingham a few years later.

Because of Mamie Till’s determined efforts, the lynching and trial drew unprecedented national and world outrage over the murder of an African American, soiling America’s image in the Cold War against Communism, especially in developing nations. It washed out the optimism Black Americans had felt a year earlier when the Supreme Court’s Brown decision outlawed segregated schools. During the fall of 1955, several hundred thousand joined rallies protesting Till’s murder in Chicago and other large cities. The growing coalition of churches, labor unions, and black organizations that marched helped launch the emerging civil rights movement, in conjunction with the simultaneous Montgomery Bus Boycott. Indeed, Rosa Parks was among those moved by Till’s murder, and in the early 1960s, the lunch-counter protesters and freedom riders called themselves the “Emmett Till generation.”

The Montgomery Bus Boycott

One of those inspired by Till’s death was Rosa Parks, an NAACP member from Montgomery, Alabama, who became the face of the 1955–1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott. City ordinances segregated the city’s buses, forcing African American passengers to ride in the back section. They had to enter through the rear of the bus, could not share seats with White passengers, and if the front of the bus was full and a White passenger requested an African American’s seat, were required to relinquish their place. The bus company also refused to hire African American drivers even though most of the people who rode the buses were Black.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give her seat to a White man, and the Montgomery police arrested her. After being bailed out of jail, she decided to fight the laws requiring segregation in court. To support her, the Women’s Political Council, a group of African American female activists, organized a boycott of Montgomery’s buses. News of the boycott spread through newspaper notices and by word of mouth; ministers rallied their congregations to support the Women’s Political Council. Their efforts were successful, and forty thousand African American riders did not take the bus on December 5, the first day of the boycott.

Other African American leaders within the city embraced the boycott and maintained it beyond December 5, Rosa Parks’ court date. Among them was a young minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. For the next year, Black Montgomery residents avoided the city’s buses. Some organized carpools. Others paid for rides in African American-owned taxis, whose drivers reduced their fees. Most walked to and from school, work, and church for 381 days, the duration of the boycott. In June 1956, an Alabama federal court found the segregation ordinance unconstitutional. The city appealed, but the Supreme Court upheld the decision. The city’s buses were desegregated.

The Montgomery bus boycott made King a national civil rights leader and charismatic symbol of black equality. Other black ministers and activists like Abernathy, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Bayard Rustin, and Ella Baker also became prominent figures in the civil rights movement. The ministers formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to protest white supremacy and work for voting rights throughout the South, testifying to the importance of black churches and ministers as a vital element of the civil rights movement.

The Montgomery bus boycott paved the way for the civil rights movement to demand freedom and equality for African Americans and transformed American politics, culture, and society by helping create the strategies, support networks, leadership, vision, and spiritual direction of the movement. It demonstrated that ordinary African American citizens could band together at the local level to demand and win in their struggle for equal rights and dignity. The Montgomery experience laid the foundations for the next decade of a nonviolent direct-action movement for equal civil rights for African Americans.