SSUSH22:
The student will identify dimensions of the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1970.
A. Explain the importance of President Truman’s order to integrate the U.S. military and the federal government.
1948––President Harry Truman issued an executive order to integrate the U.S.armed forces and to end discrimination in the hiring of U.S. government employees. In turn, this led to the civil rights laws enacted in the 1960s.
B. Identify Jackie Robinson and the integration of baseball.
1947––Jackie Robinson was the first African American to play for a major league baseball team in the United States, the Brooklyn Dodgers. This led to the complete integration of baseball and other professional sports. Robinson was the National League’s most valuable player in 1949 and the first African American in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Until this time, African Americans played professional baseball in the Negro League.
C. Explain Brown v. Board of Education and efforts to resist the decision.
1954––In the Brown v. Board of Education case, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that state laws establishing “separate but equal” public schools denied African American students the equal education promised in the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court’s decision reversed prior rulings dating back to the Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896. Many people were unhappy with this decision, and some even refused to follow it. The governor of Arkansas ordered the National Guard to keep nine African American students from attending Little Rock’s Central High School; President Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock to force the high school to integrate.
D. Describe the significance of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail and his I Have a Dream Speech.
1963––Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, while demonstrating against racial segregation. In jail he wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to address fears white religious leaders had that he was moving too fast toward desegregation. In his letter, King explained why victims of segregation, violent attacks, and murder found it difficult to wait for those injustices to end. Later the same year, King delivered his most famous speech, “I Have a Dream,” to over 250,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. In this speech, King asked for peace and racial harmony.
E. Describe the causes and consequences of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
TV Impacts the Civil Rights Movement
The first regular television broadcasts began in 1949, providing just two hours a week of news and entertainment to a very small area on the East Coast. By 1956, over 500 stations were broadcasting all over America, bringing news and entertainment into the living rooms of most Americans.
TV newscasts also changed the shape of American culture. Americans who might never have attended a civil rights demonstration saw and heard them on their TVs in the 1960s. In 1963, TV reports showed helmeted police officers from Birmingham, Alabama, using high-pressure fire hoses to spray African American children who had been walking in a protest march. The reports also showed the officers setting police dogs to attack them, and then clubbing them.
TV news coverage of the civil rights movement helped many Americans turn their sympathies toward ending racial segregation and persuaded Kennedy that new laws were the only ways to end the racial violence and to give African Americans the civil rights they were demanding.
TV newscasts also changed the shape of American culture. Americans who might never have attended a civil rights demonstration saw and heard them on their TVs in the 1960s. In 1963, TV reports showed helmeted police officers from Birmingham, Alabama, using high-pressure fire hoses to spray African American children who had been walking in a protest march. The reports also showed the officers setting police dogs to attack them, and then clubbing them.
TV news coverage of the civil rights movement helped many Americans turn their sympathies toward ending racial segregation and persuaded Kennedy that new laws were the only ways to end the racial violence and to give African Americans the civil rights they were demanding.