20 questions · History
When Rosa Parks boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on the evening of 1 December 1955, the injustice she was about to refuse was not an oversight. It was the law. Since the end of Reconstruction the Southern states had woven a dense net of rules named after a minstrel character, Jim Crow: separate schools, separate waiting rooms, separate drinking fountains, and on the buses a movable colour line that shifted backwards whenever a white passenger was left standing. The Supreme Court had blessed the whole arrangement in 1896 with the phrase „separate but equal“. Separate it certainly was. Equal it never was. The first crack came from the same court in 1954. In Brown v. Board of Education the justices ruled unanimously that segregated schooling was unconstitutional, because separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. A year later fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi, and his mother insisted on an open casket so that the country would have to look at what had been done to her son. The photographs travelled everywhere. A few months after that, Rosa Parks kept her seat, was arrested, and Black Montgomery stopped riding the buses for 381 days. The boycott was led by a 26-year-old pastor named Martin Luther King Jr. What followed was a decade of nerve. Nine teenagers walked into Little Rock Central High in 1957 behind a screen of paratroopers. Students sat down at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960, were refused service, and simply stayed put. Six-year-old Ruby Bridges was escorted to first grade by federal marshals. Freedom Riders rode integrated buses through the South in 1961 and were beaten for it. In Birmingham in 1963 the police commissioner, Bull Connor, turned dogs and fire hoses on demonstrators, and the pictures did more for the movement than any speech could. That same summer a quarter of a million people stood at the Lincoln Memorial and heard King describe his dream. Two laws made the gains permanent: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed segregation in public life, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which would not exist without the march from Selma and the beatings on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In 1967 the Supreme Court struck down the last bans on interracial marriage in the case of a couple named Loving. One year later King was shot dead in Memphis. He was 39.
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Jim Crow laws
The name came from a stage character used by white performers to mock Black people.
💡 Did you know? In 1896 the Supreme Court declared segregation lawful under the formula „separate but equal“: it stood for 58 years.
Brown v. Board of Education
The justices ruled unanimously that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.
💡 Did you know? The lawyer who argued the case, Thurgood Marshall, became the first Black justice on that same court 13 years later.
Emmett Till
He was accused of speaking to a white woman; two men abducted and killed him, and an all-white jury acquitted them.
💡 Did you know? „I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby“, said his mother Mamie Till: the casket photographs shook the country.
Rosa Parks
She was a seamstress and had been active in the civil rights organisation NAACP for years: hardly the tired lady of legend.
💡 Did you know? Nine months earlier 15-year-old Claudette Colvin had done exactly the same; the movement was looking for a test case it could win in court.
381 days
For more than a year tens of thousands walked, shared cars, or rode with taxi drivers who charged them the bus fare.
💡 Did you know? It ended not through negotiation but in court: in Browder v. Gayle the Supreme Court ruled bus segregation unconstitutional.
Martin Luther King Jr.
He was 26 when the boycott began and had been a pastor in Montgomery for barely a year.
💡 Did you know? He took his method of non-violent resistance from Mahatma Gandhi and travelled to India in 1959 to study it.
The Little Rock Nine
The governor of Arkansas called out the National Guard to keep them out.
💡 Did you know? President Eisenhower answered by sending the 101st Airborne Division: paratroopers escorted the students to class for an entire school year.
The sit-in
They sat down at a counter that refused to serve Black customers and stayed until closing time. The next day more came.
💡 Did you know? Within two months there were sit-ins in 55 cities across nine states; the Greensboro store gave in that July.
Ruby Bridges
White parents pulled their children out; for a whole year a single teacher taught Ruby alone in an empty classroom.
💡 Did you know? Norman Rockwell painted the scene in 1964 as „The Problem We All Live With“: the girl walking between four men whose faces you never see.
The Freedom Riders
They were testing whether a Supreme Court ruling against segregation on interstate buses was actually being obeyed. It was not.
💡 Did you know? In Anniston, Alabama, a mob firebombed one of their buses; the riders escaped at the last moment. The rides continued anyway.
Birmingham
Hundreds of the marchers were schoolchildren: the campaign had deliberately called for a „Children's Crusade“.
💡 Did you know? The photographs of dogs and water cannon went around the world and pushed President Kennedy to introduce a civil rights bill.
„I have a dream“
About 250,000 people had gathered at the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington.
💡 Did you know? The famous passage was not in the script: the singer Mahalia Jackson called out „Tell them about the dream!“, and King set his notes aside.
A Baptist church
The four girls were between 11 and 14 years old; they were changing into their choir robes.
💡 Did you know? The last of the bombers was not convicted until 2002 to 2039 years after the attack.
The Civil Rights Act
It banned discrimination based on race, colour, religion, national origin and sex: in restaurants, hotels, schools and at work.
💡 Did you know? President Johnson signed it and predicted his party had just lost the South for a generation. He was right.
The Nobel Peace Prize
He was 35, the youngest person to have received it at the time.
💡 Did you know? He kept none of the roughly 54,000 dollars in prize money: all of it went to the civil rights movement.
Malcolm X
He spoke of self-defence „by any means necessary“ rather than non-violent resistance.
💡 Did you know? After his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964 his position shifted and he broke with the Nation of Islam. He was assassinated shortly afterwards.
Selma
State troopers drove the marchers back across the Edmund Pettus Bridge with clubs and tear gas.
💡 Did you know? Only the third attempt succeeded: under federal protection 25,000 people walked the 54 miles to Montgomery.
The Voting Rights Act
It outlawed the devices Southern states used to keep Black citizens from voting: literacy tests, poll taxes, arbitrary obstacles.
💡 Did you know? In Mississippi barely 7 per cent of eligible Black voters were registered before the act; four years later it was almost 60.
Loving v. Virginia
Richard and Mildred Loving had been arrested in their home state of Virginia simply for being married to each other.
💡 Did you know? History handed the case a perfect name: the ruling that legalised love across the colour line is called Loving.
Memphis
He had gone there to support striking sanitation workers: by then his focus had shifted towards poverty as much as segregation.
💡 Did you know? The night before he said he had been to the mountaintop and seen the promised land. The next day he was shot on his motel balcony.
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