The Civil Rights Movement 1954 1963 The Long Civil Rights Movement Some historians believe that the Civil Rights Movement started much earlier than 1954 with the case of Plessy vs Ferguson in 1896 There were also many NAACP court battles between 1909 and 1923 The NAACP s strategy rather than attack Plessy vs Ferguson was to attack school desegregation in the hopes that it would be easier to win those cases The lead attorneys on most cases for the NAACP were Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall Gaines 1938 Lloyd Gaines was an African American who applied to the law school at the University of Missouri He was denied admission because he was black His case went all the way to the Supreme Court where they ruled that the 14 th Amendment requires any state to provide the same education opportunities to both blacks and whites Missouri was told that they had to admit Gaines to their law school or provide an entirely separate school for African Americans Many states across the country began to open separate schools for blacks rather than admit them but this became a huge financial burden Smith vs Allwright 1944 Lonnie Smith filed this case because he was denied the right to vote in primary election In the South there was a tradition that only whites could vote in these elections The Supreme Court ruled that this was unconstitutional based on the 15 th Amendment 1954 Brown vs Board of Education This was actually a group of four cases that were consolidated starting with Briggs vs Elliot in South Carolina The main reason that the Supreme Court made its decision was because of Footnote Eleven This was about a psychological study done by two African American psychologists In the study young girls both white and black were shown white and black dolls and told to choose the one they liked better More often than not the black girls chose the white doll presumably due to low self esteem The psychologists argued that the young black girls felt inferior to whites because of school segregation Overall this was an unimpressive case It was happening in the midst of the Cold War and the whole world was watching to see how African Americans were treated in the US They simply wanted an end to segregation in public education Brown II in 1955 the case gets a second opinion The Supreme Court required that schools be desegregated with all deliberate speed most schools in the US remained segregated The Southern Manifesto white Southerners reacted to Brown with extreme violence Although lynchings were on the decline there were many murders beatings and legal lynchings where they would accuse and convict a black person of a crime that they didn t commit and kill them or put them in jail In March of 1956 101 Congressmen from the South issued the Southern Manifesto written by Strom Thurmond All but three southern democrats signed the document LBJ did not The Southern Manifesto accused the Supreme Court of abusing their judicial power and insisted that they would refuse to desegregate their schools It also outlawed the NAACP in southern states which is a violation of the First Amendment They also passed laws specifically aimed at preventing school integration and some localities in the South simply shut their schools down all together The Little Rock Nine in 1957 nine African American students attempted to integrate Little Rock High School In order to prevent this integration the Governor of Arkansas called in the Arkansas National Guard Each day as the students attempted to enter the high school they were met by mobs who cursed at them spit on them and physically prevented them from entering the school President Eisenhower eventually had to call in federal troops For months the angry mobs didn t leave and the nine students had to be escorted in by federal troops Emmitt Till In 1955 a 14 year old boy from Chicago was visiting his Grandma in Mississippi for the summer Supposedly he and some other boys went to a store where he whistled at the store owner s wife Being from Chicago he didn t understand the repercussions of his actions Several nights later the store owner and his brother in law kidnapped Emmitt beat him shot him in the head tied a cotton gin around his neck and threw him in a river His murderers were arrested and charged with murder but were acquitted by an all white jury Emmitt s mother wanted the whole world to know what happened to her son She transported his body back to Chicago where she held an open casket funeral so that everyone who could see what happened to him Ebony Magazine took photographs of him in the casket and published them Many leaders of the Civil Rights Movement cited the Emmitt Till case as a turning point for them helping them to become active and involved in the Civil Rights Movement The Movement Expands As the Civil Rights Movement expanded there was an increase of boycotts and the grassroots movement which was average people organizing protests sit ins and boycotts on a local level Montgomery Bus Boycott 1955 1956 Rosa Parks was a long time member of the NAACP who was actively involved in getting African Americans the right to vote She had tried many times to vote but was denied She was also involved in the investigations of black women who were raped by white men Parks had attended the Highlander Fold School a training school for civil rights activists When Rosa Parks got on the bus that day she sat down in the front on purpose knowing that she would asked to move Her act is what sparked the bus boycott which lasted over a year and resulted in the case going all the way to the Supreme Court In November of 1956 the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on Alabama buses was unconstitutional Reverend Martin Luther King Jr prior to becoming a civil rights activist he was a minister a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference SCLC and had been involved in other activities King was chosen to represent them because he was attractive charismatic and an excellent speaker He preached non violence not as a strategy but as a philosophy a way of life o Civil Disobedience this saying comes from poet Henry David Thoreau who wrote an essay called On Civil Disobedience in 1849 It means that you have the right to disobey a law when that law or anything else that the government requires you to do is unjust For example King would be denied the right to hold a march but would do it anyways Greensboro Sit Ins in 1960 a group of black students at NC A T University organized