Dick Gregory Typed Quote Signed Civil Rights Leader African American Autograph

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Seller: memorabilia111 ✉️ (808) 100%, Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan, US, Ships to: US & many other countries, Item: 176270373017 DICK GREGORY TYPED QUOTE SIGNED CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER AFRICAN AMERICAN AUTOGRAPH. DICK GREGORY TYPED QUOTE SIGNED ON A 4X6 CARD Richard Claxton Gregory was an American comedian, civil rights leader, business owner and entrepreneur, vegetarian activist, and conspiracy theorist. His writings were best sellers.  _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Richard Claxton Gregory (October 12, 1932 – August 19, 2017) was an American comedian, civil rights leader, business owner and entrepreneur, vegetarian activist, and conspiracy theorist.[1][2] His writings were best sellers. Gregory became popular among the African-American communities in the southern United States with his "no-holds-barred" sets, poking fun at the bigotry and racism in the United States. In 1961 he became a staple in the comedy clubs, appeared on television, and released comedy record albums.[3] Gregory was at the forefront of political activism in the 1960s, when he protested the Vietnam War and racial injustice. He was arrested multiple times and went on many hunger strikes.[4] He later became a speaker and author, primarily promoting spirituality.[3] Gregory died of heart failure, aged 84, at a Washington, D.C., hospital in August 2017.[3] Early life Gregory was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Lucille, a housemaid, and Presley Gregory.[5] At Sumner High School, he was aided by teachers, among them Warren St. James; he also excelled at running, winning the state cross country championship in 1950.[6] Gregory earned a track scholarship to Southern Illinois University (SIU),[7] where he set school records as a half-miler and miler.[8] He was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. In 1954, his college career was interrupted for two years when he was drafted into the United States Army. At the urging of his commanding officer, who had taken notice of his penchant for joking, Gregory got his start in comedy in the Army, where he entered and won several talent shows. In 1956, Gregory briefly returned to SIU after his discharge, but dropped out because he felt that the university "didn't want me to study, they wanted me to run."[9] In the hopes of becoming a professional comedian, Gregory moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he became part of a new generation of black comedians that included Nipsey Russell, Bill Cosby, and Godfrey Cambridge, all of whom broke with the minstrel tradition that presented stereotypical black characters. Gregory drew on current events, especially racial issues, for much of his material: "Segregation is not all bad. Have you ever heard of a collision where the people in the back of the bus got hurt?"[10] Comedy career Gregory started helping his family with the gigs he started to get at a young age. He was always involved in sports and in social groups in high school. He enrolled in Southern Illinois University in 1951. He was named the university's outstanding student athlete of the year in 1953. The same year he left college when he was drafted into the United States Army, where he performed comedy shows hosted by the Army after encouragement by his Commanding Officer. In 1961, Gregory made his New York debut at The Blue Angel nightclub, also recording a live set there, "Dick Gregory at the Blue Angel" for his album East & West.[11][12] He soon came back to Chicago and finally got his big break at the Playboy Club in Chicago, also in 1961, that was supposed to be one night and ended up being six weeks and earned him a spot in Time and a guest appearance on Jack Paar’s show and other night clubs shows, etc. External video 2014 Ferguson and Beyond Rally 31.jpg video icon Dick Gregory: Advice to Young African Americans, National Visionary Leadership Project video icon Dick Gregory: The Civil Rights Movement – Part 1, National Visionary Leadership Project video icon Booknotes interview with Gregory on Callus on My Soul: A Memoir, March 4, 2001, C-SPAN Gregory began his career as a comedian while serving in the military in the mid-1950s. He served in the Army for a year and a half at Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Lee in Virginia, and Fort Smith in Arkansas. He was drafted in 1954 while attending Southern Illinois University. After being discharged in 1956, he returned to the university but did not receive a degree. He moved to Chicago with a desire to perform comedy professionally.[10] In 1958, Gregory opened the Apex Club nightclub in Illinois. The club failed and landed Gregory in financial hardship. In 1959, Gregory landed a job as master of ceremonies at the Roberts Show Club.[13] While working for the United States Postal Service during the daytime, Gregory performed as a comedian in small, primarily black-patronized nightclubs. In an interview with The Huffington Post, Gregory described the history of black comics as limited: "Blacks could sing and dance in the white night clubs but weren't allowed to stand flat-footed and talk to white folks, which is what a comic does."[14] In 1961, Gregory was working at the black-owned Roberts Show Bar in Chicago when he was spotted by Hugh Hefner. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I understand there are a good many Southerners in the room tonight. I know the South very well. I spent twenty years there one night. Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant and this white waitress came up to me and said, "We don't serve colored people here." I said, "That's all right. I don't eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken." Then these three white boys came up to me and said, "Boy, we're giving you fair warning. Anything you do to that chicken, we're gonna do to you." So I put down my knife and fork, I picked up that chicken and I kissed it. Then I said, "Line up, boys!" Gregory attributed the launch of his career to Hefner. Based on his performance at Roberts Show Bar, Hefner hired Gregory to work at the Chicago Playboy Club as a replacement for comedian "Professor" Irwin Corey.[15] Gregory's comedy occasioned controversy in some conservative white circles. The administration of the University of Tennessee, for instance, branded Gregory an "extreme racist"[16] whose "appearance would be an outrage and an insult to many citizens of this state",[17] and revoked his invitation by students to speak on campus. The students sued, with noted litigator William Kunstler as their counsel, and in Smith v. University of Tennessee, 300 F. Supp. 777 (E.D. Tenn. 1969), won an order from the court that the university's policy was "too broad and vague". The University of Tennessee then implemented an "open speaker" system, and Gregory subsequently performed in April 1970.[16] In 1964, Gregory's book, Nigger, was published. Since then, the book has never been out of print. In 2019 a trade paperback was published as well as an audio version.[18] Post-standup career Gregory was number 82 on Comedy Central's list of the 100 Greatest Stand-ups of all time and had his own star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.[19] He was a co-host with radio personality Cathy Hughes, and was a frequent morning guest, on WOL 1450 AM talk radio's The Power, the flagship station of Hughes' Radio One.[20] He also appeared regularly on the nationally syndicated Imus in the Morning program.[21] Gregory appeared as "Mr. Sun" on the television show Wonder Showzen (the third episode, entitled "Ocean", aired in 2005). As Chauncey, a puppet character, imbibes a hallucinogenic substance, Mr. Sun warns: "Don't get hooked on imagination, Chauncey. It can lead to terrible, horrible things." Gregory also provided guest commentary on the Wonder Showzen Season One DVD.[22] Large segments of his commentary were intentionally bleeped out, including the names of several dairy companies, as he made potentially defamatory remarks concerning ill effects that the consumption of cow milk has on human beings. Gregory attended and spoke at the funeral of James Brown on December 30, 2006, in Augusta, Georgia.[23] Gregory was an occasional guest on the Mark Thompson's Make It Plain Sirius Channel 146 Radio Show from 3pm to 6pm PST.[24] Gregory appeared on The Alex Jones Show on September 14, 2010, March 19, 2012, and April 1, 2014.[25][26][27] Gregory gave the keynote address for Black History Month at Bryn Mawr College on February 28, 2013.[28] His take-away message to the students was to never accept injustice. Once I accept injustice, I become injustice. For example, paper mills give off a terrible stench. But the people who work there don't smell it. Remember, Dr. King was assassinated when he went to work for garbage collectors. To help them as workers to enforce their rights. They couldn't smell the stench of the garbage all around them anymore. They were used to it. They would eat their lunch out of a brown bag sitting on the garbage truck. One day, a worker was sitting inside the back of the truck on top of the garbage, and got crushed to death because no one knew he was there.[28] Towards the end of his life, he was featured in a Fantagraphics book by Pat Thomas entitled Listen, Whitey: The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965–1975, which uses the political recordings of the Civil Rights era to highlight sociopolitical meanings throughout the movement.[29] Gregory is known for comedic performances that not only made people laugh, but mocked the establishment. According to Thomas, Gregory's monologues reflect a time when entertainment needed to be political to be relevant, which is why he included his standup in the collection. Gregory is featured along with the likes of Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr., Langston Hughes and Bill Cosby.[30] Political career Gregory began his political career by running against Richard J. Daley for Mayor of Chicago in 1967. Though he did not win, this would not prove to be the end of his participation in electoral politics.[31] Gregory ran for presidency in the 1968 United States presidential election as a write-in candidate of the Freedom and Peace Party, which had broken off from the Peace and Freedom Party. He garnered 47,097 votes, including one from Hunter S. Thompson,[32] with fellow activist Mark Lane as his running mate in some states. His running mate in New Jersey was Dr. David Frost of Plainfield, a biologist, Rutgers professor, and Chairman of NJ SANE (Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy). Famed pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock was the running mate in Virginia[33] and Pennsylvania[34] garnering more than the party he had left.[35] The Freedom and Peace Party also ran other candidates, including Beulah Sanders for New York State Senate and Flora Brown for New York State Assembly.[36] His efforts landed him on the master list of Nixon's political opponents. Gregory then wrote the book Write Me In about his presidential campaign. One anecdote in the book relates the story of a publicity stunt that came out of Operation Breadbasket in Chicago. The campaign had printed one-dollar bills with Gregory's image on them, some of which made it into circulation. The majority of these bills were quickly seized by the federal government,[8] much in part to the bills resembling authentic US currency enough to work in many dollar-cashing machines of the day.[37] Gregory avoided being charged with a federal crime, later joking that the bills could not really be considered United States currency, because "everyone knows a black man will never be on a U.S. bill."[38] On October 15, 1969, Gregory spoke at the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam demonstration in Washington, D.C., where he joked to the crowd: "The President says nothing you kids do will have any effect on him. Well, I suggest he make one long-distance call to the LBJ ranch".[39] Political activism Anti-Apartheid On July 21, 1979, Gregory appeared at the Amandla Festival where Bob Marley, Patti LaBelle, and Eddie Palmieri, among others, performed.[40] Gregory gave a speech before Marley's performance, blaming President Jimmy Carter, and showing his support for the international Anti-Apartheid Movement. Civil rights movement Gregory in 1969 in Tallahassee, Florida during a civil rights speech Gregory was active in the civil rights movement. On October 7, 1963, he came to Selma, Alabama, and spoke for two hours on a public platform two days before the voter registration drive known as "Freedom Day" (October 7, 1963).[41] In 1964, Gregory became more involved in civil rights activities, activism against the Vietnam War, economic reform, and anti-drug issues. As a part of his activism, he went on several hunger strikes and campaigns in America and overseas. In the early 1970s, he was banned from Australia, where government officials feared he would "...stir up demonstrations against the Vietnam war."[42] In 1964, Gregory played a role in the search for three missing civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, who vanished in Philadelphia, Mississippi. After Gregory and members of CORE met with Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence A. Rainey, Gregory became convinced that the Sheriff's office was complicit. With cash provided by Hugh Hefner, Gregory announced a $25,000 reward for information. The FBI, which had been criticized for inaction, eventually followed suit with its own reward, and the rewards worked. The bodies of the three men were found by the FBI 44 days after they disappeared.[43] At a civil rights rally marking the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Gregory criticized the United States, calling it "the most dishonest, ungodly, unspiritual nation that ever existed in the history of the planet. As we talk now, America is 5 percent of the world's population and consumes 96 percent of the world's hard drugs".[44] Feminism Gregory was an outspoken feminist, and in 1978 joined Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Margaret Heckler, Barbara Mikulski, and others to lead the National ERA March for Ratification and Extension, a march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the United States Capitol. Gregory was invited to join the march by actress and activist Susan Blakely.[citation needed] There were over 100,000 on Women's Equality Day (August 26), 1978, to demonstrate for a ratification deadline extension for the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution, and for the ratification of the ERA.[45][citation needed] The march was ultimately successful in extending the deadline to June 30, 1982, and Gregory joined other activists to the Senate for celebration and victory speeches by pro-ERA Senators, members of Congress, and activists. The ERA narrowly failed to be ratified by the extended ratification date. Gregory at the Million Woman March in 1997 JFK assassination and the Warren Commission Gregory became an outspoken critic of the findings of the Warren Commission concerning the assassination of John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald. On February 3, 1975, in Washington, D.C., Gregory introduced photographic forensic investigator Stephen Jaffe and assassination researchers Robert J. Groden and Ralph Schoenman to the members and lawyers for the presidential commission known as the Rockefeller Commission who gave testimony and presented evidence. A month later, on March 6, 1975, Gregory and researcher Robert J. Groden appeared on Geraldo Rivera's late night ABC talk show Goodnight America. An important historical event happened that night when the famous Zapruder film of JFK's assassination was shown to the public on TV for the first time.[46] The public's response and outrage to its showing led to the forming of the Hart-Schweiker investigation, which contributed to the Church Committee Investigation on Intelligence Activities by the United States, which resulted in the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations investigation. Martin Luther King, Jr. Gregory and Mark Lane conducted landmark research into the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., helping move the U.S. House Select Assassinations Committee to investigate the murder, along with that of John F. Kennedy. Lane was the author of conspiracy theory books such as Rush to Judgment. The pair wrote the King conspiracy book Code Name Zorro, which postulated that convicted assassin James Earl Ray did not act alone. Gregory also argued that the moon landing was faked and the commonly accepted account of the 9/11 attacks is incorrect, among other conspiracy theories.[1][47] In 1998, Gregory spoke at the celebration of the birthday of Dr Martin Luther King Jr., with President Bill Clinton in attendance. Not long after, the President told Gregory's long-time friend and public relations consultant Steve Jaffe, "I love Dick Gregory; he is one of the funniest people on the planet." They spoke of how Gregory had made a comment on Dr. King's birthday that broke everyone into laughter when he noted that the President made Speaker Newt Gingrich ride "in the back of the plane," on an Air Force One trip overseas.[48] Native American rights In 1966, Gregory and his wife were arrested for illegal net fishing alongside of the Nisqually people in Washington state in a protest fish-in. The tribe was protesting against the state laws that ban forms of fishing other than hook-and-line because it barred their rights guaranteed to them through a federal treaty that allowed them to fish in their traditional ways.[49] He was later released from jail in Olympia, Washington after six weeks of fasting to call attention to the violation of Native American treaties by the United States government.[49] US Embassy hostage crisis in Iran Gregory was an outspoken activist during the US Embassy hostage crisis in Iran. In 1980, he traveled to Tehran to attempt to negotiate the hostages' release and engaged in a public hunger strike there, weighing less than 100 pounds (45 kg) when he returned to the United States.[50] Vegetarianism and animal rights Gregory became a vegetarian and fasting activist in 1965 "based on the philosophy of nonviolence practiced during the Civil Rights Movement."[51] His 1973 book, Dick Gregory's Natural Diet For Folks Who Eat: Cookin' With Mother Nature, outlined how fasting and going vegetarian led to dramatic weight loss.[51] He developed a diet drink called Bahamian Diet Nutritional Drink and went on TV shows to advocate his diet to help the morbidly obese. He wrote the introduction to Viktoras Kulvinskas' book Survival into the 21st Century.[31] A talk he gave at Amherst College in 1986 inspired Tracye McQuirter to become a vegan activist.[51] In 1984, he founded Health Enterprises, Inc., a company that distributed weight-loss products. With this company, Gregory made efforts to improve the life expectancy of African Americans, which he believed was being hindered by poor nutrition and drug and alcohol abuse.[52] In 1985, Gregory introduced the Slim-Safe Bahamian Diet, a powdered diet mix.[53] He launched the weight-loss powder at the Whole Life Expo in Boston under the slogan "It's cool to be healthy." The diet mix, if drunk three times a day, was said to provide rapid weight loss. Gregory received a multimillion-dollar distribution contract to retail the diet.[54] In 1985, the Ethiopian government adopted, to reported success, Gregory's formula to combat malnutrition during a period of famine in the country.[55] Gregory's clients included Muhammad Ali.[56] In 2003, Gregory and Cornel West wrote letters on behalf of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) to Kentucky Fried Chicken's CEO, asking that the company improve its animal-handling procedures.[57] Gregory saw civil rights and animal rights as intrinsically linked, once stating, "Because I'm a civil rights activist, I am also an animal rights activist. Animals and humans suffer and die alike. Violence causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of death, the same arrogant, cruel and vicious taking of life. We shouldn't be a part of it."[58] Gregory in 2015 Personal life Gregory met his future wife Lillian Gregory[59] at an African-American club; they married in 1959. They had 11 children (including one son, Richard Jr., who died two months after birth): Michele, Lynne, Pamela, Paula, Xenobia (Stephanie), Gregory, Christian, Miss, Ayanna, and Yohance.[10] In a 2000 interview with The Boston Globe, Gregory was quoted as saying, "People ask me about being a father and not being there. I say, 'Jack the Ripper had a father. Hitler had a father. Don't talk to me about family.'"[20] Health and death Gregory was diagnosed with lymphoma in late 1999. He said he was treating the cancer with herbs, vitamins, and exercise, which he believed kept the cancer in remission.[60] Gregory died from heart failure[61] at a hospital in Washington, D.C., on August 19, 2017, at the age of 84.[50] A week prior to his death, he was hospitalized with a bacterial infection.[62] Discography In Living Black and White (1961)[63] East & West (1961)[63] Dick Gregory Talks Turkey (1962)[63] The Two Sides of Dick Gregory (1963)[63] My Brother's Keeper (1963) Dick Gregory Running for President (1964)[63] So You See... We All Have Problems (1964) Dick Gregory On: (1969)[63] The Light Side: The Dark Side (1969)[63] Dick Gregory's Frankenstein (1970)[63] Live at the Village Gate (1970)[63] At Kent State (1971)[63] Caught in the Act (1974)[63] The Best of Dick Gregory (1997)[64] 21st Century "State of the Union" (2001) You Don't Know Dick (2016) Bibliography Nigger: An Autobiography by Dick Gregory, an autobiography written with Robert Lipsyte, E. P. Dutton, September 1964 (reprinted, Pocket Books, 1965–present) Write me in!, Bantam, 1968. From the Back of the Bus What's Happening? The Shadow that Scares Me Dick Gregory's Bible Tales, with Commentary, a book of Bible-based humor. ISBN 0-8128-6194-9 Dick Gregory's Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat: Cookin' With Mother Nature!. ISBN 0-06-080315-0 (with Shelia P. Moses), Callus on My Soul: A Memoir. ISBN 0-7582-0202-4 Up from Nigger No More Lies; The Myth and the Reality of American History Dick Gregory's Political Primer (with Mark Lane), Murder in Memphis: The FBI and the Assassination of Martin Luther King (with Mel Watkins), African American Humor: The Best Black Comedy from Slavery to Today (Library of Black America) Robert Lee Green, Dick Gregory, daring Black leader African American Humor: The Best Black Comedy from Slavery to Today (editor). ISBN 1-55652-430-7 "Not Poor, Just Broke", short story "Defining Moments in Black History: Reading Between the Lies", 2017. Filmography The One and Only Dick Gregory (2021) The Leisure Seeker (2017) The History of Comedy (2017) Ir/Reconcilable (2014) Steppin: The Movie (2009) One Bright Shining Moment (2006) Wonder Showzen (2005) Reno 911! (2004) The Hot Chick (2002), as Bathroom Attendant Children of the Struggle (1999), as Vernon Lee Panther (1995), as Rev. Slocum The Glass Shield (1994) ABC Stage 67 (TV Series) (1967), as Civil Rights Marcher Sweet Love, Bitter (1967), as Richie 'Eagle' Stokes Cultural references Joe Morton played Dick Gregory in 2016 in the play Turn Me Loose at the Westside Theatre in Manhattan.[65] The American hip-hop duo Run the Jewels included a reference to Gregory's theories in the song "Walking in the Snow" on their album RTJ4, released in 2020. The song was first performed live in an event by Adult Swim coinciding with the lead-up to the 2020 United States Presidential election, broadcast on October 17, 2020. The excerpted lyrics are: "Dick Gregory told me a couple of secrets before he laid down in his grave All of us serve the same masters, All of us nothin' but slaves Never forget in the story of Jesus, the hero was killed by the state."[66] A documentary film about the life of Dick Gregory entitled The One and Only Dick Gregory written and directed by Andre Gaines made its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 19, 2021, and was released on Showtime television on July 4, 2021. The film was heralded by critics and rated Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes with a 100% critics' score.[67][68] See also flag United States portal Timeline of the civil rights movement Gregory v. City of Chicago List of peace activists List of civil rights leaders The civil rights movement[b] was a nonviolent social movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement throughout the United States. The movement had its origins in the Reconstruction era during the late 19th century, although it made its largest legislative gains in the 1960s after years of direct actions and grassroots protests. The social movement's major nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience campaigns eventually secured new protections in federal law for the civil rights of all Americans. After the American Civil War and the subsequent abolition of slavery in the 1860s, the Reconstruction Amendments to the United States Constitution granted emancipation and constitutional rights of citizenship to all African Americans, most of whom had recently been enslaved. For a short period of time, African-American men voted and held political office, but as time went on they were increasingly deprived of civil rights, often under the racist Jim Crow laws, and African Americans were subjected to discrimination and sustained violence by white supremacists in the South. Over the following century, various efforts were made by African Americans to secure their legal and civil rights, such as the civil rights movement (1865–1896) and the civil rights movement (1896–1954). The movement was characterized by nonviolent mass protests and civil disobedience following highly publicized events such as the lynching of Emmett Till. These included boycotts such as the Montgomery bus boycott, "sit-ins" in Greensboro and Nashville, a series of protests during the Birmingham campaign, and a march from Selma to Montgomery.[1][2] At the culmination of a legal strategy pursued by African Americans, in 1954 the Supreme Court struck down many of the laws that had allowed racial segregation and discrimination to be legal in the United States as unconstitutional.[3][4][5][6] The Warren Court made a series of landmark rulings against racist discrimination, including the separate but equal doctrine, such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States (1964), and Loving v. Virginia (1967) which banned segregation in public schools and public accommodations, and struck down all state laws banning interracial marriage.[7][8][9] The rulings played a crucial role in bringing an end to the segregationist Jim Crow laws prevalent in the Southern states.[10] In the 1960s, moderates in the movement worked with the United States Congress to achieve the passage of several significant pieces of federal legislation that authorized oversight and enforcement of civil rights laws. The Civil Rights Act of 1964[11] explicitly banned all discrimination based on race, including racial segregation in schools, businesses, and in public accommodations.[12] The Voting Rights Act of 1965 restored and protected voting rights by authorizing federal oversight of registration and elections in areas with historic under-representation of minority voters. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. African Americans re-entered politics in the South, and young people across the country began to take action. From 1964 through 1970, a wave of riots and protests in black communities dampened support from the white middle class, but increased support from private foundations.[13][clarification needed] The emergence of the Black Power movement, which lasted from 1965 to 1975, challenged Black leaders of the movement for its cooperative attitude and its adherence to legalism and nonviolence. Its leaders demanded not only legal equality, but also economic self-sufficiency for the community. Support for the Black Power movement came from African Americans who had seen little material improvement since the civil rights movement's peak in the mid-1960s, and still faced discrimination in jobs, housing, education and politics. Martin Luther King Jr. was the most visible leader of the movement. However, some scholars note that the movement was too diverse to be credited to any particular person, organization, or strategy.[14] Background Main articles: African-American history and Timeline of African-American history American Civil War and Reconstruction era Further information: Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution Before the American Civil War, eight serving presidents had owned slaves, almost four million black people remained enslaved in the South, generally only white men with property could vote, and the Naturalization Act of 1790 limited U.S. citizenship to whites.[15][16][17] Following the Civil War, three constitutional amendments were passed, including the 13th Amendment (1865) that ended slavery; the 14th Amendment (1869) that gave black people citizenship, adding their total for Congressional apportionment; and the 15th Amendment (1870) that gave black males the right to vote (only males could vote in the U.S. at the time).[18] From 1865 to 1877, the United States underwent a turbulent Reconstruction era during which the federal government tried to establish free labor and the civil rights of freedmen in the South after the end of slavery. Many whites resisted the social changes, leading to the formation of insurgent movements such as the Ku Klux Klan, whose members attacked black and white Republicans in order to maintain white supremacy. In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant, the U.S. Army, and U.S. Attorney General Amos T. Akerman, initiated a campaign to repress the KKK under the Enforcement Acts.[19] Some states were reluctant to enforce the federal measures of the act. In addition, by the early 1870s, other white supremacist and insurgent paramilitary groups arose that violently opposed African-American legal equality and suffrage, intimidating and suppressing black voters, and assassinating Republican officeholders.[20][21] However, if the states failed to implement the acts, the laws allowed the Federal Government to get involved.[21] Many Republican governors were afraid of sending black militia troops to fight the Klan for fear of war.[21] Disenfranchisement after Reconstruction Main article: Disenfranchisement after the Reconstruction Era Further information: Jim Crow laws, Civil rights movement (1865–1896), and Civil rights movement (1896–1954) After the disputed election of 1876, which resulted in the end of Reconstruction and the withdrawal of federal troops, whites in the South regained political control of the region's state legislatures. They continued to intimidate and violently attack blacks before and during elections to suppress their voting, but the last African Americans were elected to Congress from the South before disenfranchisement of blacks by states throughout the region, as described below. The mob-style lynching of Will James, Cairo, Illinois, 1909 From 1890 to 1908, southern states passed new constitutions and laws to disenfranchise African Americans and many Poor Whites by creating barriers to voter registration; voting rolls were dramatically reduced as blacks and poor whites were forced out of electoral politics. After the landmark Supreme Court case of Smith v. Allwright (1944), which prohibited white primaries, progress was made in increasing black political participation in the Rim South and Acadiana – although almost entirely in urban areas[22] and a few rural localities where most blacks worked outside plantations.[23] The status quo ante of excluding African Americans from the political system lasted in the remainder of the South, especially North Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, until national civil rights legislation was passed in the mid-1960s to provide federal enforcement of constitutional voting rights. For more than sixty years, blacks in the South were essentially excluded from politics, unable to elect anyone to represent their interests in Congress or local government.[21] Since they could not vote, they could not serve on local juries. During this period, the white-dominated Democratic Party maintained political control of the South. With whites controlling all the seats representing the total population of the South, they had a powerful voting bloc in Congress. The Republican Party—the "party of Lincoln" and the party to which most blacks had belonged—shrank to insignificance except in remote Unionist areas of Appalachia and the Ozarks as black voter registration was suppressed. The Republican lily-white movement also gained strength by excluding blacks. Until 1965, the "Solid South" was a one-party system under the white Democrats. Excepting the previously noted historic Unionist strongholds the Democratic Party nomination was tantamount to election for state and local office.[24] In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington, president of the Tuskegee Institute, to dine at the White House, making him the first African American to attend an official dinner there. "The invitation was roundly criticized by southern politicians and newspapers."[25] Washington persuaded the president to appoint more blacks to federal posts in the South and to try to boost African-American leadership in state Republican organizations. However, these actions were resisted by both white Democrats and white Republicans as an unwanted federal intrusion into state politics.[25] Lynching victim Will Brown, who was mutilated and burned during the Omaha, Nebraska race riot of 1919. Postcards and photographs of lynchings were popular souvenirs in the U.S.[26] During the same time as African Americans were being disenfranchised, white southerners imposed racial segregation by law. Violence against blacks increased, with numerous lynchings through the turn of the century. The system of de jure state-sanctioned racial discrimination and oppression that emerged from the post-Reconstruction South became known as the "Jim Crow" system. The United States Supreme Court made up almost entirely of Northerners, upheld the constitutionality of those state laws that required racial segregation in public facilities in its 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, legitimizing them through the "separate but equal" doctrine.[27] Segregation, which began with slavery, continued with Jim Crow laws, with signs used to show blacks where they could legally walk, talk, drink, rest, or eat.[28] For those places that were racially mixed, non-whites had to wait until all white customers were served first.[28] Elected in 1912, President Woodrow Wilson gave in to demands by Southern members of his cabinet and ordered segregation of workplaces throughout the federal government.[29] The early 20th century is a period often referred to as the "nadir of American race relations", when the number of lynchings was highest. While tensions and civil rights violations were most intense in the South, social discrimination affected African Americans in other regions as well.[30] At the national level, the Southern bloc controlled important committees in Congress, defeated passage of federal laws against lynching, and exercised considerable power beyond the number of whites in the South. Characteristics of the post-Reconstruction period: Racial segregation. By law, public facilities and government services such as education were divided into separate "white" and "colored" domains.[31] Characteristically, those for colored were underfunded and of inferior quality. Disenfranchisement. When white Democrats regained power, they passed laws that made voter registration more restrictive, essentially forcing black voters off the voting rolls. The number of African-American voters dropped dramatically, and they were no longer able to elect representatives. From 1890 to 1908, Southern states of the former Confederacy created constitutions with provisions that disfranchised tens of thousands of African Americans, and U.S. states such as Alabama disenfranchised poor whites as well. Exploitation. Increased economic oppression of blacks through the convict lease system, Latinos, and Asians,[clarification needed] denial of economic opportunities, and widespread employment discrimination. Violence. Individual, police, paramilitary, organizational, and mob racial violence against blacks (and Latinos in the Southwest, and Asians in the West Coast). KKK night rally near Chicago, in the 1920s African Americans and other ethnic minorities rejected this regime. They resisted it in numerous ways and sought better opportunities through lawsuits, new organizations, political redress, and labor organizing (see the Civil rights movement (1896–1954)). The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded in 1909. It fought to end race discrimination through litigation, education, and lobbying efforts. Its crowning achievement was its legal victory in the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education (1954), when the Warren Court ruled that segregation of public schools in the US was unconstitutional and, by implication, overturned the "separate but equal" doctrine established in Plessy v. Ferguson of 1896.[7][32] Following the unanimous Supreme Court ruling, many states began to gradually integrate their schools, but some areas of the South resisted by closing public schools altogether.[7][32] The integration of Southern public libraries followed demonstrations and protests that used techniques seen in other elements of the larger civil rights movement.[33] This included sit-ins, beatings, and white resistance.[33] For example, in 1963 in the city of Anniston, Alabama, two black ministers were brutally beaten for attempting to integrate the public library.[33] Though there was resistance and violence, the integration of libraries was generally quicker than the integration of other public institutions.[33] National issues Colored Sailors room in World War I The situation for blacks outside the South was somewhat better (in most states they could vote and have their children educated, though they still faced discrimination in housing and jobs). In 1900 Reverend Matthew Anderson, speaking at the annual Hampton Negro Conference in Virginia, said that "...the lines along most of the avenues of wage-earning are more rigidly drawn in the North than in the South. There seems to be an apparent effort throughout the North, especially in the cities to debar the colored worker from all the avenues of higher remunerative labor, which makes it more difficult to improve his economic condition even than in the South."[34] From 1910 to 1970, blacks sought better lives by migrating north and west out of the South. A total of nearly seven million blacks left the South in what was known as the Great Migration, most during and after World War II. So many people migrated that the demographics of some previously black-majority states changed to a white majority (in combination with other developments). The rapid influx of blacks altered the demographics of Northern and Western cities; happening at a period of expanded European, Hispanic, and Asian immigration, it added to social competition and tensions, with the new migrants and immigrants battling for a place in jobs and housing. A white gang looking for blacks during the Chicago race riot of 1919 Reflecting social tensions after World War I, as veterans struggled to return to the workforce and labor unions were organizing, the Red Summer of 1919 was marked by hundreds of deaths and higher casualties across the U.S. as a result of white race riots against blacks that took place in more than three dozen cities, such as the Chicago race riot of 1919 and the Omaha race riot of 1919. Urban problems such as crime and disease were blamed on the large influx of Southern blacks to cities in the north and west, based on stereotypes of rural southern African-Americans. Overall, blacks in Northern and Western cities experienced systemic discrimination in a plethora of aspects of life. Within employment, economic opportunities for blacks were routed to the lowest status and restrictive in potential mobility. Within the housing market, stronger discriminatory measures were used in correlation to the influx, resulting in a mix of "targeted violence, restrictive covenants, redlining and racial steering".[35] The Great Migration resulted in many African Americans becoming urbanized, and they began to realign from the Republican to the Democratic Party, especially because of opportunities under the New Deal of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration during the Great Depression in the 1930s.[36] Substantially under pressure from African-American supporters who began the March on Washington Movement, President Roosevelt issued the first federal order banning discrimination and created the Fair Employment Practice Committee. After both World Wars, black veterans of the military pressed for full civil rights and often led activist movements. In 1948, President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which ended segregation in the military.[37] White tenants seeking to prevent blacks from moving into the housing project erected this sign, Detroit, 1942. Housing segregation became a nationwide problem following the Great Migration of black people out of the South. Racial covenants were employed by many real estate developers to "protect" entire subdivisions, with the primary intent to keep "white" neighborhoods "white". Ninety percent of the housing projects built in the years following World War II were racially restricted by such covenants.[38] Cities known for their widespread use of racial covenants include Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, Milwaukee,[39] Los Angeles, Seattle, and St. Louis.[40] Said premises shall not be rented, leased, or conveyed to, or occupied by, any person other than of the white or Caucasian race. — Racial covenant for a home in Beverly Hills, California.[41] While many whites defended their space with violence, intimidation, or legal tactics toward black people, many other whites migrated to more racially homogeneous suburban or exurban regions, a process known as white flight.[42] From the 1930s to the 1960s, the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) issued guidelines that specified that a realtor "should never be instrumental in introducing to a neighborhood a character or property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individual whose presence will be clearly detrimental to property values in a neighborhood." The result was the development of all-black ghettos in the North and West, where much housing was older, as well as South.[43] The first anti-miscegenation law was passed by the Maryland General Assembly in 1691, criminalizing interracial marriage.[44] In a speech in Charleston, Illinois in 1858, Abraham Lincoln stated, "I am not, nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people".[45] By the late 1800s, 38 US states had anti-miscegenation statutes.[44] By 1924, the ban on interracial marriage was still in force in 29 states.[44] While interracial marriage had been legal in California since 1948, in 1957 actor Sammy Davis Jr. faced a backlash for his involvement with white actress Kim Novak.[46] Davis briefly married a black dancer in 1958 to protect himself from mob violence.[46] In 1958, officers in Virginia entered the home of Mildred and Richard Loving and dragged them out of bed for living together as an interracial couple, on the basis that "any white person intermarry with a colored person"— or vice versa—each party "shall be guilty of a felony" and face prison terms of five years.[44] Invigorated by the victory of Brown and frustrated by the lack of immediate practical effect, private citizens increasingly rejected gradualist, legalistic approaches as the primary tool to bring about desegregation. They were faced with "massive resistance" in the South by proponents of racial segregation and voter suppression. In defiance, African-American activists adopted a combined strategy of direct action, nonviolence, nonviolent resistance, and many events described as civil disobedience, giving rise to the civil rights movement of 1954 to 1968. A. Philip Randolph had planned a march on Washington, D.C., in 1941 to support demands for elimination of employment discrimination in the defense industry; he called off the march when the Roosevelt administration met the demand by issuing Executive Order 8802, which barred racial discrimination and created an agency to oversee compliance with the order.[47] Protests begin The strategy of public education, legislative lobbying, and litigation that had typified the civil rights movement during the first half of the 20th century broadened after Brown to a strategy that emphasized "direct action": boycotts, sit-ins, Freedom Rides, marches or walks, and similar tactics that relied on mass mobilization, nonviolent resistance, standing in line, and, at times, civil disobedience.[48] Churches, local grassroots organizations, fraternal societies, and black-owned businesses mobilized volunteers to participate in broad-based actions. This was a more direct and potentially more rapid means of creating change than the traditional approach of mounting court challenges used by the NAACP and others. In 1952, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), led by T. R. M. Howard, a black surgeon, entrepreneur, and planter organized a successful boycott of gas stations in Mississippi that refused to provide restrooms for blacks. Through the RCNL, Howard led campaigns to expose brutality by the Mississippi state highway patrol and to encourage blacks to make deposits in the black-owned Tri-State Bank of Nashville which, in turn, gave loans to civil rights activists who were victims of a "credit squeeze" by the White Citizens' Councils.[49] After Claudette Colvin was arrested for not giving up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in March 1955, a bus boycott was considered and rejected. But when Rosa Parks was arrested in December, Jo Ann Gibson Robinson of the Montgomery Women's Political Council put the bus boycott protest in motion. Late that night, she, John Cannon (chairman of the Business Department at Alabama State University) and others mimeographed and distributed thousands of leaflets calling for a boycott.[50][51] The eventual success of the boycott made its spokesman Martin Luther King Jr., a nationally known figure. It also inspired other bus boycotts, such as the successful Tallahassee, Florida boycott of 1956–57.[52] This movement also sparked the 1956 Sugar Bowl riots in Atlanta which later became a major organizing center of the civil rights movement, with Martin Luther King Jr.[53][54] In 1957, King and Ralph Abernathy, the leaders of the Montgomery Improvement Association, joined with other church leaders who had led similar boycott efforts, such as C. K. Steele of Tallahassee and T. J. Jemison of Baton Rouge, and other activists such as Fred Shuttlesworth, Ella Baker, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levison, to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The SCLC, with its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, did not attempt to create a network of chapters as the NAACP did. It offered training and leadership assistance for local efforts to fight segregation. The headquarters organization raised funds, mostly from Northern sources, to support such campaigns. It made nonviolence both its central tenet and its primary method of confronting racism. In 1959, Septima Clarke, Bernice Robinson, and Esau Jenkins, with the help of Myles Horton's Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, began the first Citizenship Schools in South Carolina's Sea Islands. They taught literacy to enable blacks to pass voting tests. The program was an enormous success and tripled the number of black voters on Johns Island. SCLC took over the program and duplicated its results elsewhere. History Main article: History of civil rights in the United States For a chronological guide, see Timeline of the civil rights movement. Further information: Civil rights movement (1865–1896) and Civil rights movement (1896–1954) Brown v. Board of Education, 1954 Main article: Brown v. Board of Education In the spring of 1951, black students in Virginia protested their unequal status in the state's segregated educational system. Students at Moton High School protested the overcrowded conditions and failing facility.[55] Some local leaders of the NAACP had tried to persuade the students to back down from their protest against the Jim Crow laws of school segregation. When the students did not budge, the NAACP joined their battle against school segregation. The NAACP proceeded with five cases challenging the school systems; these were later combined under what is known today as Brown v. Board of Education.[55] Under the leadership of Walter Reuther, the United Auto Workers donated $75,000 to help pay for the NAACP's efforts at the Supreme Court.[56] In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren ruled unanimously that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren ruled unanimously in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that mandating, or even permitting, public schools to be segregated by race was unconstitutional.[7] Chief Justice Warren wrote in the court majority opinion that[7][32] Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law; for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group.[57] The lawyers from the NAACP had to gather plausible evidence in order to win the case of Brown vs. Board of Education. Their method of addressing the issue of school segregation was to enumerate several arguments. One pertained to having exposure to interracial contact in a school environment. It was argued that interracial contact would, in turn, help prepare children to live with the pressures that society exerts in regards to race and thereby afford them a better chance of living in a democracy. In addition, another argument emphasized how "'education' comprehends the entire process of developing and training the mental, physical and moral powers and capabilities of human beings".[58] Risa Goluboff wrote that the NAACP's intention was to show the Courts that African American children were the victims of school segregation and their futures were at risk. The Court ruled that both Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which had established the "separate but equal" standard in general, and Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education (1899), which had applied that standard to schools, was unconstitutional. The federal government filed a friend of the court brief in the case urging the justices to consider the effect that segregation had on America's image in the Cold War. Secretary of State Dean Acheson was quoted in the brief stating that "The United States is under constant attack in the foreign press, over the foreign radio, and in such international bodies as the United Nations because of various practices of discrimination in this country."[59][60] The following year, in the case known as Brown II, the Court ordered segregation to be phased out over time, "with all deliberate speed".[61] Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) did not overturn Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Plessy v. Ferguson was segregation in transportation modes. Brown v. Board of Education dealt with segregation in education. Brown v. Board of Education did set in motion the future overturning of 'separate but equal'. School integration, Barnard School, Washington, D.C., 1955 On May 18, 1954, Greensboro, North Carolina, became the first city in the South to publicly announce that it would abide by the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling. "It is unthinkable,' remarked School Board Superintendent Benjamin Smith, 'that we will try to [override] the laws of the United States."[62] This positive reception for Brown, together with the appointment of African American David Jones to the school board in 1953, convinced numerous white and black citizens that Greensboro was heading in a progressive direction. Integration in Greensboro occurred rather peacefully compared to the process in Southern states such as Alabama, Arkansas, and Virginia where "massive resistance" was practiced by top officials and throughout the states. In Virginia, some counties closed their public schools rather than integrate, and many white Christian private schools were founded to accommodate students who used to go to public schools. Even in Greensboro, much local resistance to desegregation continued, and in 1969, the federal government found the city was not in compliance with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Transition to a fully integrated school system did not begin until 1971.[62] Many Northern cities also had de facto segregation policies, which resulted in a vast gulf in educational resources between black and white communities. In Harlem, New York, for example, neither a single new school was built since the turn of the century, nor did a single nursery school exist – even as the Second Great Migration was causing overcrowding. Existing schools tended to be dilapidated and staffed with inexperienced teachers. Brown helped stimulate activism among New York City parents like Mae Mallory who, with the support of the NAACP, initiated a successful lawsuit against the city and state on Brown's principles. Mallory and thousands of other parents bolstered the pressure of the lawsuit with a school boycott in 1959. During the boycott, some of the first freedom schools of the period were established. The city responded to the campaign by permitting more open transfers to high-quality, historically-white schools. (New York's African-American community, and Northern desegregation activists generally, now found themselves contending with the problem of white flight, however.)[63][64] Emmett Till's murder, 1955 Main article: Emmett Till Emmett Till's mother Mamie (middle) at her son's funeral in 1955. He was killed by white men after a white woman accused him of offending her in her family's grocery store. Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American from Chicago, visited his relatives in Money, Mississippi, for the summer. He allegedly had an interaction with a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in a small grocery store that violated the norms of Mississippi culture, and Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam brutally murdered young Emmett Till. They beat and mutilated him before shooting him in the head and sinking his body in the Tallahatchie River. Three days later, Till's body was discovered and retrieved from the river. After Emmett's mother, Mamie Till,[65] came to identify the remains of her son, she decided she wanted to "let the people see what I have seen".[66] Till's mother then had his body taken back to Chicago where she had it displayed in an open casket during the funeral services where many thousands of visitors arrived to show their respects.[66] A later publication of an image at the funeral in Jet is credited as a crucial moment in the civil rights era for displaying in vivid detail the violent racism that was being directed at black people in America.[67][66] In a column for The Atlantic, Vann R. Newkirk wrote: "The trial of his killers became a pageant illuminating the tyranny of white supremacy".[1] The state of Mississippi tried two defendants, but they were speedily acquitted by an all-white jury.[68] "Emmett's murder," historian Tim Tyson writes, "would never have become a watershed historical moment without Mamie finding the strength to make her private grief a public matter."[69] The visceral response to his mother's decision to have an open-casket funeral mobilized the black community throughout the U.S.[1] The murder and resulting trial ended up markedly impacting the views of several young black activists.[69] Joyce Ladner referred to such activists as the "Emmett Till generation."[69] One hundred days after Emmett Till's murder, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama.[70] Parks later informed Till's mother that her decision to stay in her seat was guided by the image she still vividly recalled of Till's brutalized remains.[70] The glass topped casket that was used for Till's Chicago funeral was found in a cemetery garage in 2009. Till had been reburied in a different casket after being exhumed in 2005.[71] Till's family decided to donate the original casket to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American Culture and History, where it is now on display.[72] In 2007, Bryant said that she had fabricated the most sensational part of her story in 1955.[67][73] Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott, 1955–1956 Main articles: Rosa Parks and Montgomery bus boycott Rosa Parks being fingerprinted after being arrested for not giving up her seat on a bus to a white person. On December 1, 1955, nine months after a 15-year-old high school student, Claudette Colvin, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested, Rosa Parks did the same thing. Parks soon became the symbol of the resulting Montgomery bus boycott and received national publicity. She was later hailed as the "mother of the civil rights movement".[74] Parks was secretary of the Montgomery NAACP chapter and had recently returned from a meeting at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee where nonviolence as a strategy was taught by Myles Horton and others. After Parks' arrest, African Americans gathered and organized the Montgomery bus boycott to demand a bus system in which passengers would be treated equally.[75] The organization was led by Jo Ann Robinson, a member of the Women's Political Council who had been waiting for the opportunity to boycott the bus system. Following Rosa Parks' arrest, Jo Ann Robinson mimeographed 52,500 leaflets calling for a boycott. They were distributed around the city and helped gather the attention of civil rights leaders. After the city rejected many of its suggested reforms, the NAACP, led by E. D. Nixon, pushed for full desegregation of public buses. With the support of most of Montgomery's 50,000 African Americans, the boycott lasted for 381 days, until the local ordinance segregating African Americans and whites on public buses was repealed. Ninety percent of African Americans in Montgomery partook in the boycotts, which reduced bus revenue significantly, as they comprised the majority of the riders. This movement also sparked riots leading up to the 1956 Sugar Bowl.[76] In November 1956, the United States Supreme Court upheld a district court ruling in the case of Browder v. Gayle and ordered Montgomery's buses desegregated, ending the boycott.[75] Local leaders established the Montgomery Improvement Association to focus their efforts. Martin Luther King Jr. was elected President of this organization. The lengthy protest attracted national attention for him and the city. His eloquent appeals to Christian brotherhood and American idealism created a positive impression on people both inside and outside the South.[51] Little Rock Nine, 1957 Main article: Little Rock Nine White parents rally against integrating Little Rock's schools in August 1959. The Little Rock Nine were a group of nine students who attended segregated black high schools in Little Rock, the capital of the state of Arkansas. They each volunteered when the NAACP and the national civil rights movement obtained federal court orders to integrate the prestigious Little Rock Central High School in September, 1957. The Nine faced intense harassment and threats of violence from white parents and students, as well as organized white supremacy groups. The enraged opposition emphasized miscegenation as the threat to white society. Arkansas Governor, Orval Faubus, claiming his only goal was to preserve the peace, deployed the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the blacks from entering the school. Faubus defied federal court orders, whereupon President Dwight D. Eisenhower intervened. He federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent them home. Then he sent in an elite Army unit to escort the students to school and protect them between classes during the 1957–58 school year. In class, however, the Nine were teased and ridiculed every day. In the city compromise efforts all failed and political tensions continued to fester. A year later in September 1958 the Supreme Court ruled that all the city's high schools had to be integrated immediately. Governor Faubus and the legislature responded by immediately shutting down all the public high schools in the city for the entire 1958–1959 school year, despite the harm it did to all the students. The decision to integrate the school was a landmark event in the civil rights movement, and the students' bravery and determination in the face of violent opposition is remembered as a key moment in American history. The city and state were entangled in very expensive legal disputes for decades, while suffering a reputation for hatred and obstruction.[77][78] Method of nonviolence and nonviolence training During the time period considered to be the "African-American civil rights" era, the predominant use of protest was nonviolent, or peaceful.[79] Often referred to as pacifism, the method of nonviolence is considered to be an attempt to impact society positively. Although acts of racial discrimination have occurred historically throughout the United States, perhaps the most violent regions have been in the former Confederate states. During the 1950s and 1960s, the nonviolent protesting of the civil rights movement caused definite tension, which gained national attention. In order to prepare for protests physically and psychologically, demonstrators received training in nonviolence. According to former civil rights activist Bruce Hartford, there are two main branches of nonviolence training. There is the philosophical method, which involves understanding the method of nonviolence and why it is considered useful, and there is the tactical method, which ultimately teaches demonstrators "how to be a protestor—how to sit-in, how to picket, how to defend yourself against attack, giving training on how to remain cool when people are screaming racist insults into your face and pouring stuff on you and hitting you" (Civil Rights Movement Archive). The philosophical method of nonviolence, in the American civil rights movement, was largely inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's "non-cooperation" policies during his involvement in the Indian independence movement which were intended to gain attention so that the public would either "intervene in advance," or "provide public pressure in support of the action to be taken" (Erikson, 415). As Hartford explains it, philosophical nonviolence training aims to "shape the individual person's attitude and mental response to crises and violence" (Civil Rights Movement Archive). Hartford and activists like him, who trained in tactical nonviolence, considered it necessary in order to ensure physical safety, instill discipline, teach demonstrators how to demonstrate, and form mutual confidence among demonstrators (Civil Rights Movement Archive).[79][80] For many, the concept of nonviolent protest was a way of life, a culture. However, not everyone agreed with this notion. James Forman, former SNCC (and later Black Panther) member, and nonviolence trainer was among those who did not. In his autobiography, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, Forman revealed his perspective on the method of nonviolence as "strictly a tactic, not a way of life without limitations." Similarly, Bob Moses, who was also an active member of SNCC, felt that the method of nonviolence was practical. When interviewed by author Robert Penn Warren, Moses said "There's no question that he (Martin Luther King Jr.) had a great deal of influence with the masses. But I don't think it's in the direction of love. It's in a practical direction . . ." (Who Speaks for the Negro? Warren).[81][82] According to a 2020 study in the American Political Science Review, nonviolent civil rights protests boosted vote shares for the Democratic party in presidential elections in nearby counties, but violent protests substantially boosted white support for Republicans in counties near to the violent protests.[83] Sit-ins, 1958–1960 See also: Greensboro sit-ins, Nashville sit-ins, and Sit-in movement In July 1958, the NAACP Youth Council sponsored sit-ins at the lunch counter of a Dockum Drug Store in downtown Wichita, Kansas. After three weeks, the movement successfully got the store to change its policy of segregated seating, and soon afterward all Dockum stores in Kansas were desegregated. This movement was quickly followed in the same year by a student sit-in at a Katz Drug Store in Oklahoma City led by Clara Luper, which also was successful.[84] Student sit-in at Woolworth in Durham, North Carolina on February 10, 1960. Mostly black students from area colleges led a sit-in at a Woolworth's store in Greensboro, North Carolina.[85] On February 1, 1960, four students, Ezell A. Blair Jr., David Richmond, Joseph McNeil, and Franklin McCain from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College, an all-black college, sat down at the segregated lunch counter to protest Woolworth's policy of excluding African Americans from being served food there.[86] The four students purchased small items in other parts of the store and kept their receipts, then sat down at the lunch counter and asked to be served. After being denied service, they produced their receipts and asked why their money was good everywhere else at the store, but not at the lunch counter.[87] The protesters had been encouraged to dress professionally, to sit quietly, and to occupy every other stool so that potential white sympathizers could join in. The Greensboro sit-in was quickly followed by other sit-ins in Richmond, Virginia;[88][89] Nashville, Tennessee; and Atlanta, Georgia.[90][91] The most immediately effective of these was in Nashville, where hundreds of well organized and highly disciplined college students conducted sit-ins in coordination with a boycott campaign.[92][93] As students across the south began to "sit-in" at the lunch counters of local stores, police and other officials sometimes used brutal force to physically escort the demonstrators from the lunch facilities. The "sit-in" technique was not new—as far back as 1939, African-American attorney Samuel Wilbert Tucker organized a sit-in at the then-segregated Alexandria, Virginia, library.[94] In 1960 the technique succeeded in bringing national attention to the movement.[95] On March 9, 1960, an Atlanta University Center group of students released An Appeal for Human Rights as a full page advertisement in newspapers, including the Atlanta Constitution, Atlanta Journal, and Atlanta Daily World.[96] Known as the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR), the group initiated the Atlanta Student Movement and began to lead sit-ins starting on March 15, 1960.[91][97] By the end of 1960, the process of sit-ins had spread to every southern and border state, and even to facilities in Nevada, Illinois, and Ohio that discriminated against blacks. Demonstrators focused not only on lunch counters but also on parks, beaches, libraries, theaters, museums, and other public facilities. In April 1960 activists who had led these sit-ins were invited by SCLC activist Ella Baker to hold a conference at Shaw University, a historically black university in Raleigh, North Carolina. This conference led to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).[98] SNCC took these tactics of nonviolent confrontation further, and organized the freedom rides. As the constitution protected interstate commerce, they decided to challenge segregation on interstate buses and in public bus facilities by putting interracial teams on them, to travel from the North through the segregated South.[99] Freedom Rides, 1961 Main article: Freedom Rider Freedom Rides were journeys by civil rights activists on interstate buses into the segregated southern United States to test the United States Supreme Court decision Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which ruled that segregation was unconstitutional for passengers engaged in interstate travel. Organized by CORE, the first Freedom Ride of the 1960s left Washington D.C. on May 4, 1961, and was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans on May 17.[100] During the first and subsequent Freedom Rides, activists traveled through the Deep South to integrate seating patterns on buses and desegregate bus terminals, including restrooms and water fountains. That proved to be a dangerous mission. In Anniston, Alabama, one bus was firebombed, forcing its passengers to flee for their lives.[101] A mob beats Freedom Riders in Birmingham. This picture was reclaimed by the FBI from a local journalist who also was beaten and whose camera was smashed. In Birmingham, Alabama, an FBI informant reported that Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor gave Ku Klux Klan members fifteen minutes to attack an incoming group of freedom riders before having police "protect" them. The riders were severely beaten "until it looked like a bulldog had got a hold of them." James Peck, a white activist, was beaten so badly that he required fifty stitches to his head.[101] In a similar occurrence in Montgomery, Alabama, the Freedom Riders followed in the footsteps of Rosa Parks and rode an integrated Greyhound bus from Birmingham. Although they were protesting interstate bus segregation in peace, they were met with violence in Montgomery as a large, white mob attacked them for their activism. They caused an enormous, 2-hour long riot which resulted in 22 injuries, five of whom were hospitalized.[102] Mob violence in Anniston and Birmingham temporarily halted the rides. SNCC activists from Nashville brought in new riders to continue the journey from Birmingham to New Orleans. In Montgomery, Alabama, at the Greyhound Bus Station, a mob charged another busload of riders, knocking John Lewis[103] unconscious with a crate and smashing Life photographer Don Urbrock in the face with his own camera. A dozen men surrounded James Zwerg,[104] a white student from Fisk University, and beat him in the face with a suitcase, knocking out his teeth.[101] On May 24, 1961, the freedom riders continued their rides into Jackson, Mississippi, where they were arrested for "breaching the peace" by using "white only" facilities. New Freedom Rides were organized by many different organizations and continued to flow into the South. As riders arrived in Jackson, they were arrested. By the end of summer, more than 300 had been jailed in Mississippi.[100] .. When the weary Riders arrive in Jackson and attempt to use "white only" restrooms and lunch counters they are immediately arrested for Breach of Peace and Refusal to Obey an Officer. Says Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett in defense of segregation: "The Negro is different because God made him different to punish him." From lockup, the Riders announce "Jail No Bail"—they will not pay fines for unconstitutional arrests and illegal convictions—and by staying in jail they keep the issue alive. Each prisoner will remain in jail for 39 days, the maximum time they can serve without loosing [sic] their right to appeal the unconstitutionality of their arrests, trials, and convictions. After 39 days, they file an appeal and post bond...[105] The jailed freedom riders were treated harshly, crammed into tiny, filthy cells and sporadically beaten. In Jackson, some male prisoners were forced to do hard labor in 100 °F (38 °C) heat. Others were transferred to the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, where they were treated to harsh conditions. Sometimes the men were suspended by "wrist breakers" from the walls. Typically, the windows of their cells were shut tight on hot days, making it hard for them to breathe. Public sympathy and support for the freedom riders led John F. Kennedy's administration to order the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to issue a new desegregation order. When the new ICC rule took effect on November 1, 1961, passengers were permitted to sit wherever they chose on the bus; "white" and "colored" signs came down in the terminals; separate drinking fountains, toilets, and waiting rooms were consolidated; and lunch counters began serving people regardless of skin color. The student movement involved such celebrated figures as John Lewis, a single-minded activist; James Lawson,[106] the revered "guru" of nonviolent theory and tactics; Diane Nash,[107] an articulate and intrepid public champion of justice; Bob Moses, pioneer of voting registration in Mississippi; and James Bevel, a fiery preacher and charismatic organizer, strategist, and facilitator. Other prominent student activists included Dion Diamond,[108] Charles McDew, Bernard Lafayette,[109] Charles Jones, Lonnie King, Julian Bond,[110] Hosea Williams, and Stokely Carmichael. Voter registration organizing After the Freedom Rides, local black leaders in Mississippi such as Amzie Moore, Aaron Henry, Medgar Evers, and others asked SNCC to help register black voters and to build community organizations that could win a share of political power in the state. Since Mississippi ratified its new constitution in 1890 with provisions such as poll taxes, residency requirements, and literacy tests, it made registration more complicated and stripped blacks from voter rolls and voting. Also, violence at the time of elections had earlier suppressed black voting. By the mid-20th century, preventing blacks from voting had become an essential part of the culture of white supremacy. In June and July 1959, members of the black community in Fayette County, TN formed the Fayette County Civic and Welfare League to spur voting. At the time, there were 16,927 blacks in the county, yet only 17 of them had voted in the previous seven years. Within a year, some 1,400 blacks had registered, and the white community responded with harsh economic reprisals. Using registration rolls, the White Citizens Council circulated a blacklist of all registered black voters, allowing banks, local stores, and gas stations to conspire to deny registered black voters essential services. What's more, sharecropping blacks who registered to vote were getting evicted from their homes. All in all, the number of evictions came to 257 families, many of whom were forced to live in a makeshift Tent City for well over a year. Finally, in December 1960, the Justice Department invoked its powers authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1957 to file a suit against seventy parties accused of violating the civil rights of black Fayette County citizens.[111] In the following year the first voter registration project in McComb and the surrounding counties in the Southwest corner of the state. Their efforts were met with violent repression from state and local lawmen, the White Citizens' Council, and the Ku Klux Klan. Activists were beaten, there were hundreds of arrests of local citizens, and the voting activist Herbert Lee was murdered.[112] White opposition to black voter registration was so intense in Mississippi that Freedom Movement activists concluded that all of the state's civil rights organizations had to unite in a coordinated effort to have any chance of success. In February 1962, representatives of SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP formed the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). At a subsequent meeting in August, SCLC became part of COFO.[113] In the Spring of 1962, with funds from the Voter Education Project, SNCC/COFO began voter registration organizing in the Mississippi Delta area around Greenwood, and the areas surrounding Hattiesburg, Laurel, and Holly Springs. As in McComb, their efforts were met with fierce opposition—arrests, beatings, shootings, arson, and murder. Registrars used the literacy test to keep blacks off the voting roles by creating standards that even highly educated people could not meet. In addition, employers fired blacks who tried to register, and landlords evicted them from their rental homes.[114] Despite these actions, over the following years, the black voter registration campaign spread across the state. Similar voter registration campaigns—with similar responses—were begun by SNCC, CORE, and SCLC in Louisiana, Alabama, southwest Georgia, and South Carolina. By 1963, voter registration campaigns in the South were as integral to the Freedom Movement as desegregation efforts. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,[11] protecting and facilitating voter registration despite state barriers became the main effort of the movement. It resulted in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which had provisions to enforce the constitutional right to vote for all citizens. Integration of Mississippi universities, 1956–1965 Further information: Ole Miss riot of 1962 Beginning in 1956, Clyde Kennard, a black Korean War-veteran, wanted to enroll at Mississippi Southern College (now the University of Southern Mississippi) at Hattiesburg under the G.I. Bill. William David McCain, the college president, used the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, in order to prevent his enrollment by appealing to local black leaders and the segregationist state political establishment.[115] The state-funded organization tried to counter the civil rights movement by positively portraying segregationist policies. More significantly, it collected data on activists, harassed them legally, and used economic boycotts against them by threatening their jobs (or causing them to lose their jobs) to try to suppress their work. Kennard was twice arrested on trumped-up charges, and eventually convicted and sentenced to seven years in the state prison.[116] After three years at hard labor, Kennard was paroled by Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett. Journalists had investigated his case and publicized the state's mistreatment of his colon cancer.[116] McCain's role in Kennard's arrests and convictions is unknown.[117][118][119][120] While trying to prevent Kennard's enrollment, McCain made a speech in Chicago, with his travel sponsored by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. He described the blacks' seeking to desegregate Southern schools as "imports" from the North. (Kennard was a native and resident of Hattiesburg.) McCain said: We insist that educationally and socially, we maintain a segregated society...In all fairness, I admit that we are not encouraging Negro voting...The Negroes prefer that control of the government remain in the white man's hands.[117][119][120] Note: Mississippi had passed a new constitution in 1890 that effectively disfranchised most blacks by changing electoral and voter registration requirements; although it deprived them of constitutional rights authorized under post-Civil War amendments, it survived U.S. Supreme Court challenges at the time. It was not until after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that most blacks in Mississippi and other southern states gained federal protection to enforce the constitutional right of citizens to vote. James Meredith walking to class accompanied by a U.S. Marshal and a Justice Department official. In September 1962, James Meredith won a lawsuit to secure admission to the previously segregated University of Mississippi. He attempted to enter campus on September 20, on September 25, and again on September 26. He was blocked by Governor Ross Barnett, who said, "[N]o school will be integrated in Mississippi while I am your Governor." The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held Barnett and Lieutenant Governor Paul B. Johnson Jr. in contempt, ordering them arrested and fined more than $10,000 for each day they refused to allow Meredith to enroll. U.S. Army trucks loaded with Federal law enforcement personnel on the University of Mississippi campus, 1962. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy sent in a force of U.S. Marshals and deputized U.S. Border Patrol agents and Federal Bureau of Prisons officers. On September 30, 1962, Meredith entered the campus under their escort. Students and other whites began rioting that evening, throwing rocks and firing on the federal agents guarding Meredith at Lyceum Hall. Rioters ended up killing two civilians, including a French journalist; 28 federal agents suffered gunshot wounds, and 160 others were injured. President John F. Kennedy sent U.S. Army and federalized Mississippi National Guard forces to the campus to quell the riot. Meredith began classes the day after the troops arrived.[121] Kennard and other activists continued to work on public university desegregation. In 1965 Raylawni Branch and Gwendolyn Elaine Armstrong became the first African-American students to attend the University of Southern Mississippi. By that time, McCain helped ensure they had a peaceful entry.[122] In 2006, Judge Robert Helfrich ruled that Kennard was factually innocent of all charges for which he had been convicted in the 1950s.[116] Albany Movement, 1961–1962 Main article: Albany Movement The SCLC, which had been criticized by some student activists for its failure to participate more fully in the freedom rides, committed much of its prestige and resources to a desegregation campaign in Albany, Georgia, in November 1961. King, who had been criticized personally by some SNCC activists for his distance from the dangers that local organizers faced—and given the derisive nickname "De Lawd" as a result—intervened personally to assist the campaign led by both SNCC organizers and local leaders. The campaign was a failure because of the canny tactics of Laurie Pritchett, the local police chief, and divisions within the black community. The goals may not have been specific enough. Pritchett contained the marchers without violent attacks on demonstrators that inflamed national opinion. He also arranged for arrested demonstrators to be taken to jails in surrounding communities, allowing plenty of room to remain in his jail. Pritchett also foresaw King's presence as a danger and forced his release to avoid King's rallying the black community. King left in 1962 without having achieved any dramatic victories. The local movement, however, continued the struggle, and it obtained significant gains in the next few years.[123] Birmingham campaign, 1963 Main article: Birmingham campaign The Albany movement was shown to be an important education for the SCLC, however, when it undertook the Birmingham campaign in 1963. Executive Director Wyatt Tee Walker carefully planned the early strategy and tactics for the campaign. It focused on one goal—the desegregation of Birmingham's downtown merchants, rather than total desegregation, as in Albany. The movement's efforts were helped by the brutal response of local authorities, in particular Eugene "Bull" Connor, the Commissioner of Public Safety. He had long held much political power but had lost a recent election for mayor to a less rabidly segregationist candidate. Refusing to accept the new mayor's authority, Connor intended to stay in office. The campaign used a variety of nonviolent methods of confrontation, including sit-ins, kneel-ins at local churches, and a march to the county building to mark the beginning of a drive to register voters. The city, however, obtained an injunction barring all such protests. Convinced that the order was unconstitutional, the campaign defied it and prepared for mass arrests of its supporters. King elected to be among those arrested on April 12, 1963.[124] Recreation of Martin Luther King Jr.'s cell in Birmingham Jail at the National Civil Rights Museum While in jail, King wrote his famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail"[125] on the margins of a newspaper, since he had not been allowed any writing paper while held in solitary confinement.[126] Supporters appealed to the Kennedy administration, which intervened to obtain King's release. Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, arranged for $160,000 to bail out King and his fellow protestors.[127] King was allowed to call his wife, who was recuperating at home after the birth of their fourth child and was released early on April 19. The campaign, however, faltered as it ran out of demonstrators willing to risk arrest. James Bevel, SCLC's Director of Direct Action and Director of Nonviolent Education, then came up with a bold and controversial alternative: to train high school students to take part in the demonstrations. As a result, in what would be called the Children's Crusade, more than one thousand students skipped school on May 2 to meet at the 16th Street Baptist Church to join the demonstrations. More than six hundred marched out of the church fifty at a time in an attempt to walk to City Hall to speak to Birmingham's mayor about segregation. They were arrested and put into jail. In this first encounter, the police acted with restraint. On the next day, however, another one thousand students gathered at the church. When Bevel started them marching fifty at a time, Bull Connor finally unleashed police dogs on them and then turned the city's fire hoses water streams on the children. National television networks broadcast the scenes of the dogs attacking demonstrators and the water from the fire hoses knocking down the schoolchildren.[128] Widespread public outrage led the Kennedy administration to intervene more forcefully in negotiations between the white business community and the SCLC. On May 10, the parties announced an agreement to desegregate the lunch counters and other public accommodations downtown, to create a committee to eliminate discriminatory hiring practices, to arrange for the release of jailed protesters, and to establish regular means of communication between black and white leaders. A black and white photograph of a building in ruins next to an intact wall Wreckage at the Gaston Motel following the bomb explosion on May 11, 1963 Not everyone in the black community approved of the agreement—Fred Shuttlesworth was particularly critical, since he was skeptical about the good faith of Birmingham's power structure from his experience in dealing with them. Parts of the white community reacted violently. They bombed the Gaston Motel, which housed the SCLC's unofficial headquarters, and the home of King's brother, the Reverend A. D. King. In response, thousands of blacks rioted, burning numerous buildings and one of them stabbed and wounded a police officer.[129] Alabama governor George Wallace tried to block desegregation at the University of Alabama and is confronted by U.S. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach in 1963. Kennedy prepared to federalize the Alabama National Guard if the need arose. Four months later, on September 15, a conspiracy of Ku Klux Klan members bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four young girls. "Rising tide of discontent" and Kennedy's response, 1963 Main articles: Gloria Richardson, Stand in the Schoolhouse Door, and Civil Rights Address Birmingham was only one of over a hundred cities rocked by the chaotic protest that spring and summer, some of them in the North but mainly in the South. During the March on Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. would refer to such protests as "the whirlwinds of revolt." In Chicago, blacks rioted through the South Side in late May after a white police officer shot a fourteen-year-old black boy who was fleeing the scene of a robbery.[130] Violent clashes between black activists and white workers took place in both Philadelphia and Harlem in successful efforts to integrate state construction projects.[131][132] On June 6, over a thousand whites attacked a sit-in in Lexington, North Carolina; blacks fought back and one white man was killed.[133][134] Edwin C. Berry of the National Urban League warned of a complete breakdown in race relations: "My message from the beer gardens and the barbershops all indicate the fact that the Negro is ready for war."[130] In Cambridge, Maryland, a working‐class city on the Eastern Shore, Gloria Richardson of SNCC led a movement that pressed for desegregation but also demanded low‐rent public housing, job‐training, public and private jobs, and an end to police brutality.[135] On June 11, struggles between blacks and whites escalated into violent rioting, leading Maryland Governor J. Millard Tawes to declare martial law. When negotiations between Richardson and Maryland officials faltered, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy directly intervened to negotiate a desegregation agreement.[136] Richardson felt that the increasing participation of poor and working-class blacks was expanding both the power and parameters of the movement, asserting that "the people as a whole really do have more intelligence than a few of their leaders.ʺ[135] In their deliberations during this wave of protests, the Kennedy administration privately felt that militant demonstrations were ʺbad for the countryʺ and that "Negroes are going to push this thing too far."[137] On May 24, Robert Kennedy had a meeting with prominent black intellectuals to discuss the racial situation. The blacks criticized Kennedy harshly for vacillating on civil rights and said that the African-American community's thoughts were increasingly turning to violence. The meeting ended with ill will on all sides.[138][139][140] Nonetheless, the Kennedys ultimately decided that new legislation for equal public accommodations was essential to drive activists "into the courts and out of the streets."[137][141] The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom at the National Mall Leaders of the March on Washington posing before the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963 On June 11, 1963, George Wallace, Governor of Alabama, tried to block[142] the integration of the University of Alabama. President John F. Kennedy sent a military force to make Governor Wallace step aside, allowing the enrollment of Vivian Malone Jones and James Hood. That evening, President Kennedy addressed the nation on TV and radio with his historic civil rights speech, where he lamented "a rising tide of discontent that threatens the public safety." He called on Congress to pass new civil rights legislation, and urged the country to embrace civil rights as "a moral issue...in our daily lives."[143] In the early hours of June 12, Medgar Evers, field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP, was assassinated by a member of the Klan.[144][145] The next week, as promised, on June 19, 1963, President Kennedy submitted his Civil Rights bill to Congress.[146] March on Washington, 1963 Main article: March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom Bayard Rustin (left) and Cleveland Robinson (right), organizers of the March, on August 7, 1963 Randolph and Bayard Rustin were the chief planners of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which they proposed in 1962. In 1963, the Kennedy administration initially opposed the march out of concern it would negatively impact the drive for passage of civil rights legislation. However, Randolph and King were firm that the march would proceed.[147] With the march going forward, the Kennedys decided it was important to work to ensure its success. Concerned about the turnout, President Kennedy enlisted the aid of white church leaders and Walter Reuther, president of the UAW, to help mobilize white supporters for the march.[148][149] The march was held on August 28, 1963. Unlike the planned 1941 march, for which Randolph included only black-led organizations in the planning, the 1963 march was a collaborative effort of all of the major civil rights organizations, the more progressive wing of the labor movement, and other liberal organizations. The march had six official goals: meaningful civil rights laws a massive federal works program full and fair employment decent housing the right to vote adequate integrated education. Of these, the march's major focus was on passage of the civil rights law that the Kennedy administration had proposed after the upheavals in Birmingham. Martin Luther King Jr. at a civil rights march on Washington, D.C. National media attention also greatly contributed to the march's national exposure and probable impact. In the essay "The March on Washington and Television News,"[150] historian William Thomas notes: "Over five hundred cameramen, technicians, and correspondents from the major networks were set to cover the event. More cameras would be set up than had filmed the last presidential inauguration. One camera was positioned high in the Washington Monument, to give dramatic vistas of the marchers". By carrying the organizers' speeches and offering their own commentary, television stations framed the way their local audiences saw and understood the event.[150] "I Have a Dream" 0:30 30-second sample from "I Have a Dream" speech by Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963 Problems playing this file? See media help. The march was a success, although not without controversy. An estimated 200,000 to 300,000 demonstrators gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial, where King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. While many speakers applauded the Kennedy administration for the efforts it had made toward obtaining new, more effective civil rights legislation protecting the right to vote and outlawing segregation, John Lewis of SNCC took the administration to task for not doing more to protect southern blacks and civil rights workers under attack in the Deep South. After the march, King and other civil rights leaders met with President Kennedy at the White House. While the Kennedy administration appeared sincerely committed to passing the bill, it was not clear that it had enough votes in Congress to do so. However, when President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963,[146] the new President Lyndon Johnson decided to use his influence in Congress to bring about much of Kennedy's legislative agenda. Malcolm X joins the movement, 1964–1965 Main articles: Malcolm X, Black Nationalism, and The Ballot or the Bullet In March 1964, Malcolm X (el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz), national representative of the Nation of Islam, formally broke with that organization, and made a public offer to collaborate with any civil rights organization that accepted the right to self-defense and the philosophy of Black nationalism (which Malcolm said no longer required Black separatism). Gloria Richardson, head of the Cambridge, Maryland, chapter of SNCC, and leader of the Cambridge rebellion,[151] an honored guest at The March on Washington, immediately embraced Malcolm's offer. Mrs. Richardson, "the nation's most prominent woman [civil rights] leader,"[152] told The Baltimore Afro-American that "Malcolm is being very practical...The federal government has moved into conflict situations only when matters approach the level of insurrection. Self-defense may force Washington to intervene sooner."[152] Earlier, in May 1963, writer and activist James Baldwin had stated publicly that "the Black Muslim movement is the only one in the country we can call grassroots, I hate to say it...Malcolm articulates for Negroes, their suffering...he corroborates their reality..."[153] On the local level, Malcolm and the NOI had been allied with the Harlem chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) since at least 1962.[154] Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. speak to each other thoughtfully as others look on. Malcolm X meets with Martin Luther King Jr., March 26, 1964 On March 26, 1964, as the Civil Rights Act was facing stiff opposition in Congress, Malcolm had a public meeting with Martin Luther King Jr. at the Capitol. Malcolm had tried to begin a dialog with King as early as 1957, but King had rebuffed him. Malcolm had responded by calling King an "Uncle Tom", saying he had turned his back on black militancy in order to appease the white power structure. But the two men were on good terms at their face-to-face meeting.[155] There is evidence that King was preparing to support Malcolm's plan to formally bring the U.S. government before the United Nations on charges of human rights violations against African Americans.[156] Malcolm now encouraged Black nationalists to get involved in voter registration drives and other forms of community organizing to redefine and expand the movement.[157] Civil rights activists became increasingly combative in the 1963 to 1964 period, seeking to defy such events as the thwarting of the Albany campaign, police repression and Ku Klux Klan terrorism in Birmingham, and the assassination of Medgar Evers. The latter's brother Charles Evers, who took over as Mississippi NAACP Field Director, told a public NAACP conference on February 15, 1964, that "non-violence won't work in Mississippi...we made up our minds...that if a white man shoots at a Negro in Mississippi, we will shoot back."[158] The repression of sit-ins in Jacksonville, Florida, provoked a riot in which black youth threw Molotov cocktails at police on March 24, 1964.[159] Malcolm X gave numerous speeches in this period warning that such militant activity would escalate further if African Americans' rights were not fully recognized. In his landmark April 1964 speech "The Ballot or the Bullet", Malcolm presented an ultimatum to white America: "There's new strategy coming in. It'll be Molotov cocktails this month, hand grenades next month, and something else next month. It'll be ballots, or it'll be bullets."[160] As noted in the PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize, "Malcolm X had a far-reaching effect on the civil rights movement. In the South, there had been a long tradition of self-reliance. Malcolm X's ideas now touched that tradition".[161] Self-reliance was becoming paramount in light of the 1964 Democratic National Convention's decision to refuse seating to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and instead to seat the regular state delegation, which had been elected in violation of the party's own rules, and by Jim Crow law instead.[162] SNCC moved in an increasingly militant direction and worked with Malcolm X on two Harlem MFDP fundraisers in December 1964. When Fannie Lou Hamer spoke to Harlemites about the Jim Crow violence that she'd suffered in Mississippi, she linked it directly to the Northern police brutality against blacks that Malcolm protested against;[163] When Malcolm asserted that African Americans should emulate the Mau Mau army of Kenya in efforts to gain their independence, many in SNCC applauded.[164] During the Selma campaign for voting rights in 1965, Malcolm made it known that he'd heard reports of increased threats of lynching around Selma. In late January he sent an open telegram to George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party, stating: "if your present racist agitation against our people there in Alabama causes physical harm to Reverend King or any other black Americans...you and your KKK friends will be met with maximum physical retaliation from those of us who are not handcuffed by the disarming philosophy of nonviolence."[165] The following month, the Selma chapter of SNCC invited Malcolm to speak to a mass meeting there. On the day of Malcolm's appearance, President Johnson made his first public statement in support of the Selma campaign.[166] Paul Ryan Haygood, a co-director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, credits Malcolm with a role in gaining support by the federal government. Haygood noted that "shortly after Malcolm's visit to Selma, a federal judge, responding to a suit brought by the Department of Justice, required Dallas County, Alabama, registrars to process at least 100 Black applications each day their offices were open."[167] St. Augustine, Florida, 1963–1964 Main article: St. Augustine movement Further information: 1964 Monson Motor Lodge protest "We Cater to White Trade Only" sign on a restaurant window in Lancaster, Ohio, in 1938. In 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested and spent a night in jail for attempting to eat at a white-only restaurant in St. Augustine, Florida. St. Augustine was famous as the "Nation's Oldest City", founded by the Spanish in 1565. It became the stage for a great drama leading up to the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. A local movement, led by Robert B. Hayling, a black dentist and Air Force veteran affiliated with the NAACP, had been picketing segregated local institutions since 1963. In the fall of 1964, Hayling and three companions were brutally beaten at a Ku Klux Klan rally. Nightriders shot into black homes, and teenagers Audrey Nell Edwards, JoeAnn Anderson, Samuel White, and Willie Carl Singleton (who came to be known as "The St. Augustine Four") sat in at a local Woolworth's lunch counter, seeking to get served. They were arrested and convicted of trespassing, and sentenced to six months in jail and reform school. It took a special act of the governor and cabinet of Florida to release them after national protests by the Pittsburgh Courier, Jackie Robinson, and others. Black and white photograph of segregationists fighting on a beach White segregationists (foreground) trying to prevent black people from swimming at a "White only" beach in St. Augustine, Florida during the 1964 Monson Motor Lodge protests In response to the repression, the St. Augustine movement practiced armed self-defense in addition to nonviolent direct action. In June 1963, Hayling publicly stated that "I and the others have armed. We will shoot first and answer questions later. We are not going to die like Medgar Evers." The comment made national headlines.[168] When Klan nightriders terrorized black neighborhoods in St. Augustine, Hayling's NAACP members often drove them off with gunfire. In October 1963, a Klansman was killed.[169] In 1964, Hayling and other activists urged the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to come to St. Augustine. Four prominent Massachusetts women – Mary Parkman Peabody, Esther Burgess, Hester Campbell (all of whose husbands were Episcopal bishops), and Florence Rowe (whose husband was vice president of an insurance company) – also came to lend their support. The arrest of Peabody, the 72-year-old mother of the governor of Massachusetts, for attempting to eat at the segregated Ponce de Leon Motor Lodge in an integrated group, made front-page news across the country and brought the movement in St. Augustine to the attention of the world.[170] Widely publicized activities continued in the ensuing months. When King was arrested, he sent a "Letter from the St. Augustine Jail" to a northern supporter, Rabbi Israel S. Dresner. A week later, in the largest mass arrest of rabbis in American history took place, while they were conducting a pray-in at the segregated Monson Motel. A well-known photograph taken in St. Augustine shows the manager of the Monson Motel pouring hydrochloric acid in the swimming pool while blacks and whites are swimming in it. As he did so he yelled that he was "cleaning the pool", a presumed reference to it now being, in his eyes, racially contaminated.[171] The photograph was run on the front page of a Washington newspaper the day the Senate was to vote on passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Chester school protests, Spring 1964 Main article: Chester school protests From November 1963 through April 1964, the Chester school protests were a series of civil rights protests led by George Raymond of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons (NAACP) and Stanley Branche of the Committee for Freedom Now (CFFN) that made Chester, Pennsylvania one of the key battlegrounds of the civil rights movement. James Farmer, the national director of the Congress of Racial Equality called Chester "the Birmingham of the North".[172] In 1962, Branche and the CFFN focused on improving conditions at the predominantly black Franklin Elementary school in Chester. Although the school was built to house 500 students, it had become overcrowded with 1,200 students. The school's average class size was 39, twice the number of nearby all-white schools.[173] The school was built in 1910 and had never been updated. Only two bathrooms were available for the entire school.[174] In November 1963, CFFN protesters blocked the entrance to Franklin Elementary school and the Chester Municipal Building resulting in the arrest of 240 protesters. Following public attention to the protests stoked by media coverage of the mass arrests, the mayor and school board negotiated with the CFFN and NAACP.[172] The Chester Board of Education agreed to reduce class sizes at Franklin school, remove unsanitary toilet facilities, relocate classes held in the boiler room and coal bin and repair school grounds.[174] Emboldened by the success of the Franklin Elementary school demonstrations, the CFFN recruited new members, sponsored voter registration drives and planned a citywide boycott of Chester schools. Branche built close ties with students at nearby Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania Military College and Cheyney State College in order to ensure large turnouts at demonstrations and protests.[172] Branche invited Dick Gregory and Malcolm X to Chester to participate in the "Freedom Now Conference"[175] and other national civil rights leaders such as Gloria Richardson came to Chester in support of the demonstrations.[176] In 1964, a series of almost nightly protests brought chaos to Chester as protestors argued that the Chester School Board had de facto segregation of schools. The mayor of Chester, James Gorbey, issued "The Police Position to Preserve the Public Peace", a ten-point statement promising an immediate return to law and order. The city deputized firemen and trash collectors to help handle demonstrators.[172] The State of Pennsylvania deployed 50 state troopers to assist the 77-member Chester police force.[174] The demonstrations were marked by violence and charges of police brutality.[177] Over six hundred people were arrested over a two-month period of civil rights rallies, marches, pickets, boycotts and sit-ins.[172] Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton became involved in the negotiations and convinced Branche to obey a court-ordered moratorium on demonstrations.[175] Scranton created the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission to conduct hearings on the de facto segregation of public schools. All protests were discontinued while the commission held hearings during the summer of 1964.[178] In November 1964, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission concluded that the Chester School Board had violated the law and ordered the Chester School District to desegregate the city's six predominantly African-American schools. The city appealed the ruling, which delayed implementation.[174] Freedom Summer, 1964 Main article: Freedom Summer In the summer of 1964, COFO brought nearly 1,000 activists to Mississippi—most of them white college students from the North and West—to join with local black activists to register voters, teach in "Freedom Schools," and organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP).[179] Many of Mississippi's white residents deeply resented the outsiders and attempts to change their society. State and local governments, police, the White Citizens' Council and the Ku Klux Klan used arrests, beatings, arson, murder, spying, firing, evictions, and other forms of intimidation and harassment to oppose the project and prevent blacks from registering to vote or achieving social equality.[180] Missing persons poster created by the FBI in 1964 shows the photographs of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner On June 21, 1964, three civil rights workers disappeared: James Chaney, a young black Mississippian and plasterer's apprentice; and two Jewish activists, Andrew Goodman, a Queens College anthropology student; and Michael Schwerner, a CORE organizer from Manhattan's Lower East Side. They were found weeks later, murdered by conspirators who turned out to be local members of the Klan, some of the members of the Neshoba County sheriff's department. This outraged the public, leading the U.S. Justice Department along with the FBI (the latter which had previously avoided dealing with the issue of segregation and persecution of blacks) to take action. The outrage over these murders helped lead to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. From June to August, Freedom Summer activists worked in 38 local projects scattered across the state, with the largest number concentrated in the Mississippi Delta region. At least 30 Freedom Schools, with close to 3,500 students, were established, and 28 community centers were set up.[181] Over the course of the Summer Project, some 17,000 Mississippi blacks attempted to become registered voters in defiance of the red tape and forces of white supremacy arrayed against them—only 1,600 (less than 10%) succeeded. But more than 80,000 joined the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), founded as an alternative political organization, showing their desire to vote and participate in politics.[182] Though Freedom Summer failed to register many voters, it had a significant effect on the course of the civil rights movement. It helped break down the decades of people's isolation and repression that were the foundation of the Jim Crow system. Before Freedom Summer, the national news media had paid little attention to the persecution of black voters in the Deep South and the dangers endured by black civil rights workers. The progression of events throughout the South increased media attention to Mississippi.[183] The deaths of affluent northern white students and threats to non-Southerners attracted the full attention of the media spotlight to the state. Many black activists became embittered, believing the media valued the lives of whites and blacks differently. Perhaps the most significant effect of Freedom Summer was on the volunteers, almost all of whom—black and white—still consider it to have been one of the defining periods of their lives.[183] Civil Rights Act of 1964 Main article: Civil Rights Act of 1964 Although President Kennedy had proposed civil rights legislation and it had support from Northern Congressmen and Senators of both parties, Southern Senators blocked the bill by threatening filibusters. After considerable parliamentary maneuvering and 54 days of filibuster on the floor of the United States Senate, President Johnson got a bill through the Congress.[184] Lyndon B. Johnson signs the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 On July 2, 1964, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964,[11] which banned discrimination based on "race, color, religion, sex or national origin" in employment practices and public accommodations. The bill authorized the Attorney General to file lawsuits to enforce the new law. The law also nullified state and local laws that required such discrimination. Harlem riot of 1964 Main article: Harlem riot of 1964 When police shot an unarmed black teenager in Harlem in July 1964, tensions escalated out of control. Residents were frustrated with racial inequalities. Rioting broke out, and Bedford-Stuyvesant, a major black neighborhood in Brooklyn, erupted next. That summer, rioting also broke out in Philadelphia, for similar reasons. The riots were on a much smaller scale than what would occur in 1965 and later. Washington responded with a pilot program called Project Uplift. Thousands of young people in Harlem were given jobs during the summer of 1965. The project was inspired by a report generated by HARYOU called Youth in the Ghetto.[185] HARYOU was given a major role in organizing the project, together with the National Urban League and nearly 100 smaller community organizations.[186] Permanent jobs at living wages were still out of reach of many young black men. Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 1964 Main article: Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party Blacks in Mississippi had been disfranchised by statutory and constitutional changes since the late 19th century. In 1963 COFO held a Freedom Ballot in Mississippi to demonstrate the desire of black Mississippians to vote. More than 80,000 people registered and voted in the mock election, which pitted an integrated slate of candidates from the "Freedom Party" against the official state Democratic Party candidates.[187] President Lyndon B. Johnson (center) meets with civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney Young, and James Farmer, January 1964 In 1964, organizers launched the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to challenge the all-white official party. When Mississippi voting registrars refused to recognize their candidates, they held their own primary. They selected Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie Devine, and Victoria Gray to run for Congress, and a slate of delegates to represent Mississippi at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.[179] The presence of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was inconvenient, however, for the convention organizers. They had planned a triumphant celebration of the Johnson administration's achievements in civil rights, rather than a fight over racism within the Democratic Party. All-white delegations from other Southern states threatened to walk out if the official slate from Mississippi was not seated. Johnson was worried about the inroads that Republican Barry Goldwater's campaign was making in what previously had been the white Democratic stronghold of the "Solid South", as well as support that George Wallace had received in the North during the Democratic primaries. Johnson could not, however, prevent the MFDP from taking its case to the Credentials Committee. There Fannie Lou Hamer testified eloquently about the beatings that she and others endured and the threats they faced for trying to register to vote. Turning to the television cameras, Hamer asked, "Is this America?" Johnson offered the MFDP a "compromise" under which it would receive two non-voting, at-large seats, while the white delegation sent by the official Democratic Party would retain its seats. The MFDP angrily rejected the "compromise." The MFDP kept up its agitation at the convention after it was denied official recognition. When all but three of the "regular" Mississippi delegates left because they refused to pledge allegiance to the party, the MFDP delegates borrowed passes from sympathetic delegates and took the seats vacated by the official Mississippi delegates. National party organizers removed them. When they returned the next day, they found convention organizers had removed the empty seats that had been there the day before. They stayed and sang "freedom songs". The 1964 Democratic Party convention disillusioned many within the MFDP and the civil rights movement, but it did not destroy the MFDP. The MFDP became more radical after Atlantic City. It invited Malcolm X to speak at one of its conventions and opposed the war in Vietnam. Selma Voting Rights Movement Main articles: Selma to Montgomery marches and Voting Rights Act SNCC had undertaken an ambitious voter registration program in Selma, Alabama, in 1963, but by 1965 little headway had been made in the face of opposition from Selma's sheriff, Jim Clark. After local residents asked the SCLC for assistance, King came to Selma to lead several marches, at which he was arrested along with 250 other demonstrators. The marchers continued to meet violent resistance from the police. Jimmie Lee Jackson, a resident of nearby Marion, was killed by police at a later march on February 17, 1965. Jackson's death prompted James Bevel, director of the Selma Movement, to initiate and organize a plan to march from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital. On March 7, 1965, acting on Bevel's plan, Hosea Williams of the SCLC and John Lewis of SNCC led a march of 600 people to walk the 54 miles (87 km) from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery. Six blocks into the march, at the Edmund Pettus Bridge where the marchers left the city and moved into the county, state troopers, and local county law enforcement, some mounted on horseback, attacked the peaceful demonstrators with billy clubs, tear gas, rubber tubes wrapped in barbed wire, and bullwhips. They drove the marchers back into Selma. Lewis was knocked unconscious and dragged to safety. At least 16 other marchers were hospitalized. Among those gassed and beaten was Amelia Boynton Robinson, who was at the center of civil rights activity at the time. Police attack non-violent marchers on "Bloody Sunday", the first day of the Selma to Montgomery marches. The national broadcast of the news footage of lawmen attacking unresisting marchers seeking to exercise their constitutional right to vote provoked a national response and hundreds of people from all over the country came for a second march. These marchers were turned around by King at the last minute so as not to violate a federal injunction. This displeased many demonstrators, especially those who resented King's nonviolence (such as James Forman and Robert F. Williams). That night, local Whites attacked James Reeb, a voting rights supporter. He died of his injuries in a Birmingham hospital on March 11. Due to the national outcry at a White minister being murdered so brazenly (as well as the subsequent civil disobedience led by Gorman and other SNCC leaders all over the country, especially in Montgomery and at the White House), the marchers were able to lift the injunction and obtain protection from federal troops, permitting them to make the march across Alabama without incident two weeks later; during the march, Gorman, Williams, and other more militant protesters carried bricks and sticks of their own. Four Klansmen shot and killed Detroit homemaker Viola Liuzzo as she drove marchers back to Selma that night. Voting Rights Act of 1965 "Remarks on the Signing of the Voting Rights Act" 20:40 Statement before the United States Congress by Johnson on August 6, 1965, about the Voting Rights Act "Remarks on the Signing of the Voting Rights Act" 21:03 audio only Problems playing these files? See media help. Eight days after the first march, but before the final march, President Johnson delivered a televised address to support the voting rights bill he had sent to Congress. In it he stated: Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome. On August 6, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which suspended literacy tests and other subjective voter registration tests. It authorized Federal supervision of voter registration in states and individual voting districts where such tests were being used and where African Americans were historically under-represented in voting rolls compared to the eligible population. African Americans who had been barred from registering to vote finally had an alternative to taking suits to local or state courts, which had seldom prosecuted their cases to success. If discrimination in voter registration occurred, the 1965 act authorized the Attorney General of the United States to send Federal examiners to replace local registrars. Within months of the bill's passage, 250,000 new black voters had been registered, one-third of them by federal examiners. Within four years, voter registration in the South had more than doubled. In 1965, Mississippi had the highest black voter turnout at 74% and led the nation in the number of black public officials elected. In 1969, Tennessee had a 92.1% turnout among black voters; Arkansas, 77.9%; and Texas, 73.1%. Several whites who had opposed the Voting Rights Act paid a quick price. In 1966 Sheriff Jim Clark of Selma, Alabama, infamous for using cattle prods against civil rights marchers, was up for reelection. Although he took off the notorious "Never" pin on his uniform, he was defeated. At the election, Clark lost as blacks voted to get him out of office. Blacks' regaining the power to vote changed the political landscape of the South. When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, only about 100 African Americans held elective office, all in northern states. By 1989, there were more than 7,200 African Americans in office, including more than 4,800 in the South. Nearly every county where populations were majority black in Alabama had a black sheriff. Southern blacks held top positions in city, county, and state governments. Atlanta elected a black mayor, Andrew Young, as did Jackson, Mississippi, with Harvey Johnson Jr., and New Orleans, with Ernest Morial. Black politicians on the national level included Barbara Jordan, elected as a Representative from Texas in Congress, and President Jimmy Carter appointed Andrew Young as United States Ambassador to the United Nations. Julian Bond was elected to the Georgia State Legislature in 1965, although political reaction to his public opposition to the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War prevented him from taking his seat until 1967. John Lewis was first elected in 1986 to represent Georgia's 5th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives, where he served from 1987 until his death in 2020. Watts riot of 1965 Main article: Watts Riots Police arrest a man during the Watts riots in Los Angeles, August 1965 The new Voting Rights Act of 1965 had no immediate effect on living conditions for poor blacks. A few days after the act became law, a riot broke out in the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. Like Harlem, Watts was a majority-black neighborhood with very high unemployment and associated poverty. Its residents confronted a largely white police department that had a history of abuse against blacks.[188] While arresting a young man for drunk driving, police officers argued with the suspect's mother before onlookers. The spark triggered massive destruction of property through six days of rioting in Los Angeles. Thirty-four people were killed,[189] and property valued at about $40 million was destroyed, making the Watts riots among the city's worst unrest until the Rodney King riots of 1992.[190][191] With black militancy on the rise, ghetto residents directed acts of anger at the police. Black residents growing tired of police brutality continued to riot. Some young people joined groups such as the Black Panthers, whose popularity was based in part on their reputation for confronting police officers. Riots among blacks occurred in 1966 and 1967 in cities such as Atlanta, San Francisco, Oakland, Baltimore, Seattle, Tacoma, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Newark, Chicago, New York City (specifically in Brooklyn, Harlem and the Bronx), and worst of all in Detroit. Fair housing movements, 1966–1968 The first major blow against housing segregation in the era, the Rumford Fair Housing Act, was passed in California in 1963. It was overturned by white California voters and real estate lobbyists the following year with Proposition 14, a move which helped precipitate the Watts riots.[192][193] In 1966, the California Supreme Court invalidated Proposition 14 and reinstated the Rumford Fair Housing Act.[194] Working and organizing for fair housing laws became a major project of the movement over the next two years, with Martin Luther King Jr., James Bevel, and Al Raby leading the Chicago Freedom Movement around the issue in 1966. In the following year, Father James Groppi and the NAACP Youth Council also attracted national attention with a fair housing campaign in Milwaukee.[195][196] Both movements faced violent resistance from white homeowners and legal opposition from conservative politicians. The Fair Housing Bill was the most contentious civil rights legislation of the era. Senator Walter Mondale, who advocated for the bill, noted that over successive years, it was the most filibustered legislation in U.S. history. It was opposed by most Northern and Southern senators, as well as the National Association of Real Estate Boards. A proposed "Civil Rights Act of 1966" had collapsed completely because of its fair housing provision.[197] Mondale commented that: A lot of civil rights [legislation] was about making the South behave and taking the teeth from George Wallace, [but] this came right to the neighborhoods across the country. This was civil rights getting personal.[198] Nationwide riots of 1967 Main article: Long Hot Summer of 1967 Further information: Detroit Riot of 1967, 1967 Newark riots, and 1967 Plainfield riots 2:45CC Film on the riots created by the White House Naval Photographic Unit In 1967 riots broke out in black neighborhoods in more than 100 U.S. cities, including Detroit, Newark, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C.[199] The largest of these was the 1967 Detroit riot. In Detroit, a large black middle class had begun to develop among those African Americans who worked at unionized jobs in the automotive industry. These workers complained of persisting racist practices, limiting the jobs they could have and opportunities for promotion. The United Auto Workers channeled these complaints into bureaucratic and ineffective grievance procedures.[200] Violent white mobs enforced the segregation of housing up through the 1960s.[201] Blacks who were not upwardly mobile were living in substandard conditions, subject to the same problems as poor African Americans in Watts and Harlem. When white Detroit Police Department (DPD) officers shut down an illegal bar and arrested a large group of patrons during the hot summer, furious black residents rioted. Rioters looted and destroyed property while snipers engaged in firefights from rooftops and windows, undermining the DPD's ability to curtail the disorder. In response, the Michigan Army National Guard and U.S. Army paratroopers were deployed to reinforce the DPD and protect Detroit Fire Department (DFD) firefighters from attacks while putting out fires. Residents reported that police officers and National Guardsmen shot at black civilians and suspects indiscriminately. After five days, 43 people had been killed, hundreds injured, and thousands left homeless; $40 to $45 million worth of damage was caused.[201][202] State and local governments responded to the riot with a dramatic increase in minority hiring.[203] In the aftermath of the turmoil, the Greater Detroit Board of Commerce also launched a campaign to find jobs for ten thousand "previously unemployable" persons, a preponderant number of whom were black.[204] Governor George Romney immediately responded to the riot of 1967 with a special session of the Michigan legislature where he forwarded sweeping housing proposals that included not only fair housing, but "important relocation, tenants' rights and code enforcement legislation." Romney had supported such proposals in 1965 but abandoned them in the face of organized opposition. The laws passed both houses of the legislature. Historian Sidney Fine wrote that: The Michigan Fair Housing Act, which took effect on November 15, 1968, was stronger than the federal fair housing law...It is probably more than a coincidence that the state that had experienced the most severe racial disorder of the 1960s also adopted one of the strongest state fair housing acts.[205] President Johnson created the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in response to a nationwide wave of riots. The commission's final report called for major reforms in employment and public policy in black communities. It warned that the United States was moving toward separate white and black societies. Memphis, King assassination, and Civil Rights Act of 1968 Main articles: Poor People's Campaign, Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and Civil Rights Act of 1968 See also: King assassination riots and Orangeburg massacre A 3,000-person shantytown called Resurrection City was established in 1968 on the National Mall as part of the Poor People's Campaign. As 1968 began, the fair housing bill was being filibustered once again, but two developments revived it.[198] The Kerner Commission report on the 1967 ghetto riots was delivered to Congress on March 1, and it strongly recommended "a comprehensive and enforceable federal open housing law" as a remedy to the civil disturbances. The Senate was moved to end their filibuster that week.[206] James Lawson invited King to Memphis, Tennessee, in March 1968 to support a sanitation workers' strike. These workers launched a campaign for union representation after two workers were accidentally killed on the job; they were seeking fair wages and improved working conditions. King considered their struggle to be a vital part of the Poor People's Campaign he was planning. "I've Been to the Mountaintop" 0:30 Final 30 seconds of "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech by Martin Luther King Jr. These are the final words from his final public speech. Problems playing this file? See media help. A day after delivering his stirring "I've Been to the Mountaintop" sermon, which has become famous for his vision of American society, King was assassinated on April 4, 1968 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Riots broke out in black neighborhoods in more than 110 cities across the United States in the days that followed, notably in Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. The day before King's funeral, April 8, a completely silent march with Coretta Scott King, SCLC, and UAW president Walter Reuther attracted approximately 42,000 participants.[207][208] Armed National Guardsmen lined the streets, sitting on M-48 tanks, to protect the marchers, and helicopters circled overhead. On April 9, Mrs. King led another 150,000 people in a funeral procession through the streets of Atlanta.[209] Her dignity revived courage and hope in many of the Movement's members, confirming her place as the new leader in the struggle for racial equality. Coretta Scott King said,[210] Martin Luther King Jr. gave his life for the poor of the world, the garbage workers of Memphis and the peasants of Vietnam. The day that Negro people and others in bondage are truly free, on the day want is abolished, on the day wars are no more, on that day I know my husband will rest in a long-deserved peace. Aftermath of the King assassination riots in Washington, D.C. Ralph Abernathy succeeded King as the head of the SCLC and attempted to carry forth King's plan for a Poor People's March. It was to unite blacks and whites to campaign for fundamental changes in American society and economic structure. The march went forward under Abernathy's plainspoken leadership but did not achieve its goals. Civil Rights Act of 1968 The U.S. House of Representatives had been deliberating its Fair Housing Act in early April, before King's assassination and the aforementioned wave of unrest that followed, the largest since the Civil War.[211] Senator Charles Mathias wrote: [S]ome Senators and Representatives publicly stated they would not be intimidated or rushed into legislating because of the disturbances. Nevertheless, the news coverage of the riots and the underlying disparities in income, jobs, housing, and education, between White and Black Americans helped educate citizens and Congress about the stark reality of an enormous social problem. Members of Congress knew they had to act to redress these imbalances in American life to fulfill the dream that King had so eloquently preached.[206] The House passed the legislation on April 10, less than a week after King was murdered, and President Johnson signed it the next day. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, and national origin. It also made it a federal crime to "by force or by the threat of force, injure, intimidate, or interfere with anyone...by reason of their race, color, religion, or national origin."[212] Gates v. Collier Mississippi State Penitentiary Conditions at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, then known as Parchman Farm, became part of the public discussion of civil rights after activists were imprisoned there. In the spring of 1961, Freedom Riders came to the South to test the desegregation of public facilities. By the end of June 1963, Freedom Riders had been convicted in Jackson, Mississippi.[213] Many were jailed in Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. Mississippi employed the trusty system, a hierarchical order of inmates that used some inmates to control and enforce punishment of other inmates.[214] In 1970 the civil rights lawyer Roy Haber began taking statements from inmates. He collected 50 pages of details of murders, rapes, beatings and other abuses suffered by the inmates from 1969 to 1971 at Mississippi State Penitentiary. In a landmark case known as Gates v. Collier (1972), four inmates represented by Haber sued the superintendent of Parchman Farm for violating their rights under the United States Constitution. Federal Judge William C. Keady found in favor of the inmates, writing that Parchman Farm violated the civil rights of the inmates by inflicting cruel and unusual punishment. He ordered an immediate end to all unconstitutional conditions and practices. Racial segregation of inmates was abolished, as was the trusty system, which allowed certain inmates to have power and control over others.[215] The prison was renovated in 1972 after the scathing ruling by Keady, who wrote that the prison was an affront to "modern standards of decency." Among other reforms, the accommodations were made fit for human habitation. The system of trusties was abolished. (The prison had armed lifers with rifles and given them authority to oversee and guard other inmates, which led to many cases of abuse and murders.)[216] In integrated correctional facilities in northern and western states, blacks represented a disproportionate number of prisoners, in excess of their proportion of the general population. They were often treated as second-class citizens by white correctional officers. Blacks also represented a disproportionately high number of death row inmates. Eldridge Cleaver's book Soul on Ice was written from his experiences in the California correctional system; it contributed to black militancy.[217] Legacy Civil rights protest activity had an observable impact on white American's views on race and politics over time.[218] White people who live in counties in which civil rights protests of historical significance occurred have been found to have lower levels of racial resentment against blacks, are more likely to identify with the Democratic Party as well as more likely to support affirmative action.[218] One study found that non-violent activism of the era tended to produce favorable media coverage and changes in public opinion focusing on the issues organizers were raising, but violent protests tended to generate unfavorable media coverage that generated public desire to restore law and order.[219] The 1964 Act was passed to end discrimination in various fields based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in the areas of employment and public accommodation.[220][221] The 1964 Act did not prohibit sex discrimination against persons employed at educational institutions. A parallel law, Title VI, had also been enacted in 1964 to prohibit discrimination in federally funded private and public entities. It covered race, color, and national origin but excluded sex. Feminists during the early 1970s lobbied Congress to add sex as a protected class category. In 1972, Title IX was enacted to fill this gap and prohibit discrimination in all federally funded education programs. Title IX, or the Education Amendments of 1972 was later renamed the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act following Mink's death in 2002.[222] Characteristics Fannie Lou Hamer of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (and other Mississippi-based organizations) is an example of local grassroots leadership in the movement. African-American women Main article: African-American women in the civil rights movement African-American women in the civil rights movement were pivotal to its success.[223] They volunteered as activists, advocates, educators, clerics, writers, spiritual guides, caretakers and politicians for the civil rights movement; leading and participating in organizations that contributed to the cause of civil rights.[223] Rosa Parks's refusal to sit at the back of a public bus resulted in the year-long Montgomery bus boycott,[223] and the eventual desegregation of interstate travel in the United States.[224] Women were members of the NAACP because they believed it could help them contribute to the cause of civil rights.[223] Some of those involved with the Black Panthers were nationally recognized as leaders, and still others did editorial work on the Black Panther newspaper spurring internal discussions about gender issues.[225] Ella Baker founded the SNCC and was a prominent figure in the civil rights movement.[226][227] Female students involved with the SNCC helped to organize sit-ins and the Freedom Rides.[226] At the same time many elderly black women in towns across the Southern US cared for the organization's volunteers at their homes, providing the students food, a bed, healing aid and motherly love.[226] Other women involved also formed church groups, bridge clubs, and professional organizations, such as the National Council of Negro Women, to help achieve freedom for themselves and their race.[225] Several who participated in these organizations lost their jobs because of their involvement.[225] Sexist discrimination Many women who participated in the movement experienced gender discrimination and sexual harassment.[228] In the SCLC, Ella Baker's input was discouraged in spite of her being the oldest and most experienced person on the staff.[229] There are many other accounts and examples.[230][231][232][233] Avoiding the "Communist" label See also: The Communist Party and African-Americans On December 17, 1951, the Communist Party–affiliated Civil Rights Congress delivered the petition We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People to the United Nations, arguing that the U.S. federal government, by its failure to act against lynching in the United States, was guilty of genocide under Article II of the UN Genocide Convention (see Black genocide).[234] The petition was presented to the United Nations at two separate venues: Paul Robeson, a concert singer and activist, presented it to a UN official in New York City, while William L. Patterson, executive director of the CRC, delivered copies of the drafted petition to a UN delegation in Paris.[235] Patterson, the editor of the petition, was a leader of the Communist Party USA and head of the International Labor Defense, a group that offered legal representation to communists, trade unionists, and African Americans who were involved in cases that involved issues of political or racial persecution. The ILD was known for leading the defense of the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama in 1931, where the Communist Party had a considerable amount of influence among African Americans in the 1930s. This influence had largely declined by the late 1950s, although it could command international attention. As earlier civil rights figures such as Robeson, Du Bois and Patterson became more politically radical (and therefore targets of Cold War anti-Communism by the U.S. Government), they lost favor with mainstream Black America as well as with the NAACP.[235] In order to secure a place in the political mainstream and gain the broadest base of support, the new generation of civil rights activists believed that it had to openly distance itself from anything and anyone associated with the Communist party. According to Ella Baker, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference added the word "Christian" to its name in order to deter charges that it was associated with Communism.[236] Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI had been concerned about communism since the early 20th century, and it kept civil rights activists under close surveillance and labeled some of them "Communist" or "subversive", a practice that continued during the civil rights movement. In the early 1960s, the practice of distancing the civil rights movement from "Reds" was challenged by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee which adopted a policy of accepting assistance and participation from anyone who supported the SNCC's political program and was willing to "put their body on the line, regardless of political affiliation." At times the SNCC's policy of political openness put it at odds with the NAACP.[235] Grassroots leadership While most popular representations of the movement are centered on the leadership and philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr., some scholars note that the movement was too diverse to be credited to one person, organization, or strategy. Sociologist Doug McAdam has stated that, "in King's case, it would be inaccurate to say that he was the leader of the modern civil rights movement...but more importantly, there was no singular civil rights movement. The movement was, in fact, a coalition of thousands of local efforts nationwide, spanning several decades, hundreds of discrete groups, and all manner of strategies and tactics—legal, illegal, institutional, non-institutional, violent, non-violent. Without discounting King's importance, it would be sheer fiction to call him the leader of what was fundamentally an amorphous, fluid, dispersed movement."[237] Decentralized grassroots leadership has been a major focus of movement scholarship in recent decades through the work of historians John Dittmer, Charles Payne, Barbara Ransby, and others. Tactics and non-violence Armed Lumbee Indians aggressively confronting Klansmen in the Battle of Hayes Pond The Jim Crow system employed "terror as a means of social control,"[238] with the most organized manifestations being the Ku Klux Klan and their collaborators in local police departments. This violence played a key role in blocking the progress of the civil rights movement in the late 1950s. Some black organizations in the South began practicing armed self-defense. The first to do so openly was the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the NAACP led by Robert F. Williams. Williams had rebuilt the chapter after its membership was terrorized out of public life by the Klan. He did so by encouraging a new, more working-class membership to arm itself thoroughly and defend against attack.[239] When Klan nightriders attacked the home of NAACP member Albert Perry in October 1957, Williams' militia exchanged gunfire with the stunned Klansmen, who quickly retreated. The following day, the city council held an emergency session and passed an ordinance banning KKK motorcades.[240] One year later, Lumbee Indians in North Carolina would have a similarly successful armed stand-off with the Klan (known as the Battle of Hayes Pond) which resulted in KKK leader James W. "Catfish" Cole being convicted of incitement to riot.[241] After the acquittal of several white men charged with sexually assaulting black women in Monroe, Williams announced to United Press International reporters that he would "meet violence with violence" as a policy. Williams' declaration was quoted on the front page of The New York Times, and The Carolina Times considered it "the biggest civil rights story of 1959".[242] NAACP National chairman Roy Wilkins immediately suspended Williams from his position, but the Monroe organizer won support from numerous NAACP chapters across the country. Ultimately, Wilkins resorted to bribing influential organizer Daisy Bates to campaign against Williams at the NAACP national convention and the suspension was upheld. The convention nonetheless passed a resolution which stated: "We do not deny, but reaffirm the right of individual and collective self-defense against unlawful assaults."[243] Martin Luther King Jr. argued for Williams' removal,[244] but Ella Baker[245] and WEB Dubois[14] both publicly praised the Monroe leader's position. Williams—along with his wife, Mabel Williams—continued to play a leadership role in the Monroe movement, and to some degree, in the national movement. The Williamses published The Crusader, a nationally circulated newsletter, beginning in 1960, and the influential book Negroes With Guns in 1962. Williams did not call for full militarization in this period, but "flexibility in the freedom struggle."[246] Williams was well-versed in legal tactics and publicity, which he had used successfully in the internationally known "Kissing Case" of 1958, as well as nonviolent methods, which he used at lunch counter sit-ins in Monroe—all with armed self-defense as a complementary tactic. Williams led the Monroe movement in another armed stand-off with white supremacists during an August 1961 Freedom Ride; he had been invited to participate in the campaign by Ella Baker and James Forman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The incident (along with his campaigns for peace with Cuba) resulted in him being targeted by the FBI and prosecuted for kidnapping; he was cleared of all charges in 1976.[247] Meanwhile, armed self-defense continued discreetly in the Southern movement with such figures as SNCC's Amzie Moore,[247] Hartman Turnbow,[248] and Fannie Lou Hamer[249] all willing to use arms to defend their lives from nightrides. Taking refuge from the FBI in Cuba, the Willamses broadcast the radio show Radio Free Dixie throughout the eastern United States via Radio Progresso beginning in 1962. In this period, Williams advocated guerilla warfare against racist institutions and saw the large ghetto riots of the era as a manifestation of his strategy. University of North Carolina historian Walter Rucker has written that "the emergence of Robert F Williams contributed to the marked decline in anti-black racial violence in the U.S....After centuries of anti-black violence, African Americans across the country began to defend their communities aggressively—employing overt force when necessary. This in turn evoked in whites real fear of black vengeance..." This opened up space for African Americans to use nonviolent demonstrations with less fear of deadly reprisal.[250] Of the many civil rights activists who share this view, the most prominent was Rosa Parks. Parks gave the eulogy at Williams' funeral in 1996, praising him for "his courage and for his commitment to freedom," and concluding that "The sacrifices he made, and what he did, should go down in history and never be forgotten."[251] Political responses Eisenhower administration: 1953–1961 While not a key focus of his administration, President Eisenhower made several conservative strides toward making America a racially integrated country. The year he was elected, Eisenhower desegregated Washington D.C. after hearing a story about an African American man who was unable to rent a hotel room, buy a meal, access drinking water, and attend a movie.[252] Shortly after this act, Eisenhower utilized Hollywood personalities to pressure movie theatres into desegregating as well.[253] Under the previous administration, President Truman signed Executive Order 9981 to desegregate the military. However, Truman's executive order had hardly been enforced. President Eisenhower made it a point to enforce the executive order. By October 30, 1954, there were no segregated combat units in the United States.[252] Not only this, but Eisenhower also desegregated the Veterans Administration and military bases in the South, including federal schools for military dependents. Expanding his work beyond the military, Eisenhower formed two non-discrimination committees, one to broker nondiscrimination agreements with government contractors, and a second to end discrimination within government departments and agencies.[252] The first major piece of civil rights legislation since the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was also passed under the Eisenhower administration. President Eisenhower proposed, championed, and signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The legislation established the Civil Rights Commission and the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and banned intimidating, coercing, and other means of interfering with a citizen's right to vote. Eisenhower's work in desegregating the judicial system is also notable. The judges he appointed were liberal when it came to the subject of civil rights / desegregation, and he actively avoided placing segregationists in federal courts.[252] Kennedy administration: 1961–1963 Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy speaking before a hostile Civil Rights crowd protesting low minority hiring in his Justice Department June 14, 1963[254] For the first two years of the Kennedy administration, civil rights activists had mixed opinions of both the president and his younger brother, Robert F. Kennedy, the Attorney General. Historian David Halberstam wrote that the race question was for a long time a minor ethnic political issue in Massachusetts (where the Kennedy brothers came from), and had they been from another part of the country, "they might have been more immediately sensitive to the complexities and depth of black feelings."[255] A well of historical skepticism toward liberal politics had left African Americans with a sense of uneasy disdain for any white politician who claimed to share their concerns for freedom, particularly ones connected to the historically pro-segregationist Democratic Party. Still, many were encouraged by the discreet support Kennedy gave to King, and the administration's willingness, after dramatic pressure from civil disobedience, to bring forth racially egalitarian initiatives. Many of the initiatives resulted from Robert Kennedy's passion. The younger Kennedy gained a rapid education in the realities of racism through events such as the Baldwin-Kennedy meeting. The president came to share his brother's sense of urgency on the matter, resulting in the landmark Civil Rights Address of June 1963 and the introduction of the first major civil rights act of the decade.[256][257] Robert Kennedy expressed the administration's commitment to civil rights during a May 6, 1961 speech at the University of Georgia Law School: Our position is quite clear. We are upholding the law. The federal government would not be running the schools in Prince Edward County any more than it is running the University of Georgia or the schools in my home state of Massachusetts. In this case, in all cases, I say to you today that if the orders of the court are circumvented, the Department of Justice will act. We will not stand by or be aloof—we will move. I happen to believe that the 1954 decision was right. But my belief does not matter. It is now the law. Some of you may believe the decision was wrong. That does not matter. It is the law.[258] That same month, during the Freedom Rides, Robert Kennedy became concerned with the issue when photographs of the burning bus and savage beatings in Anniston and Birmingham were broadcast around the world. They came at an especially embarrassing time, as President Kennedy was about to have a summit with the Soviet premier in Vienna. The White House was concerned with its image among the populations of newly independent nations in Africa and Asia, and Robert Kennedy responded with an address for Voice of America stating that great progress had been made on the issue of race relations. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the administration worked to resolve the crisis with a minimum of violence and prevent the Freedom Riders from generating a fresh crop of headlines that might divert attention from the President's international agenda. The Freedom Riders documentary notes that, "The back burner issue of civil rights had collided with the urgent demands of Cold War realpolitik."[259] On May 21, when a white mob attacked and burned the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where King was holding out with protesters, Robert Kennedy telephoned King to ask him to stay in the building until the U.S. Marshals and National Guard could secure the area. King proceeded to berate Kennedy for "allowing the situation to continue". King later publicly thanked Kennedy for deploying the force to break up an attack that might otherwise have ended King's life. With a very small majority in Congress, the president's ability to press ahead with legislation relied considerably on a balancing game with the Senators and Congressmen of the South. Without the support of Vice-President Johnson, a former Senator who had years of experience in Congress and longstanding relations there, many of the Attorney-General's programs would not have progressed. By late 1962, frustration at the slow pace of political change was balanced by the movement's strong support for legislative initiatives, including administrative representation across all U.S. Government departments and greater access to the ballot box. From squaring off against Governor George Wallace, to "tearing into" Vice-President Johnson (for failing to desegregate areas of the administration), to threatening corrupt white Southern judges with disbarment, to desegregating interstate transport, Robert Kennedy came to be consumed by the civil rights movement. He continued to work on these social justice issues in his bid for the presidency in 1968. On the night of Governor Wallace's capitulation to African-American enrollment at the University of Alabama, President Kennedy gave an address to the nation, which marked the changing tide, an address that was to become a landmark for the ensuing change in political policy as to civil rights. In 1966, Robert Kennedy visited South Africa and voiced his objections to apartheid, the first time a major US politician had done so: At the University of Natal in Durban, I was told the church to which most of the white population belongs teaches apartheid as a moral necessity. A questioner declared that few churches allow black Africans to pray with the white because the Bible says that is the way it should be, because God created Negroes to serve. "But suppose God is black", I replied. "What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?" There was no answer. Only silence. — LOOK Magazine[260] Robert Kennedy's relationship with the movement was not always positive. As attorney general, he was called to account by activists—who booed him at a June 1963 speech—for the Justice Department's own poor record of hiring blacks.[254] He also presided over FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his COINTELPRO program. This program ordered FBI agents to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the activities of Communist front groups, a category in which the paranoid Hoover included most civil rights organizations.[261][262] Kennedy personally authorized some of the programs.[263] According to Tim Weiner, "RFK knew much more about this surveillance than he ever admitted." Although Kennedy only gave approval for limited wiretapping of King's phones "on a trial basis, for a month or so." Hoover extended the clearance so his men were "unshackled" to look for evidence in any areas of the black leader's life they deemed important; they then used this information to harass King.[264] Kennedy directly ordered surveillance on James Baldwin after their antagonistic racial summit in 1963.[265][266] Johnson administration: 1963–1969 Further information: Civil Rights Act of 1964, War on Poverty, and Lyndon B. Johnson Lyndon Johnson made civil rights one of his highest priorities, coupling it with a whites war on poverty. However increasing the opposition to the Vietnam War, coupled with the cost of the war, undercut support for his domestic programs.[267] Under Kennedy, major civil rights legislation had been stalled in Congress. His assassination changed everything. On one hand, President Lyndon Johnson was a much more skillful negotiator than Kennedy, but he had behind him a powerful national momentum demanding immediate action on moral and emotional grounds. Demands for immediate action originated from unexpected directions, especially white Protestant church groups. The Justice Department, led by Robert Kennedy, moved from a posture of defending Kennedy from the quagmire minefield of racial politics to acting to fulfill his legacy. The violent death and public reaction dramatically moved the conservative Republicans, led by Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen, whose support was the margin of victory for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act immediately ended de jure (legal) segregation and the era of Jim Crow.[268] With the civil rights movement at full blast, Lyndon Johnson coupled black entrepreneurship with his war on poverty, setting up special programs in the Small Business Administration, the Office of Economic Opportunity, and other agencies.[269] This time there was money for loans designed to boost minority business ownership. Richard Nixon greatly expanded the program, setting up the Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE) in the expectation that black entrepreneurs would help defuse racial tensions and possibly support his reelection .[270] Popular reactions American Jews See also: African American–Jewish relations; New York City teachers' strike of 1968; and Brownsville, Brooklyn Jewish civil rights activist Joseph L. Rauh Jr. marching with Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963 Many in the Jewish community supported the civil rights movement. In fact, statistically, Jews were one of the most actively involved non-black groups in the Movement. Many Jewish students worked in concert with African Americans for CORE, SCLC, and SNCC as full-time organizers and summer volunteers during the Civil Rights era. Jews made up roughly half of the white northern and western volunteers involved in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer project and approximately half of the civil rights attorneys active in the South during the 1960s.[271] Jewish leaders were arrested while heeding a call from Martin Luther King Jr. in St. Augustine, Florida, in June 1964, where the largest mass arrest of rabbis in American history took place at the Monson Motor Lodge. Abraham Joshua Heschel, a writer, rabbi, and professor of theology at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, was outspoken on the subject of civil rights. He marched arm-in-arm with King in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march. In the 1964 murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, the two white activists killed, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were both Jewish. Brandeis University, the only nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored college university in the world, created the Transitional Year Program (TYP) in 1968, in part response to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The faculty created it to renew the university's commitment to social justice. Recognizing Brandeis as a university with a commitment to academic excellence, these faculty members created a chance for disadvantaged students to participate in an empowering educational experience. The American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, and Anti-Defamation League (ADL) actively promoted civil rights. While Jews were very active in the civil rights movement in the South, in the North, many had experienced a more strained relationship with African Americans. It has been argued that with Black militancy and the Black Power movements on the rise, "Black Anti-Semitism" increased leading to strained relations between Blacks and Jews in Northern communities. In New York City, most notably, there was a major socio-economic class difference in the perception of African Americans by Jews.[272] Jews from better educated Upper-Middle-Class backgrounds were often very supportive of African American civil rights activities while the Jews in poorer urban communities that became increasingly minority were often less supportive largely in part due to more negative and violent interactions between the two groups. According to political scientist Michael Rogin, Jewish-Black hostility was a two-way street extending to earlier decades. In the post-World War II era, Jews were granted white privilege and most moved into the middle-class while Blacks were left behind in the ghetto.[273] Urban Jews engaged in the same sort of conflicts with Blacks—over integration busing, local control of schools, housing, crime, communal identity, and class divides—that other white ethnics did, leading to Jews participating in white flight. The culmination of this was the 1968 New York City teachers' strike, pitting largely Jewish schoolteachers against predominantly Black parents in Brownsville, New York.[274] Public profile Many Jews in the Southern states who supported civil rights for African Americans tended to keep a low profile on "the race issue", in order to avoid attracting the attention of the anti-Black and antisemitic Ku Klux Klan.[275] However, Klan groups exploited the issue of African-American integration and Jewish involvement in the struggle in order to commit violently antisemitic hate crimes. As an example of this hatred, in one year alone, from November 1957 to October 1958, temples and other Jewish communal gatherings were bombed and desecrated in Atlanta, Nashville, Jacksonville, and Miami, and dynamite was found under synagogues in Birmingham, Charlotte, and Gastonia, North Carolina. Some rabbis received death threats, but there were no injuries following these outbursts of violence.[275] Black segregationists Despite the common notion that the ideas of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Black Power only conflicted with each other and were the only ideologies of the civil rights movement, there were other sentiments felt by many blacks. Fearing the events during the movement was occurring too quickly, there were some blacks who felt that leaders should take their activism at an incremental pace. Others had reservations on how focused blacks were on the movement and felt that such attention was better spent on reforming issues within the black community. While Conservatives, in general, supported integration, some defended incrementally phased out segregation as a backstop against assimilation. Based on her interpretation of a 1966 study made by Donald Matthews and James Prothro detailing the relative percentage of blacks for integration, against it or feeling something else, Lauren Winner asserts that: Black defenders of segregation look, at first blush, very much like black nationalists, especially in their preference for all-black institutions; but black defenders of segregation differ from nationalists in two key ways. First, while both groups criticize NAACP-style integration, nationalists articulate a third alternative to integration and Jim Crow, while segregationists preferred to stick with the status quo. Second, absent from black defenders of segregation's political vocabulary was the demand for self-determination. They called for all-black institutions, but not autonomous all-black institutions; indeed, some defenders of segregation asserted that black people needed white paternalism and oversight in order to thrive.[276] Oftentimes, African-American community leaders would be staunch defenders of segregation. Church ministers, businessmen, and educators were among those who wished to keep segregation and segregationist ideals in order to retain the privileges they gained from patronage from whites, such as monetary gains. In addition, they relied on segregation to keep their jobs and economies in their communities thriving. It was feared that if integration became widespread in the South, black-owned businesses and other establishments would lose a large chunk of their customer base to white-owned businesses, and many blacks would lose opportunities for jobs that were presently exclusive to their interests.[277] On the other hand, there were the everyday, average black people who criticized integration as well. For them, they took issue with different parts of the civil rights movement and the potential for blacks to exercise consumerism and economic liberty without hindrance from whites.[278] For Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and other leading activists and groups during the movement, these opposing viewpoints acted as an obstacle against their ideas. These different views made such leaders' work much harder to accomplish, but they were nonetheless important in the overall scope of the movement. For the most part, the black individuals who had reservations on various aspects of the movement and ideologies of the activists were not able to make a game-changing dent in their efforts, but the existence of these alternate ideas gave some blacks an outlet to express their concerns about the changing social structure. "Black Power" militants Main articles: Black Power and Black Power movement Gold medalist Tommie Smith (center) and bronze medalist John Carlos (right) showing the raised fist on the podium after the 200 m race at the 1968 Summer Olympics; both wear Olympic Project for Human Rights badges. Peter Norman (silver medalist, left) from Australia also wears an OPHR badge in solidarity with Smith and Carlos. During the Freedom Summer campaign of 1964, numerous tensions within the civil rights movement came to the forefront. Many blacks in SNCC developed concerns that white activists from the North and West were taking over the movement. The participation by numerous white students was not reducing the amount of violence that SNCC suffered, but seemed to exacerbate it. Additionally, there was profound disillusionment at Lyndon Johnson's denial of voting status for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the Democratic National Convention.[279][280] Meanwhile, during CORE's work in Louisiana that summer, that group found the federal government would not respond to requests to enforce the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or to protect the lives of activists who challenged segregation. The Louisiana campaign survived by relying on a local African-American militia called the Deacons for Defense and Justice, who used arms to repel white supremacist violence and police repression. CORE's collaboration with the Deacons was effective in disrupting Jim Crow in numerous Louisiana areas.[281][282] In 1965, SNCC helped organize an independent political party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), in the heart of the Alabama Black Belt, also Klan territory. It permitted its black leaders to openly promote the use of armed self-defense. Meanwhile, the Deacons for Defense and Justice expanded into Mississippi and assisted Charles Evers' NAACP chapter with a successful campaign in Natchez. Charles had taken the lead after his brother Medgar Evers was assassinated in 1963.[283] The same year, the 1965 Watts Rebellion took place in Los Angeles. Many black youths were committed to the use of violence to protest inequality and oppression.[284] During the March Against Fear in 1966, initiated by James Meredith, SNCC and CORE fully embraced the slogan of "black power" to describe these trends towards militancy and self-reliance. In Mississippi, Stokely Carmichael declared, "I'm not going to beg the white man for anything that I deserve, I'm going to take it. We need power."[285] Some people engaging in the Black Power movement claimed a growing sense of black pride and identity. In gaining more of a sense of a cultural identity, blacks demanded that whites no longer refer to them as "Negroes" but as "Afro-Americans," similar to other ethnic groups, such as Irish Americans and Italian Americans. Until the mid-1960s, blacks had dressed similarly to whites and often straightened their hair. As a part of affirming their identity, blacks started to wear African-based dashikis and grow their hair out as a natural afro. The afro, sometimes nicknamed the "'fro," remained a popular black hairstyle until the late 1970s. Other variations of traditional African styles have become popular, often featuring braids, extensions, and dreadlocks. The Black Panther Party (BPP), which was founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California, in 1966, gained the most attention for Black Power nationally. The group began following the revolutionary pan-Africanism of late-period Malcolm X, using a "by-any-means necessary" approach to stopping racial inequality. They sought to rid African-American neighborhoods of police brutality and to establish socialist community control in the ghettos. While they conducted armed confrontation with police, they also set up free breakfast and healthcare programs for children.[286] Between 1968 and 1971, the BPP was one of the most important black organizations in the country and had support from the NAACP, SCLC, Peace and Freedom Party, and others.[287] Black Power was taken to another level inside prison walls. In 1966, George Jackson formed the Black Guerrilla Family in the California San Quentin State Prison. The goal of this group was to overthrow the white-run government in America and the prison system. In 1970, this group displayed their dedication after a white prison guard was found not guilty of shooting and killing three black prisoners from the prison tower. They retaliated by killing a white prison guard. "Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud" 0:16 James Brown's "Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud" (1968) Problems playing this file? See media help. Numerous popular cultural expressions associated with black power appeared at this time. Released in August 1968, the number one Rhythm & Blues single for the Billboard Year-End list was James Brown's "Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud".[288] In October 1968, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, while being awarded the gold and bronze medals, respectively, at the 1968 Summer Olympics, donned human rights badges and each raised a black-gloved Black Power salute during their podium ceremony. King was not comfortable with the "Black Power" slogan, which sounded too much like black nationalism to him. When King was assassinated in 1968, Stokely Carmichael said that whites had murdered the one person who would prevent rampant rioting and that blacks would burn every major city to the ground. Riots broke out in more than 100 cities across the country. Some cities did not recover from the damage for more than a generation; other city neighborhoods never recovered. Native Americans King and the civil rights movement inspired the Native American rights movement of the 1960s and many of its leaders.[289] Native Americans had been dehumanized as "merciless Indian savages" in the United States Declaration of Independence,[290] and in King's 1964 book Why We Can't Wait he wrote: "Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race."[291] John Echohawk, a member of the Pawnee tribe and the executive director and one of the founders of the Native American Rights Fund, stated: "Inspired by Dr. King, who was advancing the civil rights agenda of equality under the laws of this country, we thought that we could also use the laws to advance our Indianship, to live as tribes in our territories governed by our own laws under the principles of tribal sovereignty that had been with us ever since 1831. We believed that we could fight for a policy of self-determination that was consistent with U.S. law and that we could govern our own affairs, define our own ways and continue to survive in this society".[292] Native Americans were also active supporters of King's movement throughout the 1960s, which included a sizable Native American contingent at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.[289] Northern Ireland See also: Northern Ireland civil rights movement Mural of Malcolm X in Belfast Due to policies of segregation and disenfranchisement present in Northern Ireland many Irish activists took inspiration from American civil rights activists. People's Democracy had organized a "Long March" from Belfast to Derry which was inspired by the Selma to Montgomery marches.[293] During the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland protesters often sang the American protest song We Shall Overcome and sometimes referred to themselves as the "negroes of Northern Ireland".[294] Soviet Union There was an international context for the actions of the U.S. federal government during these years. The Soviet media frequently covered racial discrimination in the U.S.[295] Deeming American criticism of its own human rights abuses hypocritical, the Soviet government would respond by stating "And you are lynching Negroes".[296] In his 1934 book Russia Today: What Can We Learn from It?, Sherwood Eddy wrote: "In the most remote villages of Russia today Americans are frequently asked what they are going to do to the Scottsboro Negro boys and why they lynch Negroes."[297] In Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, the historian Mary L. Dudziak wrote that Communists who were critical of the United States accused it of practicing hypocrisy when it portrayed itself as the "leader of the free world," while so many of its citizens were being subjected to severe racial discrimination and violence; she argued that this was a major factor in moving the government to support civil rights legislation.[298] White moderates A majority of White Southerners have been estimated to have neither supported or resisted the civil rights movement.[299] Many did not enjoy the idea of expanding civil rights but were uncomfortable with the language and often violent tactics used by those who resisted the civil rights movement as part of the Massive resistance.[300] Many only reacted to the movement once forced to by their changing environment, and when they did their response was usually whatever they felt would disturb their daily life the least. Most of their personal reactions, whether eventually in support or resistance were not in extreme.[299] White segregationists Ku Klux Klan demonstration in St. Augustine, Florida in 1964 King reached the height of popular acclaim during his life in 1964, when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. After that point his career was filled with frustrating challenges. The liberal coalition that had gained passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 began to fray. King was becoming more estranged from the Johnson administration. In 1965 he broke with it by calling for peace negotiations and a halt to the bombing of Vietnam. He moved further left in the following years, speaking about the need for economic justice and thoroughgoing changes in American society. He believed that change was needed beyond the civil rights which had been gained by the movement. However, King's attempts to broaden the scope of the civil rights movement were halting and largely unsuccessful. In 1965 King made several attempts to take the Movement north in order to address housing discrimination. The SCLC's campaign in Chicago publicly failed, because Chicago's Mayor Richard J. Daley marginalized the SCLC's campaign by promising to "study" the city's problems. In 1966, white demonstrators in notoriously racist Cicero, a suburb of Chicago, held "white power" signs and threw stones at marchers who were demonstrating against housing segregation.[301] Politicians and journalists quickly blamed this white backlash on the movement's shift towards Black Power in the mid-1960s; today most scholars believe the backlash was a phenomenon that was already developing in the mid-1950s, and it was embodied in the "massive resistance" movement in the South where even the few moderate white leaders (including George Wallace, who had once been endorsed by the NAACP) shifted to openly racist positions.[302][303] Northern and Western racists opposed the southerners on a regional and cultural basis, but also held segregationist attitudes which became more pronounced as the civil rights movement headed north and west. For instance, prior to the Watts riot, California whites had already mobilized to repeal the state's 1963 fair housing law.[301] Even so, the backlash which occurred at the time was not able to roll back the major civil rights victories which had been achieved or swing the country into reaction. Social historians Matthew Lassiter and Barbara Ehrenreich note that the backlash's primary constituency was suburban and middle-class, not working-class whites: "among the white electorate, one half of blue-collar voters…cast their ballot for [the liberal presidential candidate] Hubert Humphrey in 1968…only in the South did George Wallace draw substantially more blue-collar than white-collar support."[304] In popular culture Main article: Civil rights movement in popular culture The 1954 to 1968 civil rights movement contributed strong cultural threads to American and international theater, song, film, television, and art. Activist organizations National/regional civil rights organizations Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Deacons for Defense and Justice Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC) National economic empowerment organizations Operation Breadbasket Urban League Local civil rights organizations Albany Movement (Albany, Georgia) Council of Federated Organizations (Mississippi) Montgomery Improvement Association (Montgomery, Alabama) Nashville Student Movement (Nashville, Tennessee) Regional Council of Negro Leadership (Mississippi) Women's Political Council (Montgomery, Alabama) Individual activists Ralph Abernathy Victoria Gray Adams Muhammad Ali Maya Angelou Louis Austin Ella Baker James Baldwin Marion Barry Daisy Bates Harry Belafonte Fay Bellamy Powell James Bevel Claude Black Unita Blackwell Julian Bond Anne Braden Carl Braden Stanley Branche Ralph Bunche Mary Fair Burks Stokely Carmichael James Chaney Shirley Chisholm Septima Poinsette Clark Xernona Clayton Albert Cleage Eldridge Cleaver Charles E. Cobb Jr. John Conyers Sam Cooke Annie Lee Cooper Dorothy Cotton Claudette Colvin Jonathan Daniels Ossie Davis Ruby Dee Annie Devine Doris Derby Marian Wright Edelman Medgar Evers James L. Farmer Jr. Walter E. Fauntroy Karl Fleming Sarah Mae Flemming James Forman Frankie Muse Freeman Andrew Goodman Fred Gray Jack Greenberg Dick Gregory Prathia Hall Fannie Lou Hamer Lorraine Hansberry Robert Hayling Dorothy Height Lola Hendricks Aaron Henry Libby Holman Myles Horton T. R. M. Howard Winson Hudson Jesse Jackson Jimmie Lee Jackson Mahalia Jackson Esau Jenkins Clarence B. Jones Barbara Jordan Vernon Jordan Clyde Kennard Coretta Scott King Martin Luther King Jr. Bernard Lafayette James Lawson Bernard Lee John Lewis Stanley Levison Viola Liuzzo Audre Lorde Joseph Lowery Autherine Lucy Clara Luper Thurgood Marshall Benjamin Mays Franklin McCain Floyd McKissick James Meredith Loren Miller Jack Minnis Anne Moody Harry T. Moore E. Frederic Morrow Bob Moses Bill Moyer Elijah Muhammad Diane Nash Denise Nicholas E. D. Nixon David Nolan James Orange Nan Grogan Orrock Rosa Parks Rutledge Pearson Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Gloria Johnson-Powell A. Philip Randolph George Raymond George Raymond Jr. James Reeb Frederick D. Reese Walter Reuther Gloria Richardson David Richmond Paul Robeson Amelia Boynton Robinson Jackie Robinson Jo Ann Robinson Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson Bayard Rustin Michael Schwerner Cleveland Sellers Charles Sherrod Fred Shuttlesworth Modjeska Monteith Simkins Nina Simone Charles Kenzie Steele Annie Stein Dempsey Travis C. T. Vivian Wyatt Tee Walker Roy Wilkins Hosea Williams Robert F. Williams Malcolm X Andrew Young Whitney Young See also Civil rights movement portal flag United States portal icon Society portal 1950s portal 1960s portal Civil rights movement (1896–1954) Civil rights movement (1865–1896) American Indian Movement Asian American movement Chicano Movement History of civil rights in the United States List of civil rights leaders List of Kentucky women in the civil rights era List of photographers of the civil rights movement South Carolina in the civil rights movement Timeline of the civil rights movement "We Shall Overcome," the unofficial anthem of the movement History preservation Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument Civil Rights Movement Archive Freedom Riders National Monument Read's Drug Store (Baltimore), the site of a 1955 desegregation sit-in Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project Television News of the Civil Rights Era 1950–1970 Post–civil rights movement Black Lives Matter Post–civil rights era in African-American history Notes  Various other dates have been proposed as the date on which the civil rights movement began or ended.  The social movement has also been called the 1960s civil rights movement, the African-American civil rights movement, the Afro-American civil rights movement, the American civil rights movement, the American freedom movement, the Black civil rights movement, the Black revolution, the Black rights movement, the civil rights revolution, the civil rights struggle, the modern civil rights movement, the Negro American revolution, the Negro freedom movement, the Negro movement, the Negro revolt, the Negro revolution, the Second Reconstruction, the Southern freedom movement, and the United States civil rights movement. Civil rights struggles can denote this or other social movements that occurred in the United States during the same period. The social movement's span of time is called the civil rights era. References Racism has been reflected in discriminatory laws, practices and actions (including violence) at various times in the history of the United States against racial or ethnic groups. Throughout American history, white Americans have generally enjoyed legally or socially sanctioned privileges and rights, which have been denied to members of various ethnic or minority groups at various times. European Americans, and affluent white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in particular, are said to have enjoyed advantages in matters of education, immigration, voting rights, citizenship, land acquisition, and criminal procedure. Racism against various ethnic or minority groups has existed in the United States since the early colonial era. Before 1865, most African Americans were enslaved and even afterwards, they have faced severe restrictions on their political, social, and economic freedoms. Native Americans have suffered genocide, forced removals, and massacres, and they continue to face discrimination. Hispanics, Middle Eastern and Asian Americans along with Pacific Islanders have also been the victims of discrimination. In addition, non-Protestant immigrants from Europe, particularly Jews, Poles, Italians, and the Irish were often subjected to xenophobic exclusion and other forms of ethnicity-based discrimination. Racism has manifested itself in a variety of ways, including genocide, slavery, lynchings, segregation, Native American reservations and boarding schools, racist immigration and naturalization laws, and internment camps.[a] Formal racial discrimination was largely banned by the mid-20th century and over time, coming to be perceived as socially and morally unacceptable. Racial politics remains a major phenomenon, and racism continues to be reflected in socioeconomic inequality.[1][b] Into the 21st century, research has uncovered extensive evidence of racial discrimination in various sectors of modern U.S. society, including the criminal justice system, business, the economy, housing, health care, the media, and politics. In the view of the United Nations and the U.S. Human Rights Network, "discrimination in the United States permeates all aspects of life and extends to all communities of color."[3] Aspects of American life Main articles: Culture of the United States, Culture of the Southern United States, and Society of the United States Citizenship and immigration The Naturalization Act of 1790 set the first uniform rules for the granting of United States citizenship by naturalization, which limited naturalization to "free white person[s]", thus excluding Native Americans, indentured servants, slaves, free Blacks and later Asians from citizenship. Citizenship and the lack of it profoundly impacted various legal and political rights, the most notable of which were suffrage rights at both the federal and state level, the right to hold certain government offices, jury duty, military service in the United States Armed Forces, as well as many other activities, besides access to government assistance and services. The second Militia Act of 1792 also provided for the conscription of every "free able-bodied white male citizen".[4] Tennessee's 1834 Constitution included a provision: “the free white men of this State have a right to Keep and bear arms for their common defense.”[5] The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, made under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, allowed those Choctaw Indians who chose to remain in Mississippi to gain recognition as U.S. citizens, the first major non-European ethnic group to become entitled to U.S. citizenship. Racial discrimination in naturalization and immigration continued despite the Equal Protection Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (ratified in 1868). The Fourteenth Amendment overruled previous court decisions and gave U.S.-born African Americans citizenship through birthright citizenship. The Naturalization Act of 1870 extended naturalization to Black persons, but not to other non-white persons and revoked the citizenship of naturalized Chinese Americans.[6] The law relied on coded language to exclude "aliens ineligible for citizenship" which primarily applied to Chinese and Japanese immigrants. Native Americans were granted citizenship in a piece-meal manner until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which unilaterally bestowed blanket citizenship status on them, whether they belonged to a federally recognized tribe or not, though by that date, two-thirds of Native Americans had already become US citizens by various means. The Act was not retroactive, so citizenship was not extended to Native Americans who were born before the effective date of the 1924 Act, nor was it extended to indigenous persons who were born outside the United States. Further changes to racial eligibility for citizenship by naturalization were made after 1940, when eligibility was extended to "descendants of races indigenous to the Western Hemisphere," "Filipino persons or persons of Filipino descent," "Chinese persons or persons of Chinese descent," and "persons of races indigenous to India."[7] The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 now prohibits racial and gender discrimination in naturalization.[8] During the period when only "white" people could be naturalized, many court decisions were required to define which ethnic groups were included in this term. These are known as the "racial prerequisite cases", and they also informed subsequent legislation.[9] Voting The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (ratified in 1870), explicitly prohibited denying the right to vote based on race, but delegated to Congress the responsibility for enforcement. During the Reconstruction era, African Americans began to run for office and vote, but the Compromise of 1877 ended the era of strong federal enforcement of equal rights in the Southern states. White Southerners were prevented by the Fifteenth Amendment from explicitly denying the vote to Blacks by law, but found other ways to disenfranchise. Jim Crow laws that targeted African Americans without mentioning race included poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests for voters, residency and record-keeping requirements, and grandfather clauses allowing White people to vote. Black Codes criminalized minor offenses like unemployment (styled "vagrancy"), providing a pretext to deny voting rights. Extralegal violence was also used to terrorize and sometimes kill African Americans who attempted to register or to vote, often in the form of lynching and cross burning. These efforts to enforce white supremacy were very successful. For example, after 1890, less than 9,000 of Mississippi's 147,000 eligible African American voters were registered to vote, or about 6%. Louisiana went from 130,000 registered African American voters in 1896 to 1,342 in 1904 (about a 99% decrease).[10] Even Native Americans who gained citizenship under the 1924 Act were not guaranteed voting rights until 1948. According to a survey by the Department of Interior, seven states still refused to grant Indians voting rights in 1938. Discrepancies between federal and state control provided loopholes in the Act's enforcement. States justified discrimination based on state statutes and constitutions. Three main arguments for Indian voting exclusion were Indian exemption from real estate taxes, maintenance of tribal affiliation and the notion that Indians were under guardianship, or lived on lands controlled by federal trusteeship.[11]: 121  By 1947, all states with large Indian populations, except Arizona and New Mexico, had extended voting rights to Native Americans who qualified under the 1924 Act. Finally, in 1948, a judicial decision forced the remaining states to withdraw their prohibition on Indian voting.[12] The civil rights movement resulted in strong Congressional enforcement of the right to vote regardless of race, starting with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Though this greatly enhanced the ability of racial minorities to vote and run for office in all areas of the country, concerns over racially discriminatory voting laws and administration persist. Gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts around the country, though mainly motivated by political considerations, often effectively disproportionately affect African Americans and other minorities. These include targeted voter ID requirements, registration hurdles, restricting vote-by-mail, and making voting facilities physically inconvenient to access due to long distances, long lines, or short hours. The 2013 U.S. Supreme court decision Shelby County v. Holder struck down the pre-clearance provisions of the 1965 Act, making anti-discrimination enforcement more difficult. In 2016, one in 13 African Americans of voting age was disenfranchised, more than four times greater than that of non-African Americans. Over 7.4% of adult African Americans were disenfranchised compared to 1.8% of non-African Americans. Felony disenfranchisement in Florida disqualifies over 10% of its citizens for life and over 23% of its African American citizens.[13] Criminal justice system Main article: Race in the United States criminal justice system See also: Criminal justice reform in the United States, Human rights in the United States, Incarceration in the United States, Police brutality in the United States, Race and the war on drugs, and Racial bias in criminal news in the United States Racial disparities in the share of prisoners, police officers, people shot by police, and judges in the United States in the late 2010s There are unique experiences and disparities in the United States in regard to the policing and prosecuting of various races and ethnicities. There have been different outcomes for different racial groups in convicting and sentencing felons in the United States criminal justice system.[14][15] Experts and analysts have debated the relative importance of different factors that have led to these disparities.[16][17] Academic research indicates that the over-representation of some racial minorities in the criminal justice system can in part be explained by socioeconomic factors, such as poverty, exposure to poor neighborhoods, poor access to public education, poor access to early childhood education, and exposure to harmful chemicals (such as lead) and pollution.[18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27] Racial housing segregation has also been linked to racial disparities in crime rates, as Blacks have historically and to the present been prevented from moving into prosperous low-crime areas through actions of the government (such as redlining) and private actors.[28][29][30] Various explanations within criminology have been proposed for racial disparities in crime rates, including conflict theory, strain theory, general strain theory, social disorganization theory, macrostructural opportunity theory, social control theory, and subcultural theory. Research also indicates that there is extensive racial and ethnic discrimination by police and the judicial system.[31][32][33][34][35][36] A substantial academic literature has compared police searches (showing that contraband is found at higher rates in whites who are stopped), bail decisions (showing that whites with the same bail decision as Blacks commit more pre-trial violations), and sentencing (showing that Blacks are more harshly sentenced by juries and judges than whites when the underlying facts and circumstances of the cases are similar), providing valid causal inferences of racial discrimination.[37][38][39][40] Studies have documented patterns of racial discrimination, as well as patterns of police brutality and disregard for the constitutional rights of African-Americans, by police departments in various American cities, including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.[41][42][43][44][45][46] Education See also: Discrimination in education § United States, School segregation in the United States, and School integration in the United States In 1954, Brown vs. the Board of Education ruled that integrated, equal schools be accessible to all children unbiased to skin color. Currently in the United States, not all state funded schools are equally funded.  Schools are funded by the "federal, state, and local governments" while "states play a large and increasing role in education funding."[47] "Property taxes support most of the funding that local government provides for education."[47] Schools located in lower income areas receive a lower level of funding and schools located in higher income areas receiving greater funding for education all based on property taxes.  The U.S. Department of Education reports that "many high-poverty schools receive less than their fair share of state and local funding, leaving students in high-poverty schools with fewer resources than schools attended by their wealthier peers."[48] The U.S. Department of Education also reports this fact affects "more than 40% of low-income schools."[48] Children of color are much more likely to suffer from poverty than white children. The phrase "brown paper bag test," also known as a paper bag party, along with the "ruler test" refers to a ritual once practiced by certain African-American sororities and fraternities who would not let anyone into the group whose skin tone was darker than a paper bag.[49] Spike Lee's film School Daze satirized this practice at historically Black colleges and universities.[50] Along with the "paper bag test," guidelines for acceptance among the lighter ranks included the "comb test" and "pencil test," which tested the coarseness of one's hair, and the "flashlight test," which tested a person's profile to make sure their features measured up or were close enough to those of the Caucasian race.[49] Curriculum See also: White supremacy in U.S. school curriculum The curriculum in U.S. schools has also contained racism against non-white Americans, including Native Americans, Black Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans.[51][52] Particularly during the 19th and early 20th centuries, school textbooks and other teaching materials emphasized the biological and social inferiority of Black Americans, consistently portraying Black people as simple, irresponsible, and oftentimes, in situations of suffering that were implied to be their fault (and not the effects of slavery and other oppression).[51][52] Black Americans were also depicted as expendable and their suffering as commonplace, as evidenced by a poem about "Ten Little Nigger Boys" dying off one by one that was circulated as a children's counting exercise from 1875 to the mid-1900s.[52] Historian Carter G. Woodson analyzed American curriculum as completely lacking any mention of Black Americans' merits in the early 20th century. Based on his observations of the time, he wrote that American students, including Black students, who went through U.S. schooling would come out believing that Black people had no significant history and had contributed nothing to human civilization.[53] School curriculum often implicitly and explicitly upheld white people as the superior race and marginalized the contributions and perspectives of non-white peoples as if they were (or are) not as important.[54] In the 19th century, a significant number of students were taught that Adam and Eve were white, and the other races evolved from their various descendants, growing further and further away from the original white standard.[51] In addition, whites were also fashioned as the capable caretakers of other races, namely Black and Native people, who could not take care of themselves.[51] This concept was at odds with the violence white Americans had committed against indigenous and Black peoples, but it was coupled with soft language that, for example, defended these acts. Mills (1994) cites the narrative about Europeans' "discovery" of a "New World," despite the people who already inhabited it, and its subsequent "colonization" instead of conquest, as examples. He maintains that these word choices constitute a cooptation of history by white people, who have used it to their advantage.[54] Health Main article: Race and health in the United States See also: Medical Apartheid, Medical racism in the United States, and Unethical human experimentation in the United States A 2019 review of the literature in the Annual Review of Public health found that structural racism, cultural racism, and individual-level discrimination are "a fundamental cause of adverse health outcomes for racial/ethnic minorities and racial/ethnic inequities in health."[55] Studies have argued that there are racial disparities in how the media and politicians act when they are faced with cases of drug addiction in which the victims are primarily Black rather than white, citing the examples of how society responded differently to the crack epidemic than the opioid epidemic.[56][57] There are major racial differences in access to health care as well as major racial differences in the quality of the health care which is provided to people. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health estimated that: "over 886,000 deaths could have been prevented from 1991 to 2000 if African Americans had received the same quality of care as whites". The key differences which they cited were lack of insurance, inadequate insurance, poor service, and reluctance to seek care.[58] A history of government-sponsored experimentation, such as the notorious Tuskegee Syphilis Study has left a legacy of African American distrust of the medical system.[59] Inequalities in health care may also reflect a systemic bias in the way in which medical procedures and treatments are prescribed to members of different ethnic groups. A University of Edinburgh Professor of Public Health, Raj Bhopal, writes that the history of racism in science and medicine shows that people and institutions behave according to the ethos of their times and he also warns of dangers that need to be avoided in the future.[60] Nancy Krieger, a Harvard Professor of Social Epidemiology, contended that much modern research supported the assumptions which were needed to justify racism. She wrote that racism underlies unexplained inequities in health care, including treatments for heart disease,[61] renal failure,[62] bladder cancer,[63] and pneumonia.[64] Bhopal writes that these inequalities have been documented in various studies and there are consistent findings that Black Americans receive less health care than white Americans—particularly where this involves expensive new technology.[65] The University of Michigan Health study found in 2010 that black patients in pain clinics received 50% of the amount of drugs that other patients who were white received.[66] Black pain in medicine links to the racial disparities between pain management and racial bias on behalf of the health professional. In 2011, Vermont organizers took a proactive stand against racism in their communities to defeat the biopolitical struggles faced on a daily basis. The first and only universal health care law was passed in the state.[67] Two local governments in the US have issued declarations stating that racism constitutes a public health emergency: the Milwaukee County, Wisconsin executive in May 2019, and the Cleveland City Council, in June 2020.[68][69] Housing and land Main article: Housing discrimination in the United States A 2014 meta-analysis found extensive evidence of racial discrimination in the American housing market.[70] Minority applicants for housing needed to make many more inquiries to view properties.[70] Geographical steering of African Americans in US housing remains significant.[70] A 2003 study found "evidence that agents interpret an initial housing request as an indication of a customer's preferences, but also are more likely to withhold a house from all customers when it is in an integrated suburban neighborhood (redlining). Moreover, agents' marketing efforts increase with asking price for white, but not for black, customers; blacks are more likely than whites to see houses in suburban, integrated areas (steering); and the houses agents show are more likely to deviate from the initial request when the customer is black than when the customer is white. These three findings are consistent with the possibility that agents act upon the belief that some types of transactions are relatively unlikely for black customers (statistical discrimination)."[71] Historically, there was extensive and long-lasting racial discrimination against African Americans in the housing and mortgage markets in the United States,[72][73] as well as discrimination against Black farmers whose numbers massively declined in post-WWII America due to anti-Black local and federal policies.[74] According to a 2019 analysis by University of Pittsburgh economists, Blacks faced a two-fold penalty due to the racially segregated housing market: rental prices increased in blocks when they underwent racial transition whereas home values declined in neighborhoods that Blacks moved into.[75] A 2017 paper by Troesken and Walsh found that pre-20th century cities "created and sustained residential segregation through private norms and vigilante activity." However, "when these private arrangements began to break down during the early 1900s" whites started "lobbying municipal governments for segregation ordinances." As a result, cities passed ordinances which "prohibited members of the majority racial group on a given city block from selling or renting property to members of another racial group" between 1909 and 1917.[76] A 2017 study by Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago economists found that the practice of redlining—the practice whereby banks discriminated against the inhabitants of certain neighborhoods—had a persistent adverse impact on the neighborhoods, with redlining affecting homeownership rates, home values and credit scores in 2010.[77][78] Since many African Americans could not access conventional home loans, they had to turn to predatory lenders (who charged high interest rates).[78] Due to lower homeownership rates, slumlords were able to rent out apartments that would otherwise be owned.[78] A 2019 analysis estimated that predatory housing contracts targeting African Americans in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s cost Black families between $3 billion and $4 billion in wealth.[79] Labor market Main articles: Employment discrimination and Occupational segregation Several meta-analyses find extensive evidence of ethnic and racial discrimination in hiring in the American labor market.[70][80][81][82] A 2017 meta-analysis found "no change in the levels of discrimination against African Americans since 1989, although we do find some indication of declining discrimination against Latinos."[83] A 2016 meta-analysis of 738 correspondence tests – tests where identical CVs for stereotypically Black and white names were sent to employers – in 43 separate studies conducted in OECD countries between 1990 and 2015 finds that there is extensive racial discrimination in hiring decisions in Europe and North America.[80] These correspondence tests showed that equivalent minority candidates need to send around 50% more applications to be invited for an interview than majority candidates.[80][84] A study which examined the job applications of actual people who were provided with identical résumés and similar interview training showed that African-American applicants with no criminal record were offered jobs at a rate as low as white applicants who had criminal records.[85] A 2018 National Bureau of Economic Research paper found evidence of racial bias in how CVs were evaluated.[86] A 2020 study revealed that discrimination not only exists against minorities in callback rates in audit studies, it also increases in severity after the callbacks in terms of job offers.[87] Research suggests that light-skinned African American women have higher salaries and greater job satisfaction than dark-skinned women.[88] Being "too black" has recently been acknowledged by the U.S. Federal courts in an employment discrimination case under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In Etienne v. Spanish Lake Truck & Casino Plaza, LLC the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, determined that an employee who was told on several occasions that her manager thought she was "too black" to do various tasks, found that the issue of the employee's skin color rather than race itself, played a key role in an employer's decision to keep the employee from advancing.[89] A 2018 study uncovered evidence which suggests that immigrants with darker skin colors are discriminated against.[90] Media See also: Cyber racism, Racial bias in criminal news in the United States, Racial stereotyping in advertising, and Representation of African Americans in media A 2017 report by Travis L. Dixon (of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) found that major media outlets tended to portray Black families as dysfunctional and dependent while white families were portrayed as stable. These portrayals may suggest that poverty and welfare are primarily Black issues. According to Dixon, this can reduce public support for social safety programs and lead to stricter welfare requirements.[91][92] African Americans who possess a lighter skin complexion and "European features," such as lighter eyes, and smaller noses and lips have more opportunities in the media industry. For example, film producers hire lighter-skinned African Americans more often, television producers choose lighter-skinned cast members, and magazine editors choose African American models that resemble European features.[93] A content analysis conducted by Scott and Neptune (1997) shows that less than one percent of advertisements in major magazines featured African American models. When African Americans did appear in advertisements they were mainly portrayed as athletes, entertainers, or unskilled laborers. In addition, seventy percent of the advertisements that feature animal print included African American women. Animal print reinforces the stereotypes that African Americans are animalistic in nature, sexually active, less educated, have lower income, and extremely concerned with personal appearances.[94] Concerning African American males in the media, darker-skinned men are more likely to be portrayed as violent or more threatening, influencing the public perception of African American men. Since dark-skinned males are more likely to be linked to crime and misconduct, many people develop preconceived notions about the characteristics of Black men.[95] During and after slavery, minstrel shows were a very popular form of theater that involved white and Black people in Blackface portraying Black people while doing demeaning things. The actors painted their faces with Black paint and overlined their lips with bright red lipstick to exaggerate and make fun of Black people.[96] When minstrel shows died out and television became popular, Black actors were rarely hired and when they were, they had very specific roles. These roles included being servants, slaves, idiots, and criminals.[97] Politics See also: Identity politics, Radical right (United States), and Criticism of welfare Politically, the "winner-takes-all" structure of the electoral college benefits white representation.[98] This has been described as structural bias and often leads voters of color to feel politically alienated, and therefore not to vote. The lack of representation in Congress has also led to lower voter turnout.[98] As of 2016, African Americans only made up 8.7% of Congress, and Latinos 7%.[99] Voter ID laws have brought on accusations of racial discrimination. In a 2014 review by the Government Accountability Office of the academic literature, three studies out of five found that voter ID laws reduced minority turnout whereas two studies found no significant impact.[70] Disparate impact may also be reflected in access to information about voter ID laws. A 2015 experimental study found that election officials queried about voter ID laws are more likely to respond to emails from a non-Latino white name (70.5% response rate) than a Latino name (64.8% response rate), though response accuracy was similar across groups.[100] Studies have also analyzed racial differences in ID requests rates. A 2012 study in the city of Boston found that Black and Hispanic voters were more likely to be asked for ID during the 2008 election. According to exit polls, 23% of whites, 33% of Blacks, and 38% of Hispanics were asked for ID, though this effect is partially attributed to Black and Hispanics preferring non-peak voting hours when election officials inspected a greater portion of IDs. Precinct differences also confound the data as Black and Hispanic voters tended to vote at Black and Hispanic-majority precincts.[101] A 2015 study found that turnout among Blacks in Georgia was generally higher since the state began enforcing its strict voter ID law.[102] A 2016 study by University of California, San Diego researchers found that voter ID laws "have a differentially negative impact on the turnout of Hispanics, Blacks, and mixed-race Americans in primaries and general elections."[103] Research by University of Oxford economist Evan Soltas and Stanford political scientist David Broockman suggests that voters act upon racially discriminatory tastes.[104] A 2018 study in Public Opinion Quarterly found that whites, in particular those who had racial resentment, largely attributed Obama's success among African-Americans to his race, and not his characteristics as a candidate and the political preferences of African-Americans.[105] A 2018 study in the journal American Politics Research found that white voters tended to misperceive political candidates from racial minorities as being more ideologically extreme than objective indicators would suggest; this adversely affected the electoral chances for those candidates.[106] A 2018 study in the Journal of Politics found that "when a white candidate makes vague statements, many [nonblack] voters project their own policy positions onto the candidate, increasing support for the candidate. But they are less likely to extend black candidates the same courtesy... In fact, black male candidates who make ambiguous statements are actually punished for doing so by racially prejudiced voters."[107] It is argued that the racial coding of concepts like crime and welfare has been used to strategically influence public political views. Racial coding is implicit; it incorporates racially primed language or imagery to allude to racial attitudes and thinking. For example, in the context of domestic policy, it is argued that Ronald Reagan implied that linkages existed between concepts like "special interests" and "big government" and ill-perceived minority groups in the 1980s, using the conditioned negativity which existed toward the minority groups to discredit certain policies and programs during campaigns. In a study which analyzes how political ads prime attitudes, Valentino compares the voting responses of participants after they are exposed to the narration of a George W. Bush advertisement which is paired with three different types of visuals which contain different embedded racial cues to create three conditions: neutral, race comparison, and undeserving Blacks. For example, as the narrator states "Democrats want to spend your tax dollars on wasteful government programs", the video shows an image of a Black woman and her child in an office setting. Valentino found that the undeserving Blacks condition produced the largest primed effect in racialized policies, like opposition to affirmative action and welfare spending.[108] Ian Haney López, Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, refers to the phenomenon of racial coding as dog-whistle politics, which, he argues, has pushed middle class white Americans to vote against their economic self-interest to punish "undeserving minorities" which, they believe, are receiving too much public assistance at their expense. According to López, conservative middle-class whites, convinced that minorities are the enemy by powerful economic interests, supported politicians who promised to curb illegal immigration and crack down on crime, but inadvertently they also voted for policies that favor the extremely rich, such as slashing taxes for top income brackets, giving corporations more regulatory control over industry and financial markets, busting unions, cutting pensions for future public employees, reducing funding for public schools, and retrenching the social welfare state. He argues that these same voters cannot link rising inequality which has impacted their lives to the policy agendas which they support, which resulted in a massive transfer of wealth to the top 1% of the population since the 1980s.[109] A book released by the former attorney of Donald Trump, Michael Cohen, in September 2020, Disloyal: A Memoir described Trump as routinely referring to Black leaders of foreign nations with racial insults, and that he was consumed with hatred for Barack Obama. Cohen in the book explained that "as a rule, Trump expressed low opinions of all Black folks, from music to culture and politics".[110] Religion Main article: Racial segregation of churches in the United States See also: Religion in the United States § Ethnicity, History of religion in the United States, Religion of Black Americans, and Religious discrimination in the United States Wealth See also: Wealth inequality in the United States Large racial differentials in wealth remain in the United States: between whites and African Americans, the gap is a factor of twenty.[111] An analyst of the phenomenon, Thomas Shapiro, professor of law and social policy at Brandeis University argues, "The wealth gap is not just a story of merit and achievement, it's also a story of the historical legacy of race in the United States."[112] Differentials applied to the Social Security Act (which excluded agricultural workers, a sector which then included most black workers), rewards to military officers, and the educational benefits offered returning soldiers after World War II. Pre-existing disparities in wealth are exacerbated by tax policies that reward investment over waged income, subsidize mortgages, and subsidize private sector developers.[113] A 2014 meta-analysis of racial discrimination in product markets found extensive evidence of minority applicants being quoted higher prices for products.[70] Historically, African-Americans have faced discrimination in terms of getting access to credit.[114] African Americans Main article: Racism against African Americans Further information: African-American history and History of the Southern United States See also: 2020–2022 United States racial unrest and 2022 Buffalo shooting Antebellum period Scars of an enslaved man, Peter, April 2, 1863, Baton Rouge, Louisiana Between 1626 and 1860, the Atlantic slave trade brought more than 470,000 enslaved Africans to what is now the United States.[115][116] White European Americans who participated in the slave industry tried to justify their economic exploitation of Black people by creating a "scientific" theory of white superiority and Black inferiority.[117] One such slave owner was Thomas Jefferson, and it was his call for science to determine the obvious "inferiority" of Blacks that is regarded as "an extremely important stage in the evolution of scientific racism."[118] He concluded that Blacks were "inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind."[119] After the importation of slaves into the United States was outlawed by federal law from 1808, the domestic slave trade expanded to replace it.[120] Maryland and Virginia, for example, would "export" their surplus slaves to the South. These sales of slaves broke up many families, with historian Ira Berlin writing that whether slaves were directly uprooted or lived in fear that they or their families would be involuntarily moved, "the massive deportation traumatized black people".[121] During the 1820s and 1830s, the American Colonization Society established the colony of Liberia and persuaded thousands of free Black Americans to move there because many members of the white elite both in the North and the South saw them as a problem to be got rid of. Even figures, such as Abraham Lincoln, who opposed slavery showed ingrained racist attitudes. Lincoln said during the Fourth Lincoln-Douglas debate held in Charleston, Illinois, on September 18, 1858: "I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, [applause]-that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race."[122] During and immediately after the American Civil War, about four million enslaved African Americans were set free, major legal actions being President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation which came into effect on January 1, 1863, and the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which finally abolished slavery in December 1865.[123] Reconstruction Era to World War II Main article: Nadir of American race relations See also: List of expulsions of African Americans, Lynching in the United States, and Mass racial violence in the United States A group of white men pose for a 1919 photograph as they stand over the body of the Black lynching victim Will Brown before they decide to mutilate and burn it during the Omaha race riot of 1919 in Omaha, Nebraska. Photographs and postcards of lynchings were popular souvenirs in the U.S.[124] After the Civil War, the Reconstruction Era was characterized by the passage of federal legislation which was designed to protect the rights of the formerly enslaved people, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The Fourteenth amendment granted full citizenship to African Americans and the Fifteenth amendment guaranteed the voting rights of African-American men (see Reconstruction Amendments). Despite this, white supremacists came to power in all Southern states, by intimidating Black voters with the assistance of terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Shirts and the White League. "Black Codes" and Jim Crow laws deprived African Americans of voting rights and other civil liberties by instituting systemic and discriminatory policies of unequal racial segregation.[125] Segregated facilities extended from white-only schools to white-only graveyards.[126] Anti-miscegenation laws forbade marriage and even sex between whites and non-whites.[127] The new century saw a hardening of institutionalized racism and legal discrimination against citizens of African descent in the United States. Throughout the post-Civil War period, racial stratification was informally and systemically enforced, to solidify the pre-existing social order. Although their vote was guaranteed by the 15th Amendment, poll taxes, pervasive acts of terrorism such as lynchings (often perpetrated by hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan), and discriminatory laws such as grandfather clauses kept Black Americans disenfranchised in most Southern states. In response to de jure racism, protest and lobbyist groups emerged, most notably, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in 1909.[128] This era is sometimes referred to as the nadir of American race relations because racism, segregation, racial discrimination, and expressions of white supremacy all increased. So did anti-Black violence, including race riots such as the Atlanta race riot of 1906, the Elaine massacre of 1919, the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, the Perry massacre of 1922, and the Rosewood massacre of 1923. The Atlanta riot was characterized as a "racial massacre of negroes" by the French newspaper Le Petit Journal.[129] The Charleston News and Courier wrote in response to the Atlanta riots: "Separation of the races is the only radical solution of the negro problem in this country. There is nothing new about it. It was the Almighty who established the bounds of the habitation of the races. The negroes were brought here by compulsion; they should be induced to leave here by persuasion."[130] Additionally, racism, which had previously been considered a problem which primarily existed in the Southern states, burst onto the nation's consciousness following the Great Migration, the relocation of millions of African Americans from their roots in the rural Southern states to the industrial centers of the North and West between 1910 and 1970. White tenants seeking to prevent Blacks from moving into the housing project erected this sign. Detroit, 1942. Throughout this period, racial tensions exploded, most violently in Chicago, and lynchings—mob-directed hangings, usually racially motivated—increased dramatically in the 1920s. Urban riots—whites attacking Blacks—became a northern and western problem.[131] Many whites defended their space with violence, intimidation, or legal tactics toward African Americans, while many other whites migrated to more racially homogeneous suburban or exurban regions, a process known as white flight.[132] Racially restrictive housing covenants were ruled unenforceable under the 14th Amendment in the 1948 landmark Supreme Court case Shelley v. Kraemer.[133] Elected in 1912, President Woodrow Wilson authorized the practice of racial segregation throughout the federal government's bureaucracy.[134] In World War I, Blacks who served in the United States Armed Forces served in segregated units. Black soldiers were often poorly trained and equipped, and they were often put on the frontlines and forced to go on suicide missions. The U.S. military was still heavily segregated during World War II. In addition, no African-American was awarded the Medal of Honor during the war, and sometimes, Black soldiers who traveled on trains had to give their seats up to Nazi prisoners of war.[135] World War II to the Civil Rights Movement Due to threats and violence against her, U.S. Marshals escorted 6-year-old Ruby Bridges to and from the previously whites only William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, 1960. As soon as Bridges entered the school, white parents pulled their children out. The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws which were enacted in the Southern and border states of the United States and enforced between 1876 and 1965. They mandated "separate but equal" status for Blacks. In reality, this led to treatment and accommodations that were almost always inferior to those which were provided to whites. The most important laws required that public schools, public places, and public transportation, like trains and buses, have separate facilities for whites and Blacks. State-sponsored school segregation was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education. One of the first federal court cases which challenged segregation in schools was Mendez v. Westminster in 1946. By the 1950s, the civil rights movement was gaining momentum. Membership in the NAACP increased in states across the U.S. Notable acts of anti-Black violence that sparked public outrage included the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till and the 1963 assassination of civil rights activist and NAACP member Medgar Evers by a member of the White Citizens' Council. In both cases, the perpetrators were able to evade conviction with the help of all-white juries. In the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, Ku Klux Klansmen killed four Black girls, aged 11 to 14.[136][137] In response to heightening discrimination and violence, non-violent acts of protest began to occur. The Greensboro sit-ins, starting in February 1960, contributed to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After many sit-ins and other non-violent protests, including marches and boycotts, places began to agree to desegregate.[138] Rosa Parks being fingerprinted after being arrested for not giving up her seat on the bus to a white person Bayard Rustin (left) and Cleveland Robinson (right), organizers of the March, on August 7, 1963 The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, with an estimated 250,000 Black and white participants, at which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech, helped facilitate the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In Loving v. Virginia (1967), the Supreme Court declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional.[139] Segregation continued even after the demise of the Jim Crow laws. Data on house prices and attitudes towards integration suggest that in the mid-20th century, segregation was a product of collective actions taken by whites to exclude Blacks from their neighborhoods.[140] Segregation also took the form of redlining, the practice of denying or increasing the cost of services, such as banking, insurance, access to jobs,[141] access to health care,[142] or even supermarkets[143] to residents in certain, often racially determined,[144] areas. Although in the U.S. informal discrimination and segregation have always existed, redlining began with the National Housing Act of 1934, which established the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). The practice was fought first through passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (which prevents redlining when the criteria for redlining are based on race, religion, gender, familial status, disability, or ethnic origin), and later through the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which requires banks to apply the same lending criteria in all communities.[145] Although redlining is illegal some argue that it continues to exist in other forms. Up until the 1940s, the full revenue potential of what was called "the Negro market" was largely ignored by white-owned manufacturers in the U.S., with advertising focused on whites.[146] Blacks, including Olympic champion Jesse Owens,[147][148] were also denied commercial deals. Famous Blacks like Owens and Hattie McDaniel had to suffer humiliating treatment even at events celebrating their achievements.[149][150] As the civil rights movement and the dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s deepened existing racial tensions in much of the Southern U.S., a Republican Party electoral strategy – the Southern strategy – was enacted to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to racism against African Americans.[151][152] Republican politicians such as presidential candidate Richard Nixon and Senator Barry Goldwater developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South who had traditionally supported the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party.[153] Nixon and Ronald Reagan exhibited racial prejudice toward African people in a recorded phone conversation in 1971, and in another conversation with White House aids Nixon commented on African Americans: "We’re going to (place) more of these little Negro bastards on the welfare rolls at $2,400 a family”.[154] The Cold War The Cold War era, spanning roughly from the late 1940s to the early 1990s, had a significant impact on the dynamics of racism in the United States: the ideological confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union influenced domestic policies, international perceptions, and the struggle for civil rights within the United States. The struggle against racism and segregation in the United States gained increased attention during the Cold War as the country sought to present itself as a global leader of democracy and freedom. The stark contrast between the principles of equality and racial justice that the United States espoused and the reality of racial discrimination within the country became a point of contention in international diplomacy. This also provided an opportunity for the civil rights movement to challenge the West's hegemony by exposing the gap between the ideals of freedom and equality and the reality of racism and discrimination in the US[155]. Internationally, the Soviet Union utilised the issue of racism to criticise and undermine the United States, as they sought to exploit racial tensions and portray the American system as hypocritical and oppressive. This led to increased pressure on the United States to address racial inequalities and improve its human rights record to counter Soviet propaganda[156]. Yet, the Soviet Union's efforts to appeal to African Americans declined in the 1960s as the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum in the United States: in this sense, it raises the possibility that racial advances in the US were allowed to be made out of necessity rather than a genuine desire for improvement. Within the United States, the Cold War had both positive and negative effects on the struggle against racism. On one hand, the heightened global scrutiny of American racial practices provided a platform for civil rights activists to expose and challenge racial discrimination. Activists used the language of democracy and human rights, drawing on the principles that the United States claimed to uphold, to advocate for equal rights for all citizens, regardless of race[157]. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s gained momentum during the Cold War, as African American leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and organisations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) fought for desegregation, voting rights, and equal treatment under the law. The movement succeeded in pressuring the U.S. government to enact significant civil rights legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, by framing the struggle for civil rights as part of a global struggle against oppression and colonialism. Overall, the Cold War created a global audience for American racial issues and forced the US government to address them in order to maintain its image as a leader of the free world[158]. The conflict also influenced the tactics and strategies of the Civil Rights Movement, such as the use of nonviolent resistance and the emphasis on legal and political change. Ghana's independence from British colonial rule in 1957 was a significant moment for the African continent, and Nkrumah's leadership in the movement was seen as a model for other African nations seeking independence. Nkrumah's emphasis on nonviolent resistance and his ability to successfully negotiate with the British government without resorting to violence was particularly noteworthy. African American expatriates in Ghana saw parallels between the struggle for independence in Ghana and the fight for civil rights in the United States. Julian Mayfield and other African American expatriates in Ghana used their experiences to inform their activism back in the United States, advocating for nonviolent resistance as a means of achieving civil rights [159]. In the context of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was using the struggle for civil rights in the United States as a way to criticise American democracy and promote communism as a more just system. Therefore, Ghana's successful nonviolent resistance movement under Nkrumah's leadership was seen as a counterpoint to Soviet propaganda, with the United States government eager to promote Ghana as a model for other African nations seeking independence, and the success of nonviolent resistance in Ghana was used to demonstrate the superiority of American democracy over communist ideology. The language of the Cold War gave reactive actors, such as conservative politicians and segregationists, leverage to limit the degree of change which African Americans could call for. During the Cold War, the United States government was engaged in a global struggle against communism, and American policymakers were concerned about the potential for Soviet propaganda to exploit racial tensions in the United States. As a result, many policymakers argued that the struggle for civil rights should be limited to a narrow focus on legal equality and should not extend to broader demands for economic and social justice. This approach, known as "containment," was seen as a way to prevent the Soviet Union from using racial inequality in the United States as a propaganda tool [160]. Reactive actors subsequently used the language of the Cold War to argue that any demands for change beyond legal equality were part of a communist plot to undermine American democracy. They argued that African Americans who called for broader social and economic change were not true patriots and were working against American interests. This language of containment and anti-communism was used to limit the scope of the civil rights movement and to prevent African Americans from making more radical demands for change. It was also used to justify the use of force against civil rights activists, such as during the Birmingham campaign in 1963, when police used fire hoses and attack dogs to disperse peaceful protesters. As seen, the Cold War context also had adverse effects on the fight against racism. The fear of communist influence within the United States led to a climate of suspicion and intensified racial tensions, and the civil rights movement was often labelled as subversive or communist-inspired, and many activists faced harassment, surveillance, and violence from both private individuals and government agencies. Furthermore, the emphasis on national unity and the need to present a strong and united front against the Soviet Union sometimes overshadowed the specific concerns of racial equality. In this sense, the prioritisation of geopolitical interests over addressing systemic racism created challenges for those advocating for comprehensive and lasting change [161]. Ultimately, the Cold War had a profound impact on the struggle against racism in the United States. It both exposed the contradictions between American ideals and the reality of racial discrimination and provided a platform for civil rights activists to push for change. However, it also brought complexities and challenges, as the anti-communist climate sometimes overshadowed the specific demands of the civil rights movement. This era was a time of both progress and setbacks for the Civil Rights Movement, with gains in some areas offset by continued discrimination and violence against African Americans. It created a paradox for the US government, as it sought to promote democracy and freedom abroad while denying those same rights to African Americans at home. Nevertheless, the era played a significant role in shaping the trajectory of racial justice in the United States and the ongoing pursuit of equality for all. 1970s to the 2000s The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church where nine Black church-goers, including the pastor, were killed by a white man in the 2015 Charleston church shooting. The church, founded in 1817, is the oldest AME church in the South. While substantial gains were made in the succeeding decades through middle class advancement and public employment, Black poverty and lack of education continued in the context of de-industrialization.[162][163] From 1981 to 1997, the United States Department of Agriculture discriminated against tens of thousands of Black American farmers, denying loans that were provided to white farmers in similar circumstances. The discrimination was the subject of the Pigford v. Glickman lawsuit brought by members of the National Black Farmers Association, which resulted in two settlement agreements of $1.06 billion in 1999 and of $1.25 billion in 2009.[164] Numerous authors, academics, and historians have asserted that the War on Drugs has been racially and politically motivated. Continuing the "tough on crime" policies and rhetoric of earlier politicians, President Ronald Reagan announced his administration's War on Drugs in October 1982.[165] A few years later, the crack epidemic spread across the country in the mid 1980s, leading Congress to pass the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. Under these sentencing guidelines, five grams of crack cocaine, often sold by and to African-Americans, carried a mandatory five-year prison sentence. However, for powder cocaine, often sold by and to white Americans, it would take one hundred times that amount, or 500 grams, for the same sentence, leading many to criticize the law as discriminatory. The 100:1 sentencing disparity was reduced to 18:1 in 2010 by the Fair Sentencing Act.[166] During the 1980s and '90s, a number of riots occurred that were related to longstanding racial tensions between police and minority communities. One of these was the 1992 Los Angeles riots, after a nearly all-white jury acquitted four Los Angeles police officers for the beating of Black motorist Rodney King. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the Director of the Harlem-based Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has identified more than 100 instances of mass racial violence in the United States since 1935 and has noted that almost every instance was precipitated by a police incident.[167] Violence against Black churches has continued – 145 fires were set to churches around the South in the 1990s,[168] and a mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina was committed in 2015 at the historic Mother Emanuel Church.[169] 2008 to the present Reverend Al Sharpton speaking at the Commitment March: Get Your Knee Off Our Necks in August 2020 Some Americans saw the presidential election of Barack Obama, who was the nation's first Black president, as a sign that the nation had entered a new, post-racial era.[170][171] The election of President Donald Trump in 2016, who was a chief proponent of the birther movement which is considered by many to be racist and has a history of speech and actions that have been widely viewed as racist or racially charged, has been viewed by some commentators as a racist backlash against the election of Barack Obama.[172] During the mid-2010s, American society has seen a resurgence of high levels of racism and discrimination. One new phenomenon has been the rise of the "alt-right" movement: a white nationalist coalition which seeks the expulsion of sexual and racial minorities from the United States.[173] Since the mid-2010s, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have identified white supremacist violence as the leading threat of domestic terrorism in the United States.[174][175] Sociologist Russ Long stated in 2013 that there is now a more subtle racism that associates a specific race with a specific characteristic.[176] In a 1993 study conducted by Katz and Braly, it was presented that "blacks and whites hold a variety of stereotypes towards each other, often negative".[177] The Katz and Braley study also found that African-Americans and whites view the traits that they identify each other with as threatening, interracial communication between the two is likely to be "hesitant, reserved, and concealing".[177] The Black Lives Matter movement started in 2013 after the acquittal of a man who had killed the African-American teen Trayvon Martin in 2012.[178] In August 2017, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination issued a rare warning to the US and its leadership to "unequivocally and unconditionally" condemn racist speech and crime, following violence in Charlottesville during a rally organized by white nationalists, white supremacists, Klansmen, neo-Nazis and various right-wing militias in August.[179][180] On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was murdered by a white Minneapolis Police Department officer, who forced his knee on Floyd's neck for a total of 9 minutes and 29 seconds.[181][182][c] Floyd's murder sparked a wave of protests across the United States and worldwide.[188] Native Americans See also: Native Americans in the United States, Native American cultures in the United States, History of Native Americans in the United States, Genocide of indigenous peoples, American Indian Wars, List of Indian massacres in North America, Stereotypes of indigenous peoples of Canada and the United States, Thomas Jefferson and Native Americans, Indian Removal Act, Choctaw Trail of Tears, California Genocide, Long Walk of the Navajo, Comanche campaign, Northern Cheyenne Exodus, Potawatomi Trail of Death, Sand Creek massacre, Trail of Tears, Timeline of Cherokee removal, Yavapai Wars, Indian removals in Indiana, and Indian removals in Ohio Members of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Oklahoma around 1877. Native Americans have inhabited the North American continent for at least 10,000 years, and millions of Native Americans lived in the region composing the modern-day United States prior to European colonization.[189] Both during and after the colonial period of American history, white settlers waged a long series of wars against Native Americans with the aim of displacing them and colonizing their lands. Many Native Americans were enslaved as a result of these wars, while others were forcibly assimilated into the culture of the white settlers.[190] During the 19th century, the desire to forcibly remove certain Native American nations gained momentum. However, some Native Americans either chose to or were allowed to remain on their land and as a result, they avoided removal but thereafter, the federal government treated them in a racist manner. The Choctaws in Mississippi described their situation in 1849, "we have had our habitations torn down and burned, our fences destroyed, cattle turned into our fields and we ourselves have been scourged, manacled, fettered and otherwise personally abused, until by such treatment some of our best men have died."[191] According to Charles Hudson, Joseph B. Cobb, who moved to Mississippi from Georgia, described the Choctaws as having "no nobility or virtue at all, and in some respects he found blacks, especially native Africans, to be more interesting and admirable, the red man's superior in every way. The Choctaw and Chickasaw, the tribes he knew best, were beneath contempt; that is, even worse than black slaves."[192] The Rescue sculpture stood outside the U.S. Capitol building between 1853 and 1958. A work commissioned by the U.S. government, its sculptor Horatio Greenough wrote that it was "to convey the idea of the triumph of the whites over the savage tribes".[193] In the 1800s, ideologies such as manifest destiny, which held the view that the United States was destined to expand from coast to coast on the North American continent, fueled U.S. attacks against, and maltreatment of, Native Americans. In the years leading up to the Indian Removal Act of 1830 there were many armed conflicts between white settlers and Native Americans.[194] A justification for the conquest and subjugation of indigenous people emanated from the stereotyped perception that Native Americans were "merciless Indian savages" (as described in the United States Declaration of Independence).[195] Sam Wolfson in The Guardian writes, "The declaration’s passage has often been cited as an encapsulation of the dehumanizing attitude toward indigenous Americans that the US was founded on."[196] Simon Moya-Smith, culture editor at Indian Country Today, states, "Any holiday that would refer to my people in such a repugnant, racist manner is certainly not worth celebrating. [July Fourth] is a day when we celebrate our resiliency, our culture, our languages, our children and we mourn the millions – literally millions – of indigenous people who have died as a consequence of American imperialism."[197] In Martin Luther King Jr.'s book Why We Can't Wait, he wrote, "Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race."[198] In 1861, residents of Mankato, Minnesota, formed the Knights of the Forest, with the goal of 'eliminating all Indians from Minnesota.' An egregious attempt occurred with the California gold rush, the first two years of which saw the death of thousands of Native Americans. Under Mexican rule in California, Indians were subjected to de facto enslavement under a system of peonage by the white elite. While in 1850, California formally entered the Union as a free state, with respect to the issue of slavery, the practice of Indian indentured servitude was not outlawed by the California Legislature until 1863.[199] The 1864 deportation of the Navajos by the U.S. government occurred when 9,000 Navajos were forcibly relocated to an internment camp in Bosque Redondo,[200] where, under armed guards, up to 3,500 Navajo and Mescalero Apache men, women, and children died from starvation and disease over the next 4 years.[200] Mass grave for the dead Lakota following the Wounded Knee massacre. Eyewitness American Horse, chief of the Oglala Lakota, stated, "A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream ... the nation's hope is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead."[201] Native American nations on the plains in the west continued armed conflicts with the U.S. throughout the 19th century, through what were called generally Indian Wars.[202] Notable conflicts in this period include the Dakota War, Great Sioux War, Snake War and Colorado War. In the years leading up to the Wounded Knee massacre the U.S. government had continued to seize Lakota lands. A Ghost Dance ritual on the Northern Lakota reservation at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, led to the U.S. Army's attempt to subdue the Lakota. The dance was part of a religion founded by Wovoka that told of the return of the Messiah to relieve the suffering of Native Americans and promised that if they would live righteous lives and perform the Ghost Dance properly, the European American invaders would vanish, the bison would return, and the living and the dead would be reunited in an Edenic world.[203] On December 29, 1890, at Wounded Knee, gunfire erupted, and U.S. soldiers killed up to 300 Indians, mostly old men, women and children.[204] During the period surrounding the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre, author L. Frank Baum wrote two editorials about Native Americans. Five days after the killing of the Lakota Sioux holy man, Sitting Bull, Baum wrote, "The proud spirit of the original owners of these vast prairies inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. With his fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites, by the law of conquest, by a justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are."[205] Following the December 29, 1890, massacre, Baum wrote, "The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past."[205][206] Reservation marginalization See also: Native American reservations Once their territories were incorporated into the United States, surviving Native Americans were denied equality before the law and often treated as wards of the state.[207] Many Native Americans were moved to reservations—constituting 4% of U.S. territory. In a number of cases, treaties signed with Native Americans were violated. Tens of thousands of American Indians and Alaska Natives were forced to attend a residential school system which sought to reeducate them in white-settler American values, culture, and economy.[208][209] Further dispossession of various kinds continues into the present, although these current dispossessions, especially in terms of land, rarely make major news headlines in the country (e.g., the Lenape people's recent fiscal troubles and subsequent land grab by the State of New Jersey), and sometimes even fail to make it to headlines in the localities in which they occur. Through concessions for industries such as oil, mining, and timber and through division of land from the General Allotment Act forward, these concessions have raised problems of consent, exploitation of low royalty rates, environmental injustice, and gross mismanagement of funds held in trust, resulting in the loss of $10–40 billion.[210] The Worldwatch Institute notes that 317 reservations are threatened by environmental hazards, while Western Shoshone land has been subjected to more than 1,000 nuclear explosions.[211] However, the last known nuclear explosion testing in the United States occurred in September 1992.[212] American Indian boarding schools Richard Henry Pratt founded the first Native American boarding school in 1879. The goal of these schools was to teach Native American students White ways of being through education which emphasized European cultural values and the superiority of White American ways of life.[213] American Indian boarding schools, were established in the United States during the 19th and lasted through the mid-20th centuries with the primary objective of assimilating Native Americans into the dominant White American culture. The effect of these schools has been described as forced assimilation against Native peoples.[52][214] In these schools, Native children were prohibited from participating in any of their cultures' traditions, including speaking their own languages. Instead, they were required to speak English at all times and learn geography, science, and history (among other disciplines) as white Americans saw fit.[52][214] This meant learning a version of history that upheld whites' superiority and rightful "inheritance" of the lands of the United States, while Natives were relegated to a position of having to assimilate to white culture without ever truly being considered equals.[52] Current issues While formal equality has been legally recognized, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders remain among the most economically disadvantaged groups in the country, and according to national mental health studies, American Indians as a group tend to suffer from high levels of alcoholism, depression and suicide.[215] Native Americans are killed in police encounters at a higher rate than any other racial or ethnic group in the United States. Native Americans are killed by police at 3 times the rate of White Americans and 2.6 times the rate of Black Americans, yet rarely do these deaths gain the national spotlight. The initial lack of media coverage and accountability has resulted in Indigenous-led movements such as Native Lives Matter and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and People.[216][217][218] Native Americans are disproportionately represented in state and federal criminal justice systems. Native Americans are incarcerated at a rate 38% higher than the national average and were overrepresented in the prison population in 19 states compared to any other race and ethnicity. The National Prisoner Statistics series of 2016 reported 22,744 Native Americans were incarcerated in state and federal facilities and represented 2.1 to 3.7% of the federal offender population during 2019 despite only accounting for 1.7% of the United States population. In states with higher Native American populations such as North Dakota, incarceration rates are up to 7 times that of their White counterparts. A study analyzing federal sentencing data found that Native Americans are sentenced more harshly than White, African American, and Hispanic offenders. In fact, further analysis showed that young Native American males receive the most punitive sentences, surpassing punishment imposed upon young, African American or Hispanic males.[219] The healthcare system also demonstrates disregard for Native American lives by creating additional barriers to accessing care in the state system, which places a higher burden on the Indian Health Service that is already chronically underfunded and understaffed. Overall, Native Americans continue to experience racism, oppression, discrimination, microaggressions, mockery, and misunderstandings of current day Nativeness. The tandem exoticization and devaluation of Native American lives contributes to the epidemic of disappearances and murders of Native Americans, paired with delayed or poor investigations of these occurrences.[220] Asian Americans Main article: History of Asian Americans Asian Americans, including those of East Asian, South Asian, and Southeast Asian descent, have experienced racism since the first major groups of Chinese immigrants arrived in America. The Naturalization Act of 1790 made Asians ineligible for citizenship.[221] First-generation immigrants, the children of immigrants, and Asians who are adopted by non-Asian families are still impacted by discrimination.[222] During the Industrial Revolution in the United States, labor shortages in the mining and rail industries were prevalent. Chinese immigrant labor was often used to fill this gap, most notably with the construction of the first transcontinental railroad, leading to large-scale Chinese immigration.[222] These Chinese immigrants were seen as taking the jobs of whites for lower wages, and the phrase Yellow Peril, which predicted the demise of Western civilization as the result of Chinese immigration, gained popularity.[223] 19th century See also: History of Chinese Americans, Anti-Chinese sentiment § United States, Anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States, and Anti-Chinese legislation in the United States A political cartoon from 1882 ridiculing the Chinese Exclusion Act, showing a Chinese man, surrounded by benefits of Chinese immigration, being barred entry to the "Golden Gate of Liberty", while other groups, including communists and hoodlums, are allowed to enter. The caption reads sarcastically, "We must draw the line somewhere, you know." In 1871, one of the largest lynchings in American history was committed against Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, California. It would go on to become known as the Los Angeles Chinese massacre of 1871. The 1879 Constitution of the State of California prohibited the employment of Chinese people by state and local governments, as well as by businesses that were incorporated in California. Also, the 1879 constitution delegated power to local governments in California to enable them to remove Chinese people from the borders of their communities.[224][225] The federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned the immigration of Chinese labourers for ten years. The Geary Act of 1892 extended the Chinese Exclusion Act by requiring all Chinese citizens to carry their resident permit at all times or risk either deportation or a year of hard labor, and was upheld by the 1893 Supreme Court case Fong Yue Ting v. United States. Several mob attacks against Chinese people took place, including the Rock Springs massacre of 1885 in Wyoming in which at least 28 Chinese miners were killed and 15 other Chinese miners were injured, and the Hells Canyon massacre of 1887 in Oregon in which 34 Chinese miners were killed.[226] In 1888, the Scott Act prevented 20,000-30,000 Chinese abroad from returning to the United States and was later upheld in the 1889 Supreme Court case Chae Chan Ping v. United States. Los Angeles Chinese massacre of 1871 Denver's anti-Chinese riot in 1880 Local discriminatory laws were also enacted to stifle Chinese business and job opportunities; for example, in the 1886 Supreme Court case of Yick Wo v. Hopkins, a San Francisco city ordinance requiring permits for laundries (which were mostly Chinese-owned) was struck down, as it was evident the law solely targeted Chinese Americans. When the law was in effect, the city issued permits to virtually all non-Chinese permit applicants, while only granting one permit out of two hundred applications from Chinese laundry owners. When the Chinese laundries continued to operate, the city tried to fine the owners. In 1913, California, home to many Chinese immigrants, enacted an Alien Land Law, which significantly restricted land ownership by Asian immigrants, and extended it in 1920, ultimately banning virtually all land ownership by Asians.[227] Japanese immigrants, who were unaffected by the Chinese Exclusion Act, began to enter the United States in large numbers in 1907, filling jobs that were once filled by Chinese workers. This influx also led to discrimination and President Theodore Roosevelt restricted Japanese immigration. Theodore Roosevelt's Executive Order 589 specifically prevented Japanese and Korean laborers, who possessed valid passports to go to Mexico, Canada, or Hawaii, from entering the continental United States. Later, Japanese immigration was closed when Japan entered into the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907 to stop issuing passports to Japanese workers intending to move to the U.S.[228] The immigration of people from all Asian countries was banned by the sweeping Immigration Act of 1917, also known as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, which also banned homosexuals, people with intellectual disability, and people with an anarchist worldview.[225] Anti-Japanese sentiment and legislation Main articles: Anti-Japanese sentiment § United States, and Anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States See also: Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907, California Alien Land Law of 1913, and Internment of Japanese Americans Anti-Filipino sentiment and legislation In 1927, the four-day Yakima Valley riots in Washington state resulted in hundreds of Filipinos being forced to leave the valley under threat of death. In 1930, the Watsonville riots in California involved a mob of 500 white men and youths causing five days of violent attacks on Filipino farm workers, and the death of one worker who was shot through the heart. In 1934, the Tydings–McDuffie Act allowed the Philippines, then an American colony, to become an independent country after ten years. The act established a quota of 50 Filipino immigrants to the United States per year. The Filipino Repatriation Act of 1935 provided voluntary one-way passage for Filipinos in the United States to return to the Philippines. However, if they wanted to return to the United States, they would then be subject to the quota of 50 Filipino immigrants per year. World War II and postwar During World War II, the Republic of China was an ally of the United States, and the federal government praised the resistance of the Chinese against Japan during the Second Sino-Japanese War, in an attempt to reduce anti-Chinese sentiment. In 1943, the Magnuson Act was passed by Congress, repealing the Chinese Exclusion Act and reopening Chinese immigration; at the time, the United States was actively fighting against the Empire of Japan, which was a member of the Axis powers. Anti-Japanese racism, which spiked after the attack on Pearl Harbor, was tacitly encouraged by the government, which used slurs such as "Jap" in propaganda posters. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which cleared the way for internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans, citing possible security threats. American soldiers who fought in the Pacific theater frequently dehumanized their enemies, leading them to mutilate Japanese war dead.[229] The racist nature of this dehumanization is revealed by the different ways in which corpses were treated in the Pacific and European theaters. Apparently, some soldiers mailed Japanese skulls home as souvenirs, but none of them mailed German or Italian skulls home.[230] This prejudice continued to exist for some time after the end of the war, and anti-Asian racism also affected U.S. policy during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, even though Asians fought on both sides during both of those wars as well as during World War II. Some historians have alleged that a climate of racism, with unofficial rules like the "mere gook rule",[231][232] allowed a pattern to exist in which South Vietnamese civilians were treated as if they were less than human and war crimes were also common.[233] Despite poor treatment by the United States, thousands of Japanese Americans joined the US military during World War II, in the segregated 442nd Infantry Regiment and 100th Infantry Battalion. The 442nd suffered heavy losses during its fight against Nazi Germany while it was rescuing the Lost Battalion, and in recognition of these combat casualties, it was nicknamed "The Purple Heart Battalion." On October 18, 1948, President Harry S. Truman issued Executive Order 10009 to revoke in part Executive Orders 589 from March 14, 1907, and Executive Order 1712 from February 24, 1913.[234] Bhagat Singh Thind was twice denied citizenship as he was not deemed white.[235] Prior to 1965, Indian immigration to the U.S. was small and isolated, with fewer than 50,000 Indian immigrants in the country. The Bellingham riots in Bellingham, Washington, on September 5, 1907, epitomized the low tolerance in the U.S. for Indians and Hindus. While anti-Asian racism was embedded in U.S. politics and culture in the early 20th century, Indians were also racialized, with U.S. officials casting them as "Hindu menaces" and pushing for Western imperial expansion abroad.[236] In the 1923 case, United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, the Supreme Court ruled that high caste Hindus were not "white persons" and were therefore racially ineligible for naturalized citizenship.[237] The Court also argued that the racial difference between Indians and whites was so great that the "great body of our people" would reject assimilation with Indians.[237] It was after the Luce–Celler Act of 1946 that a quota of 100 Indians per year could immigrate to the U.S. and become citizens.[238] The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 facilitated entry to the U.S. for immigrants other than the traditional Northern European and Germanic groups, and as a result, it would significantly, and unintentionally, alter the demographic mix in the U.S.[239] On the U.S. immigration laws prior to 1965, sociologist Stephen Klineberg stated the law "declared that Northern Europeans are a superior subspecies of the white race."[239] In 1990, Asian immigration was encouraged when nonimmigrant temporary working visas were given to help with the shortage of skilled labor within the United States.[222] 21st century See also: China Initiative Since the 20th century, Asians, particularly East Asians, have been cast as a "model minority". They are categorized as being more educated and successful, and they are also stereotyped as being intelligent and hard-working, but they are also stereotyped as being socially inept.[240] Asians may experience expectations of natural intelligence and excellence from whites as well as from members of other minority groups.[227][241] This has led to discrimination in the workplace, as Asian Americans may face unreasonable expectations because of this stereotype. According to the Journal of Organizational Behavior, in 2000, out of 1,218 adult Asian Americans, 92 percent of those who experienced personal discrimination believed that the unfair treatment which they were subjected to was due to their ethnicity.[240] These stereotypes can also render the experience of the large number of Asians who are living in poverty in the United States invisible. These stereotypes can also obstruct career paths; because Asians are seen as better skilled in engineering, computing, and mathematics, they are often encouraged to pursue technical careers. They are also discouraged from pursuing non-technical occupations as well as executive occupations which require more social interaction, since Asians are perceived as having poor social skills. In the 2000 study, forty percent of those surveyed who experienced discrimination believed that they had lost hiring or promotion opportunities. In 2007, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reported that Asians make up 10 percent of professional jobs, while 3.7 percent of them held executive, senior level, or manager positions.[240] Other forms of discrimination against Asian Americans include racial profiling and hate crimes. The FBI noted that in 2015, 3.2 percent of all hate crimes involved anti-Asian bias.[242] In 2016, the Seattle Police Department reported that there was a 40 percent increase in race-based crimes against Asian Americans, both criminal and non-criminal.[243] Research shows that discrimination has led to more use of informal mental health services by Asian Americans. Asian Americans who feel discriminated against also tend to smoke more.[244] There have been widespread incidents of xenophobia, racist bullying, and racist violence against Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.[245][246] According to a poll done in 2022, 33 percent of Americans believe Asian Americans are "more loyal to their country of origin" than the US while 21 percent falsely believe Asian Americans are at least "partially responsible" for the COVID-19 pandemic.[247] Additionally, only 29 percent of Asian Americans believe they "completely agree" with the statement that they feel they belong and are accepted in the US, while 71 percent say they are discriminated in the US.[247] According to a poll conducted in 2023, only 22 percent of Asian Americans completely agree that "Personally, I feel like I belong and am accepted in the U.S."[248] More than half of Asian Americans answered that they did not feel safe in public spaces.[249] European Americans See also: Religious discrimination in the United States, Anti-Catholicism in the United States, Anti-French sentiment in the United States, and Nativism (politics) Various European American immigrant groups have been subjected to discrimination on the basis of their religion (see Religious discrimination in the United States and Anti-Catholicism in the United States), immigrant status (which is known as "Nativism") or ethnicity (country of origin). Philadelphia nativist riots. New York Times, 1854 ad, reading "No Irish need apply." In the 19th century, this was particularly true because of anti-Irish prejudice, which was based on anti-Catholic sentiment, and prejudice against the Irish as an ethnicity. This was especially true for Irish Catholics who immigrated to the U.S. in the mid-19th century; the large number of Irish (both Catholics and Protestants) who settled in America in the 18th century had largely (but not entirely) escaped such discrimination and eventually blended into the white American population. During the 1830s in the U.S., riots over control of job sites broke out in rural areas among rival labor teams whose members were from different parts of Ireland, and riots also broke out between Irish and local American work teams which were competing for construction jobs.[250] The Native American Party, commonly called the Know Nothing movement was a political party, whose membership was limited to Protestant men, that operated on a national basis during the mid-1850s and sought to limit the influence of Irish Catholics and other immigrants, thus reflecting nativism and anti-Catholic sentiment. There was widespread anti-Irish job discrimination in the United States and "No Irish need apply" signs were common.[251][252][253] Ku Klux Klan members march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. in 1928. The second era Klan was a large nationwide movement with between four million and six million members. The second era Ku Klux Klan was a very large nationwide organization in the 1920s, consisting of between four million and six million members (15% of the nation's eligible population) that especially opposed Catholics.[254] The revival of the Klan was spurred by the release of the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation.[255] The second and third incarnations of the Ku Klux Klan made frequent references to America's "Anglo-Saxon blood".[256] Anti-Catholic sentiment, which appeared in North America with the first Pilgrim and Puritan settlers in New England in the early 17th century, remained evident in the United States up to the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy, who went on to become the first Catholic U.S. president in 1961.[257] Italian immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti were wrongfully executed in 1927; most historians agree that they were given an unfair trial heavily influenced by anti-Italianism and anti-immigrant bias. The 20th century saw discrimination against immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe (notably Italian Americans and Polish Americans), partially as a result of anti-Catholic sentiment (as well as discrimination against Irish Americans), partially as a result of Nordicism. The primary spokesman for Nordicism was the eugenicist Madison Grant. His 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History about Nordicism was highly influential among racial thinkers and government policy makers in the U.S.[258] Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. — Future U.S. president Calvin Coolidge, 1921.[259] An advocate of the U.S. immigration laws that favored Northern Europeans, the Klansman Lothrop Stoddard primarily wrote about the alleged dangers which "colored" peoples posed to white civilization, with his most famous book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy in 1920. Nordicism led to the reduction in Southern European, along with Slavic Eastern European and Russian immigrants in the National Origins Formula of the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924, whose goal was to maintain the status quo distribution of ethnicity by limiting immigration of non-Northern Europeans. According to the U.S. Department of State the purpose of the act was "to preserve the ideal of American homogeneity".[260] The racial term Untermensch originates from the title of Stoddard's 1922 book The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man.[261] It was later adopted by the Nazis (and its chief racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg) from that book's German version Der Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung des Untermenschen (1925).[262] Hispanic and Latino Americans See also: History of Hispanic and Latino Americans in the United States, History of Mexican Americans, Hispanophobia, Stereotypes of Hispanic and Latino Americans in the United States, Anti-Mexican sentiment, and 2019 El Paso shooting A rally is held for victims of Hurricane Maria in protest against the U.S. government's response to it and the Political status of Puerto Rico. Americans of Latin American ancestry (often categorized as "Hispanic" or Hispanic and Latino Americans) come from a wide variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds. As a result, not all Latinos are distinguishable as members of a single racial minority. After the Mexican–American War (1846–1848), the United States annexed much of the current Southwestern region from Mexico. Mexicans who resided in that territory were subjected to discrimination. According to conservative estimates, 597 Mexicans were lynched between 1848 and 1928, corresponding to a per capita lynching rate second only to that suffered by the African American community.[263][264] Many public institutions, businesses, and homeowners associations officially excluded Mexican Americans as a matter of policy. School children of Mexican American descent were subjected to racial segregation in the public school system. In many counties, Mexican Americans were excluded from serving as jurors in court cases, especially in those that involved Mexican American defendants. In many areas across the Southwest, they lived in separate residential areas, due to laws and real estate company policies.[265][266][267][268] Hispanic protest against California immigration policy. Todos somos ilegales – We are all Illegals. During the Great Depression, the U.S. government sponsored a Mexican Repatriation program which was intended to encourage Mexican immigrants to voluntarily return to Mexico, however, many were forcibly removed against their will. At least 355,000 persons of Mexican ancestry went to Mexico during the 1930s, 40 to 60 percent of those individuals were U.S. citizens – overwhelmingly children. Voluntary repatriation was more common than formal deportation. The government formally deported at least 82,000 people to Mexico between 1929 and 1935.[269] The Zoot Suit Riots were incidents of racial violence against Latinos in Los Angeles in 1943 which lasted several days.[270][271] During the 1960s, young Mexican Americans formed the Chicano Civil Rights Movement. U.S. president Richard Nixon is recorded exhibiting prejudice toward Mexican Americans and African Americans: I have the greatest affection for [blacks], but I know they're not going to make it for 500 years. ... The Mexicans are a different cup of tea. They have a heritage. At the present time they steal, they're dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life. They don't live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like. — U.S. president Richard Nixon, 1971.[272] Middle Eastern and South Asian Americans See also: Anti-Middle Eastern sentiment § United States, Anti-Iranian sentiment § United States, and Anti-Indian sentiment § United States An Assyrian church after it was vandalized in Detroit (2007). Although they are not Arabs and are mostly Christians, Assyrians often face a racist backlash in the US because of their Middle Eastern background.[273] People of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent historically occupied an ambiguous racial status in the United States. Middle Eastern and South Asian immigrants were among those who sued in the late 19th and early 20th century to determine whether they were "white" immigrants as required by naturalization law. By 1923, courts had vindicated a "common-knowledge" standard, concluding that "scientific evidence", including the notion of a "Caucasian race" including Middle Easterners and many South Asians, was incoherent. Legal scholar John Tehranian argues that in reality this was a "performance-based" standard, relating to religious practices, education, intermarriage and a community's role in the United States.[274] Arab Americans See also: Arab Americans, Arab immigration to the United States, Anti-Arabism § United States, and Stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims in the United States Racism against Arab Americans[275] and racialized Islamophobia against Muslims have risen concomitantly with tensions between the American government and the Islamic world.[276] Following the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, discrimination and racialized violence has markedly increased against Arab Americans and many other religious and cultural groups.[277] Scholars, including Sunaina Maira and Evelyn Alsultany, argue that in the post-September 11 climate, the markers of the racialization of Muslim Americans are cultural, political, and religious rather than phenotypic.[278][279] There have been attacks not only against Muslim Arabs, but also numerous Christian Arabs have been attacked based on their appearances.[280] Non-Arab and non-Muslim Middle Eastern people, as well as South Asians of different ethnic/religious backgrounds (Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs) have been stereotyped as "Arabs" and racialized in a similar manner. The case of Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh who was murdered at a Mesa, Arizona gas station by a white supremacist for "looking like an Arab terrorist" (because of the turban, a requirement of Sikhism), as well as that of Hindus being attacked for "being Muslims" have achieved prominence and criticism following the September 11 attacks.[281][282] Racial profiling is a growing problem for Arab Americans following the September 11 attacks. Particularly in airports, Arab Americans are often subject to heightened security screening, pre-boarding searches and interrogations, and are sometimes denied passage "based solely on the belief that ethnicity or national origin increases passengers' flight risk."[283] On January 27, 2017, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13769, titled "Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States", otherwise known as the "Muslim Ban". Entry was suspended for persons coming from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. More than 700 travelers were detained, and up to 60,000 visas were "provisionally revoked". Iranian Americans See also: Iranian Americans A man holding a sign that reads "deport all Iranians" and "get the hell out of my country" during a protest of the Iran hostage crisis in Washington, D.C. in 1979. The November 1979 Iranian hostage crisis of the U.S. embassy in Tehran precipitated a wave of anti-Iranian sentiment in the United States, directed both against the new Islamic regime and Iranian nationals and immigrants. Even though such sentiments gradually declined after the release of the hostages at the start of 1981, they sometimes flare up. In response, some Iranian immigrants to the U.S. have distanced themselves from their nationality and instead identify primarily on the basis of their ethnic or religious affiliations.[284] Since the 1980s and especially since the 1990s, it has been argued, Hollywood's depiction of Iranians has gradually shown signs of vilifying Iranians.[285] Indian Americans See also: Indian Americans § Discrimination, and Anti-Indian sentiment § United States In the United States, Indian Americans have sometimes been mistaken for Arabs or Muslims, and thus, many of the same prejudices which have been experienced by Arab Americans have also been experienced by Indian Americans, regardless of their actual religious or ethnic background. In the 1980s, a gang known as the Dotbusters specifically targeted Indian Americans in Jersey City, New Jersey with violence and harassment.[286] Studies of racial discrimination, as well as stereotyping and scapegoating of Indian Americans have been conducted in recent years.[287] In particular, racial discrimination against Indian Americans in the workplace has been correlated with Indophobia due to the rise in outsourcing/offshoring, whereby Indian Americans are blamed for US companies offshoring white-collar labor to India.[288][289] According to the offices of the Congressional Caucus on India, many Indian Americans are severely concerned of a backlash, though nothing serious has taken place yet.[289] Due to various socio-cultural reasons, implicit racial discrimination against Indian Americans largely go unreported by the Indian American community.[287] Numerous cases of religious stereotyping of American Hindus (mainly of Indian origin) have also been documented.[290] Since the September 11, 2001, attacks, there have been scattered incidents of Indian Americans becoming mistaken targets for hate crimes. In one example, a Sikh, Balbir Singh Sodhi, was murdered at a Phoenix gas station in a hate crime.[291] This happened after September 11, and the murderer claimed that his turban made him think that the victim was a Middle Eastern American. Jewish Americans Main article: Antisemitism in the United States Protesters at the Unite the Right rally carrying Confederate flags, Gadsden flags, and a Nazi flag Antisemitism has also played a role in the history of the United States. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, hundreds of thousands of Jews escaped from the pogroms which were occurring in Europe.[292] Beginning in the 1910s, Southern Jewish communities were attacked by the Ku Klux Klan, which objected to Jewish immigration, and frequently used "The Jewish Banker" caricature in its propaganda. In 1915, Leo Frank was lynched in Georgia while he was serving a life sentence after being convicted of murder.[293] This event was a catalyst in the re-formation of the Ku Klux Klan.[294] Universities, such as Harvard, introduced Jewish quotas which effectively placed a limit on the number of Jews admitted to the University. According to the historian David Oshinsky, "Most of the surrounding medical schools (Cornell, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and Yale) had rigid quotas in place. In 1935 Yale accepted 76 applicants from a pool of 501. About 200 of those applicants were Jewish and only five got in." He notes that Dean Milton Winternitz's instructions were precise: "Never admit more than five Jews, and take no blacks at all."[295] Events in Nazi Germany attracted attention in the United States. Jewish lobbying for intervention in Europe drew opposition from the isolationists, amongst whom was Father Charles Coughlin, a well known radio priest, who believed that the Jews were leading the United States into the war.[296] He preached weekly, overtly anti-Semitic sermons and, from 1936, he began the publication of a newspaper, Social Justice, in which he printed anti-Semitic accusations such as those which are contained in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.[297] A number of Jewish organizations, Christian organizations, Muslim organizations, and academics consider the Nation of Islam anti-Semitic. Specifically, they claim that the Nation of Islam has engaged in revisionist and antisemitic interpretations of the Holocaust and exaggerates the role of Jews in the Atlantic slave trade.[298] The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) alleged that the NOI's Health Minister, Dr. Abdul Alim Muhammad, accused Jewish doctors of injecting Blacks with the AIDS virus,[299] an allegation that Muhammad and The Washington Post have refuted.[300] Although Jews are often considered white by mainstream American society, the relationship between Jews and the concept of whiteness remains complex, so some prefer not to identify as white.[301][302][303][304] Prominent activist and rabbi Michael Lerner argues, in a 1993 Village Voice article, that "in America, to be 'white' means to be the beneficiary of the past 500 years of European exploration and exploitation of the rest of the world" and that "Jews can only be deemed white if there is massive amnesia on the part of non-Jews about the monumental history of anti-Semitism".[304] On October 27, 2018, Robert D. Bowers opened fire in a synagogue in Pittsburgh with an AR-15-style rifle while he was shouting anti-Semitic racial slurs. This attack resulted in 11 dead and 6 wounded, leaving the assailant charged with 29 criminal counts, one of which was the obstruction of free exercise of religious beliefs.[305] Continuing antisemitism has remained an issue in the United States and the 2011 Survey of American Attitudes Toward Jews in America, which was released by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), has found that the recent world economic recession increased the expression of some antisemitic viewpoints among Americans. Most of the people who were surveyed expressed pro-Jewish sentiments, with 64% of them agreeing that Jewish people have contributed much to U.S. social culture. Yet the polling also found that 19% of Americans answered "probably true" to the antisemitic canard that "Jews have too much control/influence on Wall Street" (see Economic antisemitism) while 15% of Americans concurred with the related statement that Jews seem "more willing to use shady practices" in business than other people do. Reflecting on the lingering antisemitism of about one in five Americans, Abraham H. Foxman, the ADL's national director, has argued, "It is disturbing that with all of the strides we have made in becoming a more tolerant society, anti-Semitic beliefs continue to hold a vice-grip on a small but not insubstantial segment of the American public."[306] Consequences See also: Racial inequality in the United States Developmental Using The Schedule of Racist Events (SRE), an 18-item self-report inventory which assesses the frequency of racist discrimination, Hope Landrine and Elizabeth A. Klonoff found that racist discrimination is rampant in the lives of African Americans and as a result, it is strongly related to psychiatric symptoms.[307] A study on racist events in the lives of African American women found that lifetime experiences of racism were positively related to lifetime histories of both physical disease and the frequency of recent common colds. These relationships were largely unaccounted for by other variables. Demographic variables such as income and educational inequality were not related to experiences of racism. The results suggest that racism can be detrimental to African Americans' well-being.[308] The physiological stress caused by racism has been documented in studies by Claude Steele, Joshua Aronson, and Steven Spencer on what they term "stereotype threat."[309] Much research has been done on the effects of racism on adults, but racism and discrimination also affect children and teens.[310] From infancy to adolescence, studies document a children's growth in understanding of race from being aware of race to later understanding how race and prejudice affects their life, the lives of others’, and society as a whole.[311][312][313][314][310] The comprehensive literature review of 214 published articles with key words related to the topic, such as discrimination, racism, and prejudice for adolescents aged 10–20 years (Benner et al., 2008) highlighted a link between teens' experiences of racial and ethnic discrimination and "their socioemotional distress, academic success, and risky health behaviors". This study chose larger sample sized and peer reviewed studies, over smaller sampled and non-peer reviewed studies.[310] In this review, researchers showed links between racial discrimination and lower socioemotional, academic, and behavioral outcomes. The socioemotional variable included depression, internalized symptoms, self-esteem, and positive well-being; academics included achievement, engagement, and motivation; and behavioral outcomes included externalized behaviors, substance abuse, deviant peer associations, and risky sexual behaviors.[310] Researchers examined the links between discrimination and other demographic variables such as race, age, and country of residence. When looking at the impact of race/ethnicity, results show that Asian and Latino youth show greater socioemotional distress and Latino youth show lower academic outcomes. Younger teens (10 to 13 years) experience more socioemotional distress than those in middle or late teens. Furthermore, when looking at county of residence, teens in the United States have a much stronger link to socioemotional distress than other countries included in the review.[310] In 2023 a study was released that looked at the effect of structural inequities on the brains of Black children. Examining MRI scans of 7,350 White and 1,786 Black children ages 9 and 10 researchers reported that Black children living in poverty face increased instances of stress and trauma that can alter their brain development. The study defines the stressors as "prolonged exposure to adverse experiences" including neighborhood disadvantage, family conflict, and income. Researchers found Black children had greater exposure to adversity, lower volume of different brain regions, and more PTSD symptoms. Accounting for differences in exposure to adversity significantly attenuated race-related differences in volume in several brain regions.[315][316] Societal Schemas and stereotypes This racist postcard from the 1900s shows the casual denigration of Black women. It states "I know you're not particular to a fault / Though I'm not sure you'll never be sued for assault / You're so fond of women that even a wench / Attracts your gross fancy despite her strong stench" Media Main article: Stereotypes of groups within the United States See also: Stereotypes of East Asians in the Western world, Stereotypes of African Americans, Stereotypes of Hispanic and Latino Americans in the United States, and Stereotypes of Native Americans Popular culture (songs, theater) for European American audiences in the 19th century created and perpetuated negative stereotypes of African Americans. One key symbol of racism against African Americans was the use of blackface. Directly related to this was the institution of minstrelsy. Other stereotypes of African Americans included the fat, dark-skinned "mammy" and the irrational, hypersexual male "buck". Many of these stereotypes entered public media with an imprimatur from the highest levels of white society. In a 1943 speech on the floor of Congress quoted in both The Jewish News of Detroit[317] and the antisemitic magazine The Defender of Wichita[318] Mississippi Representative John E. Rankin stated that Jewish Communists were arranging for white women to be raped by Black American men. In recent years increasing numbers of African-American activists have asserted that rap music videos commonly use scantily clothed African-American performers posing as thugs or pimps. The NAACP and the National Congress of Black Women also have called for the reform of images on videos and on television. Julian Bond said that in a segregated society, people get their impressions of other groups from what they see in videos and what they hear in music.[319][320][321][322] In 1899 Uncle Sam balances his new possessions which are depicted as "savage" children. The figures are Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Cuba, Philippines and "Ladrone Is." (the Mariana Islands). It is understood that representations of minorities in the media have the ability to reinforce or change stereotypes. For example, in one study, a collection of white subjects were primed by a comedy skit either showing a stereotypical or neutral portrayal of African-American characters. Participants were then required to read a vignette describing an incident of sexual violence, with the alleged offender either white or black, and assign a rating for perceived guilt. For those shown the stereotypical African-American character, there was a significantly higher guilt rating for black alleged offender in the subsequent vignette, in comparison to the other conditions.[323] While schemas have an overt societal consequence, the strong development of them have lasting effect on recipients. Overall, it is found that strong in-group attitudes are correlated with academic and economic success. In a study analyzing the interaction of assimilation and racial-ethnic schemas for Hispanic youth found that strong schematic identities for Hispanic youth undermined academic achievement.[324] Additional stereotypes attributed to minorities continue to influence societal interactions. For example, a 1993 Harvard Law Review article states that Asian Americans are commonly viewed as submissive, as a combination of relative physical stature and Western comparisons of cultural attitudes. Furthermore, Asian Americans are depicted as the model minority, unfair competitors, foreigners, and indistinguishable. These stereotypes can serve to dehumanize Asian Americans and catalyze hostility and violence.[325] Minority-minority racism Main article: Interminority racism in the United States Minority racism is sometimes considered controversial because of theories of power in society. Some theories of racism insist that racism can only exist in the context of social power so it can be imposed upon others.[326] Yet discrimination and racism has also been noted between racially marginalized groups. For example, there has been ongoing violence between African American and Mexican American gangs, particularly in Southern California.[327][328][329][330] Conflict has also been noted between recent immigrant groups and their established ethnic counterparts within the United States. Rapidly-growing communities of African and Caribbean immigrants have come into conflict with African Americans. The amount of interaction and cooperation between Black immigrants and African Americans are considered to be disputable. One can argue that racial discrimination and cooperation are not ordinarily based on skin color, but are instead based on shared or common, cultural experiences and beliefs.[331][332] Interpersonal discrimination In a manner that defines interpersonal discrimination in the United States, Darryl Brown of the Virginia Law Review states that while "our society has established a consensus against blatant, intentional racism in the decades since Brown v Board of Education and it has also developed a sizeable set of legal remedies to address it", our legal system "ignores the possibility that 'race' is structural or interstitial, that it can be the root of injury even when it is not traceable to a specific intention or action".[333] Unlike formal discrimination, interpersonal discrimination is often not an overt or deliberate act of racism. For example, in an incident regarding a racial remark which was made by a professor at Virginia Law, a rift was created by conflicting definitions of racism. For the students who defended the professor's innocence, "racism was defined as an act of intentional maliciousness". Yet for African Americans, racism was broadened to a detrimental influence on "the substantive dynamics of the classroom". As an effect, it is argued that the "daily repetition of subtle racism and subordination in the classroom can ultimately be, for African Americans, even more reductive of stress, anxiety and alienation than blatant racist acts can be." Moreover, the attention which is given to these acts of discrimination diverts energy from academics, becoming a distraction that white students do not generally face.[333] Ethnic-racial socialization Ethnic-racial socialization refers to the transfer of knowledge about various aspects of race or ethnicity through generations.[334] Parents of color use ethnic-racial socialization to transfer cultural knowledge to their children to protect them from potential biases which they may face as a result of their ethnicity and/or race.[334] However, how parents choose to socialize their children regarding issues of ethnicity and race may affect children differently.[334] For example, when parent's socialization efforts focus on positive aspects of their race or ethnicity, children of color tend to report higher self-esteem.[334] On the other hand, if the focus of socialization mainly revolves around mistrust about interracial or inter-ethnic relations, children's self-concept, or how children view themselves might suffer.[334] Promotion of socialization that centers on mistrust is especially harmful when parents present it without also teaching positive coping skills.[334] Wang et al. (2020)[334] conducted a meta-analytic review of 334 articles examining the effects of ethnic-racial socialization on children of color's psychosocial adjustment. Researchers evaluated the stage of children's development in which the effects of ethnic-racial socialization would be most prominent. Their findings using their systematic review process showed a positive relationship between parental ethnic-racial socialization and psychosocial well-being measures, including self-perception, confidence, and interpersonal relationships. The effects of age varied based on the psychosocial well-being measure a study used. Results showed that the link between positive self-perception and ethnic-racial socialization was most effective when it occurred in childhood and early adolescence.[334] On the other hand, children who reported positive relationships between their interpersonal relationships and ethnic-racial socialization showed this paper in middle to late adolescence.[334] The effects of ethnic-racial socialization also varied based on children's race/ethnicity. Self-perception and ethnic-racial socialization are related more positively among African Americans,[334] suggesting that parents used ethnic-racial socialization to buffer against the deep-rooted stigma and biases African Americans face in the United States.[334] Contrary to the experiences of African Americans, ethnic-racial socialization was related to low self-perception among Asian Americans.[334] Extensive research is required to better understand the connection of ethnic-racial socialization for Asian American children's psychosocial well-being.[334] To better understand the effects of ethnic-racial socialization and psychological development, research should take into account known moderating factors similar to stereotype threat.[334] It is important to note that the research findings were correlational and as such does not imply causality. Institutional racism Institutional racism is the theory that aspects of the existing social structure, pervasive attitudes, and established institutions in society disadvantage some racial groups, but not with an overtly discriminatory mechanism.[335] There are several factors which play into institutional racism, including: accumulated wealth/benefits for racial groups which have benefited from past discrimination, educational and occupational disadvantages which are faced by non-native English speakers in the United States, ingrained stereotypical images which still exist in American society (e.g. black men are likely to be criminals).[336] Institutional racism impacts the lives of racial groups negatively as although legislations where passed in the mid 20th century to abolish any sort of segregation and discrimination it still does not change the fact that institutional racism is still able to occur to anyone. Peter Kaufman, a former sociology professor at the State University of New York[337] published an article in which Kaufman describes three instances in which institutional racism has contributed to current views of race.[338] These are: The mis- and Missing Education of Race, in which he describes problems which the educational system has in discussing "slavery, race, racism, and topics such as white privilege." He goes on to say that schools are still segregated based on class and race, which also contributes to the poor state of race relations[226] Residential Racial Segregation. According to Kaufman, schools are still segregated because towns and cities are still largely segregated. Media Monsters. This describes the role which the media plays in the portrayal of race. The mass media tends to play on "depictions of racialized stereotypes in the mass media [which are] ubiquitous, and such caricaturized images shape our perceptions of various racial groups." An example of this is the stereotyping of Blacks as criminals.[226][339] Nazi Germany's inspiration from American racism See also: Nazi racial theories and Racial policy of Nazi Germany The U.S. was a global leader in codified racism, and its race laws fascinated Adolf Hitler and other German Nazis,[340] who praised America's system of institutional racism, believing it to be a model to follow in their Reich. Hitler's book Mein Kampf praised America as the only contemporary example of a country with racist ("völkisch") citizenship statutes in the 1920s.[340] The National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation of 1934–35, edited by lawyer Hans Frank, contains a pivotal essay by Herbert Kier on the recommendations for race legislation which devoted a quarter of its pages to U.S. legislation—from segregation, race based citizenship, immigration regulations, and anti-miscegenation.[340] Nazi lawyers were inspired by American laws when they designed their own laws in Nazi Germany,[340] including racist citizenship laws, and anti-miscegenation laws which inspired the two principal Nuremberg Laws—the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law.[340] Hitler and other Nazis were also inspired by America's 19th century westward expansion, believing it to be a model for the expansion of German territory into the territories of other nations and elimination of their indigenous inhabitants.[341] In 1928, Hitler praised the United States for having "gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage".[342] On Nazi Germany's expansion eastward, in 1941 Hitler stated, "Our Mississippi [the line beyond which Thomas Jefferson wanted all Indians expelled] must be the Volga, and not the Niger."[343] In a later speech Hitler stated, "in the East a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America", and Nazi troops "had a duty to look upon natives as Redskins".[341][344] Contemporary issues See also: 2020–2023 United States racial unrest Hate crimes and terrorism See also: Hate crime, Hate crime laws in the United States, Hate group, Right-wing terrorism § United States, Terrorism in the United States, Domestic terrorism in the United States, Timeline of terrorist attacks in the United States, Alt-right, Far-right politics § United States, Radical right (United States), and List of incidents of civil unrest in the United States In the United States, most crimes in which victims are targeted on the basis of their race or ethnicity are considered hate crimes. Leading forms of bias which are cited in the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, based on law enforcement agency filings include: anti-Black, anti-Jewish, anti-homosexual, and anti-Hispanic bias in that order in both 2004 and 2005.[345] According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, whites, Black people, and Hispanic people had similar rates of violent hate crime victimization between 2007 and 2011.[346][347] However, from 2011 to 2012, violent hate crimes against Hispanic people increased by 300%.[348] When considering all hate crimes, not just violent ones, African Americans are far more likely to be victims than other racial groups.[349][350] Hateful views See also: Hate speech Following the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the racist preference for white immigrants[221] which dated back to the 18th century was ended,[351] and in response to this change, white nationalism grew in the United States as the conservative movement developed in mainstream American society.[352] Political scientist Samuel P. Huntington argues that it developed in reaction to the perceived decline in the essence of America's identity, an identity which was believed to be European, Anglo-Saxon Protestant and English-speaking.[353] An ABC News report which was released in 2007 recounted that past ABC polls which were conducted over a period of several years have tended to find that "six percent have self-reported harboring prejudice against Jews, 27 percent have self-reported harboring prejudice against Muslims, 25 percent have self-reported harboring prejudice against Arabs," and "one in 10 have conceded harboring at least a little bit of prejudice " against Hispanic Americans. The report also stated that a full 34% of Americans reported harboring "some racist feelings" in general as a self-description.[354] An Associated Press and Yahoo News survey of 2,227 adult Americans in 2008 found that 10% of white respondents stated that "a lot" of discrimination still exists against African-Americans while 45% of white respondents stated that only "some" discrimination still exists against African Americans compared to 57% of African American respondents who stated that "a lot" of discrimination still exists against them. In the same poll, more whites applied positive attributes to African Americans than negative ones, with black people describing whites even more highly, but a significant minority of whites still called African Americans "irresponsible", "lazy", or other such things.[355] In 2008, Stanford University political scientist Paul Sniderman remarked that, in the modern U.S., racism and prejudices are "a deep challenge, and it's one that Americans in general, and for that matter, political scientists, just haven't been ready to acknowledge fully."[355] In 2017, citizens gathered in the college community of Charlottesville, Virginia to attend the Unite the Right rally. One woman was killed and dozens of other people were injured when a white supremacist drove his car into a group of counter-protesters.[356] Social media Main article: Online hate speech In contemporary times, many racist views have found a means of expression through social media.[357] Among the popular social networks, in particular, the American platform Reddit has been defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center as the "home of the most violently racist internet content."[358] The SPLC pointed at how racist views had gained more and more traction on Reddit, which was even replacing traditionally far-right websites such as Stormfront in both the quantity and frequency of its racist content.[358] Several prominent intellectuals and publications have agreed with this view, considering Reddit a platform which is filled with hateful, racist and harassing content. So far, however, little or nothing has been done to address this problem.[359] Alleviation Main article: Anti-racism See also: Critical race theory There is a wide plethora of societal and political suggestions on how to alleviate the effects of continued discrimination in the United States. For example, within universities, it has been suggested that a type of committee could respond to non-sanctionable behavior.[333] It is also argued that there is a need for "white students and faculty to reformulate white-awareness toward a more secure identity that is not threatened by black cultural institutions and can recognize the racial non-neutrality of the institutions which whites dominate" (Brown, 334). Paired with this effort, Brown encourages the increase in minority faculty members, so the embedded white normative experience begins to fragment.[333] Within the media, it is found that racial cues prime racial stereotypic thought. Thus, it is argued that "stereotype inconsistent cues might lead to more intentioned thought, thereby suppressing racial priming effects."[108] Social psychologists, such as Jennifer Eberhardt, have done work that indicates such priming effects subconsciously help determine attitudes and behavior toward individuals regardless of intentions. These results have been incorporated into training, for example, in some police departments.[360] It has also been argued that more evidence-based guidance from psychologists and sociologists is needed for people to learn what is effective in alleviating racism.[361] Such evidence-based approaches can reveal, for example, the many psychological biases to which humans are subject, such as ingroup bias and the fundamental attribution error, which can underlie racist attitudes.[362] Psychologist Stuart Vyse has argued that argument, ideas, and facts will not mend divisions but there is evidence, such as that which is provided by the Robbers Cave Experiment, that seeking shared goals can help alleviate racism.[363] See also Wikiquote has quotations related to Racism in the United States. 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Comedian Dick Gregory got his big break performing as a stand-up comedian at the Playboy Club in the early 1960s. Known for his sophisticated, layered humor that took on racial issues of the day, Gregory became a comedy headliner and a trailblazer for other African American comedians including Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby. He also participated as an activist in the Civil Rights Movement and eventually ran for political office. In his later years, he worked as a lecturer and pursued his interests in health and fitness. Early Life Richard Claxton Gregory was born the second of six children on October 12, 1932, in St. Louis, Missouri. Gregory grew up in crippling poverty. His father abandoned the family, leaving his mother to work long hours as a maid to support the family. At an early age, Gregory found the power of comedy to defend himself against childhood bullies. “They were going to laugh anyway, but if I made the jokes they’d laugh with me instead of at me,” he wrote in his 1964 autobiography. “After a while, I could say anything I wanted. I got a reputation as a funny man. And then I started to turn the jokes on them." In high school, he also became a track star and showed a thirst for activism when he protested against segregated schools. He was later accepted to Southern Illinois University where he excelled in track, and in 1954, he was drafted into the Army. He began performing stand-up comedy at this time, and after winning a talent contest, he became part of the Army's entertainment division. Stand-Up Career After his return to the states, Gregory worked as an emcee at various Chicago clubs, honing his craft working the comedy circuit while taking on odd jobs. His trailblazing style of satirical humor tackled racial issues and sociopolitical topics pulled straight from contemporary headlines. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below Gregory’s big break came in 1961 at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club in Chicago, where the comedian, as a replacement act, performed in front of a room of white executives visiting from the segregated South. Nonetheless, Gregory was a huge success and became a crossover star. “It was the first time they had seen a Black comic who was not bucking his eyes, wasn't dancing and singing and telling mother-in-law jokes,'' said Gregory in a 2000 Boston Globe interview. ''Just talking about what I read in the newspaper.” The comedian had his run at the club extended by weeks and went on to become a national comedy headliner. That same year, Gregory made history when he appeared on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show after making it clear he wanted to be invited to sit on the couch to chat with the host like white entertainers, becoming the first African American guest to do so. After his appearance, Gregory became a recurring guest on the show. He also released popular albums In Living Black and White (1961) and Dick Gregory Talks Turkey (1962). Civil Rights Activism Gregory was at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s and became friends with pivotal figures including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers. He was arrested dozens of times because of his activism. While jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, he wrote that he had received “the first really good beating I ever had in my life.” He continued his political activism throughout the 1960s. He unsuccessfully ran against Richard Daley in 1967 for the office of mayor of Chicago. A year later, he also ran for U.S. president as a write-in candidate with the Freedom and Peace Party during the electoral showdown between Richard Nixon and Hubert H. Humphrey. Later Years and Death Over the years, Gregory became devoted to health and fitness, adopting a vegetarian diet and examining issues related to diet within African American communities. He became a noted university lecturer and also regularly went on hunger strikes to bring awareness to various global issues including the Vietnam War, women's rights, apartheid in South Africa, police brutality and American Indian rights. During the mid-1980s, the comedian/activist launched a weight-loss business known as the Slim/Safe Bahamian Diet. He eventually filed a lawsuit against his business partners and experienced major financial troubles that led to the loss of his family's 40-acre farm in Plymouth, Massachusetts. In his later years, Gregory became known for supporting various conspiracy theories about the assassinations of King and John and Robert Kennedy, the crack cocaine epidemic and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He also turned away from stand-up for a time, preferring to stay out of clubs where liquor was served, but he later made his way back to performing. In 1996, he starred in the critically well-received Off-Broadway production Dick Gregory Live! The comedian/activist also authored a number of books, including Nigger: An Autobiography (1964). In the foreword, he wrote to his deceased mother: “Wherever you are, if ever you hear the word 'nigger' again, remember they are advertising my book…”). He spoke about the controversial word in the title of his book in a 2002 interview with NPR: “I said, let’s pull it out of the closet, let’s lay it out there, let’s deal with it, let’s dissect it,” he said. “It should never be called ‘the N-word.’ ” Advertisement - Continue Reading Below His other books include No More Lies: The Myth and the Reality of American History (1971), Dick Gregory’s Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat: Cookin’ With Nature (1973) and the memoir Callus on My Soul (2000). In 1999, Gregory was diagnosed with lymphoma, but refused chemotherapy and instead turned to diet and alternative treatments. The cancer went into remission. He died on August 19, 2017, at the age of 84. Personal Life In 1959, Gregory married Lillian Smith. They had 11 children; one son, Richard, Jr., died in infancy. Gregory acknowledged that his wife was the primary emotional caretaker of their children due to the demands of his career. QUICK FACTS Name: Gregory Dick Birth Year: 1932 Birth date: October 12, 1932 Birth State: Missouri Birth City: St. Louis Birth Country: United States Gender: Male Best Known For: Dick Gregory was a pioneering comedian and civil rights activist who took on race with layered, nuanced humor during the turbulent 1960s. Industries Civil Rights Astrological Sign: Libra Schools Southern Illinois University Death Year: 2017 Death date: August 19, 2017 Death City: Washington, D.C. Fact Check We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right,contact us! CITATION INFORMATION Article Title: Dick Gregory Biography Author: Biography.com Editors Website Name: The Biography.com website Url: https://www.biography.com/actors/dick-gregory Access Date: Publisher: A&E; Television Networks Last Updated: April 14, 2021 Original Published Date: April 2, 2014 Advertisement - Continue Reading Below QUOTES I've always been insulted when people tell me that my humor has done a lot for race relations. I never thought comedy did anything but make uncomfortable people feel comfortable. ...there's only been three comedic geniuses in this country. One was Mark Twain. He probably leads the whole field. And then Lenny Bruce. He just went out and said things that no one would dare say and many were scared to even listen to. And Richard Pryor. What a genius. Down South they don’t care how close I am as long as I don’t get too big, and up North they don’t care how big I am as long as I don’t get too close. I sat in six months once at a Southern lunch counter. When they finally served me, they didn’t have what I wanted. I got picked on a lot around the neighborhood; skinniest kid on the block, the poorest, the one without a Daddy. I guess that's when I began to learn about humor, the power of a joke.… They were going to laugh anyway, but if I made the jokes they'd laugh with me instead of at me. I'd get the kids off my back, on my side. I got out of comedy because I saw a conflict in saying to young folks that drugs and alcohol are bad and then coming to a nightclub and having a taste. I decided I would not take this God-given talent any further in an atmosphere where people could drink or smoke. I was one of the few entertainers who said I would not do an anti-drug commercial unless you hook a whiskey commercial with it. I've got to go up there as an individual first, a Negro second. I've got to be a colored funny man, not a funny colored man. It was never in my psyche that I'm going to be a great father. Mine was: I'm going to be a great fighter for the liberation, whatever it takes. The movement don't owe me nothing. I owe everything to the movement Dick Gregory, byname of Richard Claxton Gregory, (born October 12, 1932, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.—died August 19, 2017, Washington, D.C.), American comedian, civil rights activist, and spokesman for health issues, who became nationally recognized in the 1960s for a biting brand of comedy that attacked racial prejudice. By addressing his hard-hitting satire to white audiences, he gave a comedic voice to the rising civil rights movement. In the 1980s his nutrition business venture targeted unhealthy diets of Black Americans. Reared in poverty in St. Louis, Gregory began working at an early age to help support his family. He was involved in sports and social causes in high school, and he entered Southern Illinois University on an athletic scholarship in 1951, excelling as a middle-distance runner. He was named the university’s outstanding student athlete in 1953, the same year he left college to join the U.S. Army, where he hosted and performed comedy routines in military shows. Martin Luther King, Jr. (center), with other civil rights supporters lock arms on as they lead the way along Constitution Avenue during the March on Washington, Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963. Britannica Quiz Pop Quiz: 17 Things to Know About the American Civil Rights Movement After a brief return to his alma mater in 1955–56, Gregory sought entrance to the national comedy circuit in Chicago. His breakthrough came in 1961, when a performance at the Chicago Playboy Club turned into a six-week stint that earned him a profile in Time magazine and a television appearance on The Jack Paar Show. In his numerous subsequent TV, nightclub, and concert routines, he targeted poverty, segregation, and racial discrimination. Active in the civil rights movement, he participated in numerous demonstrations and was arrested for civil disobedience several times; in 1963 he was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama. His activism spurred him to run for mayor of Chicago in 1966 and for president of the United States in 1968. In the early 1970s Gregory abandoned comedy to focus on his political interests, which widened from race relations to include such issues as violence, world hunger, capital punishment, drug abuse, and poor health care. He generated particular attention for his many hunger fasts. At this time he became a vegetarian, a marathon runner, and an expert on nutrition. He soon began a successful business venture with his nutritional product, the “Bahamian Diet,” around which he built Dick Gregory Health Enterprises, Inc. Through his company, he targeted the lower life expectancy of Black Americans, which he attributed to poor nutrition and drug and alcohol abuse. Gregory wrote many books, including Nigger: An Autobiography (1964) and No More Lies: The Myth and the Reality of American History (1971). He made a brief return to the comedy circuit in the mid-1990s. The One and Only Dick Gregory, a documentary about his life and career, appeared in 2021. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Amy Tikkanen. segregation Table of Contents Introduction Fast Facts Related Content Media Images More More Articles On This Topic Additional Reading Contributors Article History Home Lifestyles & Social Issues Sociology & Society segregation sociology      Written by  Fact-checked by  Last Updated: Article History apartheid-era sign apartheid-era sign See all media Key People: George Wallace Morrison Remick Waite Henry Billings Brown Lemuel Shaw Related Topics: apartheid separate but equal ghetto redlining racial segregation segregation, separation of groups of people with differing characteristics, often taken to connote a condition of inequality. Racial segregation is one of many types of segregation, which can range from deliberate and systematic persecution through more subtle types of discrimination to self-imposed separation. Yet segregation can also be an outcome of circumstances that may not be morally troubling. Segregation, in and of itself, is not a normative concept, like injustice, but instead is a condition that, in order to ascribe causation, requires investigation of all its dimensions. One example of extreme segregationist policies is the treatment of nonwhites in South Africa during the apartheid era. In this case, segregation was fully institutionalized in the state’s legal system. Such segregation denies civil and political rights to the oppressed group or groups and drastically affects individuals’ living conditions. Oppression of that sort has been experienced throughout history by women, members of castes, homosexuals, and assorted religious groups, among others, and it has frequently ignited ferocious struggles for equality, such as the woman suffrage movement in Great Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries and the American civil rights movement that came to national prominence in the 1950s. Even after such battles have been formally won, however, deep-rooted prejudices often remain intact and hinder substantive integration and equality. Such prejudices are habitually manifested, for example, in the denial of equal opportunities across educational and labour-market settings. Segregation can also be voluntary or self-imposed. Within the Chicano civil rights movement in the United States during the 1960s, some rejected the idea that they would be able to equally flourish within the dominant white culture and campaigned for an independent state. Other groups (for example, the Amish in North America or certain immigrant groups across host societies), believing that their particular cultural practices are better preserved by remaining separate from mainstream society, tend to cluster geographically and residentially. Conceptually, one must be careful not to necessarily equate segregation with inequality. Segregation is made up of two dimensions: vertical segregation and horizontal segregation. The phenomenon of occupational sex segregation can be used to explain each: pay differentials between men and women across occupations within a given labour force characterize vertical segregation, while horizontal segregation illustrates the separation of various individuals in terms of the concentration of the sexes in different types of occupations—but does not necessarily indicate discrimination or inequality. (Neither does it show the absence of discrimination or inequality.) Theoretically, then, it is possible for individuals to be completely segregated horizontally without any vertical dimension, or vice versa. A given labour market, however, is more often segregated to different extents along both vertical and horizontal lines. Jude Browne The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica poverty Table of Contents Introduction Cyclical poverty Collective poverty Concentrated collective poverty Case poverty Fast Facts Related Content Read Next Causes of the Great Depression Media Videos More More Articles On This Topic Contributors Article History Home Lifestyles & Social Issues Sociology & Society poverty sociology      Written and fact-checked by  Last Updated: Apr 6, 2023 • Article History Key People: Hannah More Saint Joseph Calasanz Johann Friedrich Oberlin Saint Jean-Baptiste de La Salle St. John Bosco Related Topics: homelessness food desert bottom of the pyramid case poverty cyclical poverty view archival footage of the impoverished American population in the aftermath of the stock market crash of 1929 view archival footage of the impoverished American population in the aftermath of the stock market crash of 1929See all videos for this article poverty, the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions. Poverty is said to exist when people lack the means to satisfy their basic needs. In this context, the identification of poor people first requires a determination of what constitutes basic needs. These may be defined as narrowly as “those necessary for survival” or as broadly as “those reflecting the prevailing standard of living in the community.” The first criterion would cover only those people near the borderline of starvation or death from exposure; the second would extend to people whose nutrition, housing, and clothing, though adequate to preserve life, do not measure up to those of the population as a whole. The problem of definition is further compounded by the noneconomic connotations that the word poverty has acquired. Poverty has been associated, for example, with poor health, low levels of education or skills, an inability or an unwillingness to work, high rates of disruptive or disorderly behaviour, and improvidence. While these attributes have often been found to exist with poverty, their inclusion in a definition of poverty would tend to obscure the relation between them and the inability to provide for one’s basic needs. Whatever definition one uses, authorities and laypersons alike commonly assume that the effects of poverty are harmful to both individuals and society. Although poverty is a phenomenon as old as human history, its significance has changed over time. Under traditional (i.e., nonindustrialized) modes of economic production, widespread poverty had been accepted as inevitable. The total output of goods and services, even if equally distributed, would still have been insufficient to give the entire population a comfortable standard of living by prevailing standards. With the economic productivity that resulted from industrialization, however, this ceased to be the case—especially in the world’s most industrialized countries, where national outputs were sufficient to raise the entire population to a comfortable level if the necessary redistribution could be arranged without adversely affecting output. Groups of depositors in front of the closed American Union Bank, New York City. April 26, 1932. Great Depression run on bank crowd More From Britannica Causes of the Great Depression Several types of poverty may be distinguished depending on such factors as time or duration (long- or short-term or cyclical) and distribution (widespread, concentrated, individual). (Read Indira Gandhi’s 1975 Britannica essay on global underprivilege.) Cyclical poverty Cyclical poverty refers to poverty that may be widespread throughout a population, but the occurrence itself is of limited duration. In nonindustrial societies (present and past), this sort of inability to provide for one’s basic needs rests mainly upon temporary food shortages caused by natural phenomena or poor agricultural planning. Prices would rise because of scarcities of food, which brought widespread, albeit temporary, misery. In industrialized societies the chief cyclical cause of poverty is fluctuations in the business cycle, with mass unemployment during periods of depression or serious recession. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the industrialized nations of the world experienced business panics and recessions that temporarily enlarged the numbers of the poor. The United States’ experience in the Great Depression of the 1930s, though unique in some of its features, exemplifies this kind of poverty. And until the Great Depression, poverty resulting from business fluctuations was accepted as an inevitable consequence of a natural process of market regulation. Relief was granted to the unemployed to tide them over until the business cycle again entered an upswing. The experiences of the Great Depression inspired a generation of economists such as John Maynard Keynes, who sought solutions to the problems caused by extreme swings in the business cycle. Since the Great Depression, governments in nearly all advanced industrial societies have adopted economic policies that attempt to limit the ill effects of economic fluctuation. In this sense, governments play an active role in poverty alleviation by increasing spending as a means of stimulating the economy. Part of this spending comes in the form of direct assistance to the unemployed, either through unemployment compensation, welfare, and other subsidies or by employment on public-works projects. Although business depressions affect all segments of society, the impact is most severe on people of the lowest socioeconomic strata because they have fewer marginal resources than those of a higher strata. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Collective poverty In contrast to cyclical poverty, which is temporary, widespread or “collective” poverty involves a relatively permanent insufficiency of means to secure basic needs—a condition that may be so general as to describe the average level of life in a society or that may be concentrated in relatively large groups in an otherwise prosperous society. Both generalized and concentrated collective poverty may be transmitted from generation to generation, parents passing their poverty on to their children. Collective poverty is relatively general and lasting in parts of Asia, the Middle East, most of Africa, and parts of South America and Central America. Life for the bulk of the population in these regions is at a minimal level. Nutritional deficiencies cause disease seldom seen by doctors in the highly developed countries. Low life expectancy, high levels of infant mortality, and poor health characterize life in these societies. Collective poverty is usually related to economic underdevelopment. The total resources of many developing nations in Africa, Asia, and South and Central America would be insufficient to support the population adequately even if they were equally divided among all of the citizens. Proposed remedies are twofold: (1) expansion of the gross national product (GNP) through improved agriculture or industrialization, or both, and (2) population limitation. Thus far, both population control and induced economic development in many countries have proved difficult, controversial, and at times inconclusive or disappointing in their results. An increase of the GNP does not necessarily lead to an improved standard of living for the population at large, for a number of reasons. The most important reason is that, in many developing countries, the population grows even faster than the economy does, with no net reduction in poverty as a result. This increased population growth stems primarily from lowered infant mortality rates made possible by improved sanitary and disease-control measures. Unless such lowered rates eventually result in women bearing fewer children, the result is a sharp acceleration in population growth. To reduce birth rates, some developing countries have undertaken nationally administered family-planning programs, with varying results. Many developing nations are also characterized by a long-standing system of unequal distribution of wealth—a system likely to continue despite marked increases in the GNP. Some authorities have observed the tendency for a large portion of any increase to be siphoned off by persons who are already wealthy, while others claim that increases in GNP will always trickle down to the part of the population living at the subsistence level. Concentrated collective poverty In many industrialized, relatively affluent countries, particular demographic groups are vulnerable to long-term poverty. In city ghettos, in regions bypassed or abandoned by industry, and in areas where agriculture or industry is inefficient and cannot compete profitably, there are found victims of concentrated collective poverty. These people, like those afflicted with generalized poverty, have higher mortality rates, poor health, low educational levels, and so forth when compared with the more affluent segments of society. Their chief economic traits are unemployment and underemployment, unskilled occupations, and job instability. Efforts at amelioration focus on ways to bring the deprived groups into the mainstream of economic life by attracting new industry, promoting small business, introducing improved agricultural methods, and raising the level of skills of the employable members of the society. Case poverty Similar to collective poverty in relative permanence but different from it in terms of distribution, case poverty refers to the inability of an individual or family to secure basic needs even in social surroundings of general prosperity. This inability is generally related to the lack of some basic attribute that would permit the individual to maintain himself or herself. Such persons may, for example, be blind, physically or emotionally disabled, or chronically ill. Physical and mental handicaps are usually regarded sympathetically, as being beyond the control of the people who suffer from them. Efforts to ameliorate poverty due to physical causes focus on education, sheltered employment, and, if needed, economic maintenance. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Adam Augustyn. racial segregation Table of Contents Introduction Pop Quiz! Martin Luther King, Jr. (center), with other civil rights supporters lock arms on as they lead the way along Constitution Avenue during the March on Washington, Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963. Pop Quiz: 17 Things to Know About the American Civil Rights Movement Fast Facts Related Content Read Next What Is the Origin of the Term “Jim Crow”? Timeline of the American Civil Rights Movement Quizzes Pop Quiz: 17 Things to Know About the American Civil Rights Movement Media Images More More Articles On This Topic Contributors Article History Home Lifestyles & Social Issues Sociology & Society racial segregation      Written and fact-checked by  Last Updated: Apr 25, 2023 • Article History civil rights movement: March on Washington civil rights movement: March on Washington See all media Key People: Patrick Dodson George Wallace Morrison Remick Waite Henry Billings Brown Lemuel Shaw Related Topics: apartheid separate but equal ghetto redlining township racial segregation, the practice of restricting people to certain circumscribed areas of residence or to separate institutions (e.g., schools, churches) and facilities (parks, playgrounds, restaurants, restrooms) on the basis of race or alleged race. Racial segregation provides a means of maintaining the economic advantages and superior social status of the politically dominant group, and in recent times it has been employed primarily by white populations to maintain their ascendancy over other groups by means of legal and social colour bars. Historically, however, various conquerors—among them Asian Mongols, African Bantus, and American Aztecs—practiced discrimination involving the segregation of subject races. segregated lunch counter segregated lunch counter protesting racial segregation protesting racial segregation racial segregation racial segregation segregated water cooler segregated water cooler Racial segregation has appeared in all parts of the world where there are multiracial communities, except where racial amalgamation occurred on a large scale as in Hawaii and Brazil. In such countries there has been occasional social discrimination but not legal segregation. In the Southern states of the United States, on the other hand, legal segregation in public facilities was current from the late 19th century into the 1950s. (See Jim Crow law.) The civil rights movement was initiated by Southern Blacks in the 1950s and ’60s to break the prevailing pattern of racial segregation. This movement spurred passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which contained strong provisions against discrimination and segregation in voting, education, and use of public facilities. Martin Luther King, Jr. (center), with other civil rights supporters lock arms on as they lead the way along Constitution Avenue during the March on Washington, Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963. Britannica Quiz Pop Quiz: 17 Things to Know About the American Civil Rights Movement apartheid-era sign apartheid-era sign a beach in apartheid-era South Africa a beach in apartheid-era South Africa Elsewhere, racial segregation was practiced with the greatest rigour in South Africa, where, under the apartheid system, it was an official government policy from 1950 until the early 1990s. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Amy Tikkanen. civil rights Table of Contents Introduction & Top Questions The American civil rights movement Civil rights movements across the globe Pop Quiz! Martin Luther King, Jr. (center), with other civil rights supporters lock arms on as they lead the way along Constitution Avenue during the March on Washington, Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963. Pop Quiz: 17 Things to Know About the American Civil Rights Movement Fast Facts Related Content Top Questions What are civil rights? Where do civil rights come from? What was the civil rights movement in the U.S.? Read Next Rosa Parks, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the Birth of the Civil Rights Movement Quizzes Pop Quiz: 17 Things to Know About the American Civil Rights Movement Media Videos Images More More Articles On This Topic Additional Reading Contributors Article History Home Lifestyles & Social Issues Human Rights civil rights society      Written by  Fact-checked by  Last Updated: Apr 25, 2023 • Article History March on Washington March on Washington See all media Key People: John F. Kennedy Martin Luther King, Jr. Dwight D. Eisenhower Lyndon B. Johnson Viola Desmond Related Topics: rights of privacy freedom of information freedom of expression freedom of religion legal rights Top Questions What are civil rights? Where do civil rights come from? What is a civil rights movement? What was the civil rights movement in the U.S.? civil rights, guarantees of equal social opportunities and equal protection under the law, regardless of race, religion, or other personal characteristics. Examples of civil rights include the right to vote, the right to a fair trial, the right to government services, the right to a public education, and the right to use public facilities. Civil rights are an essential component of democracy; when individuals are being denied opportunities to participate in political society, they are being denied their civil rights. In contrast to civil liberties, which are freedoms that are secured by placing restraints on government, civil rights are secured by positive government action, often in the form of legislation. Civil rights laws attempt to guarantee full and equal citizenship for people who have traditionally been discriminated against on the basis of some group characteristic. When the enforcement of civil rights is found by many to be inadequate, a civil rights movement may emerge in order to call for equal application of the laws without discrimination. Martin Luther King, Jr. (center), with other civil rights supporters lock arms on as they lead the way along Constitution Avenue during the March on Washington, Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963. Britannica Quiz Pop Quiz: 17 Things to Know About the American Civil Rights Movement Unlike other rights concepts, such as human rights or natural rights, in which people acquire rights inherently, perhaps from God or nature, civil rights must be given and guaranteed by the power of the state. Therefore, they vary greatly over time, culture, and form of government and tend to follow societal trends that condone or abhor particular types of discrimination. For example, the civil rights of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community have only recently come to the forefront of political debate in some Western democracies. The American civil rights movement Civil rights politics in the United States has its roots in the movement to end discrimination against African Americans. Though slavery was abolished and former slaves were officially granted political rights after the Civil War, in most Southern states African Americans continued to be systematically disenfranchised and excluded from public life, leading them to become perpetual second-class citizens. By the 1950s the marginalization of African Americans, often taking an extremely violent form, had spurred a social movement of epic proportions. The American civil rights movement, based mainly in African American churches and colleges of the South, involved marches, boycotts, and extensive efforts of civil disobedience, such as sit-ins, as well as voter education and voting drives. Most of these efforts were local in scope, but the impact was felt at the national level—a model of civil rights organizing that has since spread all over the globe. Civil rights movements across the globe In the 1960s the Roman Catholic-led civil rights movement in Northern Ireland was inspired by events in the United States. Its initial focus was fighting discriminatory gerrymandering that had been securing elections for Protestant unionists. Later, internment of Catholic activists by the British government sparked both a civil disobedience campaign and the more radical strategies of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), resulting in the violent sectarian conflict that became known as the Troubles (1968–98). Nelson Mandela: 1994 election Nelson Mandela: 1994 election A high-profile civil rights movement led to the end of the South African system of racial segregation known as apartheid. The resistance movement began in the 1940s and intensified in the 1950s and ’60s, when civil rights as a concept was sweeping the globe, but it was forced underground as most of its leaders were imprisoned, and it did not regain strength until the 1980s. International pressure combined with internal upheaval led to the eventual lifting of the ban on the African National Congress, the major Black party in South Africa, and the release from prison of Nelson Mandela in 1990. Mandela later became the first Black president of South Africa, in 1994. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar: statue Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar: statue A more recent movement that has striking parallels to both the American civil rights movement and the South African struggle against apartheid is the civil disobedience and political activism of the Dalits in India. The Dalits—formerly known as "untouchables" and now officially designated Scheduled Castes—constitute some one-sixth of the Indian population. However, for centuries they were forced to live as second-class citizens, and many were not even considered to be a part of India’s varna system of social hierarchy. Dalit activism, including the efforts of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, led to great victories, including the election of Kocheril Raman Narayanan to the presidency. The fact that the president of India is elected by parliament, whose members come principally from the upper castes, underlines how much the mentality has changed. In addition to these international movements, many groups in the United States have been inspired by the successes of the American civil rights movement to fight for government protections, with varying degrees of success. Most notably, women, having gained the right to vote in 1920 via constitutional amendment, also have made many gains in the area of employment rights. The women’s rights movement has thus far been stopped short of passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have codified equal rights for women in the U.S. Constitution. Since its failure to be ratified in 1982, women have seen many gains in court decisions that ruled against sex discrimination and have seen the passing of legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which established a commission designed to investigate the persistence of the “glass ceiling” that has prevented women from advancing to top management positions in the workplace. A number of other groups were the focus of civil rights movements since the 1960s. In 1968 the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Civil Rights Act. Latinos and Asian Americans fought for increased civil rights based on a history of discrimination over race, religion, language, and immigrant status. There were some successes in the form of provisions for bilingual education and affirmative action programs. More recently, Arab Americans and the LGBTQ community took centre stage in the struggle to achieve equal protection and equal opportunity in American society. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Arab Americans suffered from heightened levels of discrimination and hate crimes and had to conform to government policies that restricted their liberties, as codified in the controversial USA PATRIOT Act of 2001. Dick Gregory, the comedian and civil rights crusader, died Saturday. He was 84. His family announced the news on his public Facebook page. "It is with enormous sadness that the Gregory family confirms that their father, comedic legend and civil rights activist Mr. Dick Gregory departed this earth tonight in Washington, DC," his son Christian Gregory said in the post. "The family appreciates the outpouring of support and love and respectfully asks for their privacy as they grieve during this very difficult time. More details will be released over the next few days." According to The Associated Press, Gregory, who was recently in and out of the hospital, died following a severe bacterial infection. NPR has not independently confirmed the cause of death. Gregory gained attention as a comedian in the early 1960s, and was the first black comedian to widely win plaudits from white audiences. Darryl Littleton, author of the book Black Comedians on Black Comedy, told NPR in 2009 that Gregory broke barriers with his appearances on television, just by sitting down: "Dick Gregory is the first to recognized — and he'll say it — the first black comedian to be able to stand flat-footed, and just delivered comedy. You had other comedians back then but they always had to do a little song or a dance or whatever, Sammy Davis had to dance and sing, and then tell jokes. Same with Pearl Bailey and some of the other comedians. But Dick Gregory was able to grow on television, sit down on the Jack Paar show — and sit on the couch and actually have a discussion, and that it never happened in the history of television." Gregory "opened the door" for Bill Cosby to rise to fame, Littleton said. He was noted for his political and social activism, beginning in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. He attended the historic 1963 March on Washington. Forty years later, Gregory told Tavis Smiley on NPR about his experience at the march, describing it as "joy. It was festivity, and as far as the human eye could see." Gregory talked in 2003 about his experience trying to integrate a restaurant in Mississippi before the march, showing he could inject some humor into a serious story: "We tried to integrate a restaurant, and they said, `We don't serve colored folk here,' and I said, `Well, I don't eat colored folk nowhere. Bring me some pork chops.' And then Ku Klux Klan come in, and the woman say, `We don't have no pork chops,' so I say, `Well, bring me a whole fried chicken.' And then the Klan walked up to me when they put that whole fried chicken in front of me, and they say, `Whatever you do to that chicken, boy, we're going to do to you.' So I opened up its legs and kissed it in the rump and tell you all, `Be my guest.' " He was direct in his language about race. He co-wrote with Robert Lipsyte the book nigger: An Autobiography — the "n" is lowercase — in 1964. Gregory explained to NPR why he chose that title: "So this word 'nigger' was one of the most well-used words in America, particularly among black folks. And I said, `Well, let's pull it out the closet. Let's lay it out here. Let's deal with it. Let's dissect it.' Now the problem I have today is people call it the N-word. It should never be called the N-word. You see, how do you talk about a swastika by using another term?" Gregory called the U.S. "the number-one most racist system on the planet. ... And I hope that America is willing to take this shoe of racism off and deal with racism and deal with sexism." He ran for mayor of Chicago in 1967 and ran for president in 1968 under the Freedom and Peace Party. He was on the ballot in eight states and got 47,133 votes, as Ken Rudin wrote for NPR. Hunger strikes were a frequent activist tool for Gregory. He told Juan Williams on Talk of the Nation that he went without solid food for two and a half years to protest the war in Vietnam. At one point, he said he weighed 365 pounds. But he lost a lot of weight fasting to protest the war. "I went on a fast, 40 days of water. Forty days of fruit juice. Forty days of fruit. And then 40 days of water again," Gregory told NPR. In 2000, Gregory went on a hunger strike to protest police brutality, long before the current wave of activism. Gregory promoted some conspiracy theories, telling NPR in 2005 about conspiracies involving the death of Princess Diana and the Sept. 11 attacks. "The FBI and the CIA is probably the two most evil entities that ever existed in the history of the planet," Gregory told Ed Gordon on News & Notes. He was also an inspired health guru, who doled out advice to many for better living, including celebrities like Michael Jackson, whom he advised during the singer's trial. The musician Questlove paid tribute to Gregory's healthful influence on Instagram, as "one of the first major black figures I saw advocating for a healthier lifestyle for black folks that were caught on unhealthy choices we've made in the name of cheaper survival options," he wrote. Gregory joked about getting old with Tavis Smiley in 2002: "Here's how you can tell when you're getting old. When someone compliment those beautiful alligator shoes you're wearing and you're barefooted. ... Or when your lady or man hollers downstairs, `Dear, run upstairs and let's have some sex,' and you yell back, `You know I can just do one or the other,' then you kind of be in trouble, you know." Gregory was married for more than 50 years and had 10 children. His daughter Ayanna Gregory released a song called "A Ballad For My Father" in 2007. She told NPR that her father was gone from home often, but it was because "human rights became his life." She sang: "As a little girl, I didn't know what you meant to this world. If I had a dime for every time somebody told me it's to save their lives and changed their minds. You planted seeds so long ago deep in me so I would grow." Gregory mused about death in 2006, when talking with Ed Gordon about the passing at the time of Coretta Scott King: "Let me just say this, whenever you die from this planet, I feel you go some place, and my trip going to be so long to wherever I go, I got instructions from my wife to put on a couple of backpacks." The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was a New Deal agency created in 1937 to combat rural poverty during the Great Depression in the United States. It succeeded the Resettlement Administration (1935–1937).[1] The FSA is famous for its small but highly influential photography program, 1935–44, that portrayed the challenges of rural poverty. The photographs in the FSA/Office of War Information Photograph Collection form an extensive pictorial record of American life between 1935 and 1944. This U.S. government photography project was headed for most of its existence by Roy Stryker, who guided the effort in a succession of government agencies: the Resettlement Administration (1935–1937), the Farm Security Administration (1937–1942), and the Office of War Information (1942–1944). The collection also includes photographs acquired from other governmental and nongovernmental sources, including the News Bureau at the Offices of Emergency Management (OEM), various branches of the military, and industrial corporations.[2] In total, the black-and-white portion of the collection consists of about 175,000 black-and-white film negatives, encompassing both negatives that were printed for FSA-OWI use and those that were not printed at the time. Color transparencies also made by the FSA/OWI are available in a separate section of the catalog: FSA/OWI Color Photographs.[2] The FSA stressed "rural rehabilitation" efforts to improve the lifestyle of very poor landowning farmers, and a program to purchase submarginal land owned by poor farmers and resettle them in group farms on land more suitable for efficient farming. Reactionary critics, including the Farm Bureau, strongly opposed the FSA as an alleged experiment in collectivizing agriculture—that is, in bringing farmers together to work on large government-owned farms using modern techniques under the supervision of experts. After the Conservative coalition took control of Congress, it transformed the FSA into a program to help poor farmers buy land, and that program continues to operate in the 21st century as the Farmers Home Administration. Origins Walker Evans portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs (1936) Arthur Rothstein photograph "Dust Bowl Cimarron County, Oklahoma" of a farmer and two sons during a dust storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma (1936) Dorothea Lange photograph of an Arkansas squatter of three years near Bakersfield, California (1935) The projects that were combined in 1935 to form the Resettlement Administration (RA) started in 1933 as an assortment of programs tried out by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. The RA was headed by Rexford Tugwell, an economic advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.[3] However, Tugwell's goal moving 650,000 people into 100,000,000 acres (400,000 km2) of exhausted, worn-out land was unpopular among the majority in Congress.[3] This goal seemed socialistic to some and threatened to deprive powerful farm proprietors of their tenant workforce.[3] The RA was thus left with only enough resources to relocate a few thousand people from 9 million acres (36,000 km2) and build several greenbelt cities,[3] which planners admired as models for a cooperative future that never arrived.[3] The main focus of the RA was to now build relief camps in California for migratory workers, especially refugees from the drought-stricken Dust Bowl of the Southwest.[3] This move was resisted by a large share of Californians, who did not want destitute migrants to settle in their midst.[3] The RA managed to construct 95 camps that gave migrants unaccustomed clean quarters with running water and other amenities,[3] but the 75,000 people who had the benefit of these camps were a small share of those in need and could only stay temporarily.[3] After facing enormous criticism for his poor management of the RA, Tugwell resigned in 1936.[3] On January 1, 1937,[4] with hopes of making the RA more effective, the RA was transferred to the Department of Agriculture through executive order 7530.[4] On July 22, 1937,[5] Congress passed the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act.[5] This law authorized a modest credit program to assist tenant farmers to purchase land,[5] and it was the culmination of a long effort to secure legislation for their benefit.[5] Following the passage of the act, Congress passed the Farm Security Act into law. The Farm Security Act officially transformed the RA into the Farm Security Administration (FSA).[3] The FSA expanded through funds given by the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act.[3] Relief work One of the activities performed by the RA and FSA was the buying out of small farms that were not economically viable, and the setting up of 34 subsistence homestead communities, in which groups of farmers lived together under the guidance of government experts and worked a common area. They were not allowed to purchase their farms for fear that they would fall back into inefficient practices not guided by RA and FSA experts.[6] The Dust Bowl in the Great Plains displaced thousands of tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and laborers, many of whom (known as "Okies" or "Arkies") moved on to California. The FSA operated camps for them, such as Weedpatch Camp as depicted in The Grapes of Wrath. The RA and the FSA gave educational aid to 455,000 farm families during the period 1936-1943. In June, 1936, Roosevelt wrote: "You are right about the farmers who suffer through their own fault... I wish you would have a talk with Tugwell about what he is doing to educate this type of farmer to become self-sustaining. During the past year, his organization has made 104,000 farm families practically self-sustaining by supervision and education along practical lines. That is a pretty good record!"[7] The FSA's primary mission was not to aid farm production or prices. Roosevelt's agricultural policy had, in fact, been to try to decrease agricultural production to increase prices. When production was discouraged, though, the tenant farmers and small holders suffered most by not being able to ship enough to market to pay rents. Many renters wanted money to buy farms, but the Agriculture Department realized there already were too many farmers, and did not have a program for farm purchases. Instead, they used education to help the poor stretch their money further. Congress, however, demanded that the FSA help tenant farmers purchase farms, and purchase loans of $191 million were made, which were eventually repaid. A much larger program was $778 million in loans (at effective rates of about 1% interest) to 950,000 tenant farmers. The goal was to make the farmer more efficient so the loans were used for new machinery, trucks, or animals, or to repay old debts. At all times, the borrower was closely advised by a government agent. Family needs were on the agenda, as the FSA set up a health insurance program and taught farm wives how to cook and raise children. Upward of a third of the amount was never repaid, as the tenants moved to much better opportunities in the cities.[8] The FSA was also one of the authorities administering relief efforts in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico during the Great Depression. Between 1938 and 1945, under the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration, it oversaw the purchase of 590 farms with the intent of distributing land to working and middle-class Puerto Ricans.[9] Modernization The FSA resettlement communities appear in the literature as efforts to ameliorate the wretched condition of southern sharecroppers and tenants, but those evicted to make way for the new settlers are virtually invisible in the historic record. The resettlement projects were part of larger efforts to modernize rural America. The removal of former tenants and their replacement by FSA clients in the lower Mississippi alluvial plain—the Delta—reveals core elements of New Deal modernizing policies. The key concepts that guided the FSA's tenant removals were: the definition of rural poverty as rooted in the problem of tenancy; the belief that economic success entailed particular cultural practices and social forms; and the commitment by those with political power to gain local support. These assumptions undergirded acceptance of racial segregation and the criteria used to select new settlers. Alternatives could only become visible through political or legal action—capacities sharecroppers seldom had. In succeeding decades, though, these modernizing assumptions created conditions for Delta African Americans on resettlement projects to challenge white supremacy.[10] FSA and its contribution to society The documentary photography genre describes photographs that would work as a time capsule for evidence in the future or a certain method that a person can use for a frame of reference. Facts presented in a photograph can speak for themselves after the viewer gets time to analyze it. The motto of the FSA was simply, as Beaumont Newhall insists, "not to inform us, but to move us."[citation needed] Those photographers wanted the government to move and give a hand to the people, as they were completely neglected and overlooked, thus they decided to start taking photographs in a style that we today call "documentary photography." The FSA photography has been influential due to its realist point of view, and because it works as a frame of reference and an educational tool from which later generations could learn. Society has benefited and will benefit from it for more years to come, as this photography can unveil the ambiguous and question the conditions that are taking place.[11] Photography program The RA and FSA are well known for the influence of their photography program, 1935–1944. Photographers and writers were hired to report and document the plight of poor farmers. The Information Division (ID) of the FSA was responsible for providing educational materials and press information to the public. Under Roy Stryker, the ID of the FSA adopted a goal of "introducing America to Americans." Many of the most famous Depression-era photographers were fostered by the FSA project. Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks were three of the most famous FSA alumni.[12] The FSA was also cited in Gordon Parks' autobiographical novel, A Choice of Weapons. The FSA's photography was one of the first large-scale visual documentations of the lives of African-Americans.[13] These images were widely disseminated through the Twelve Million Black Voices collection, published in October 1941, which combined FSA photographs selected by Edwin Rosskam and text by author and poet Richard Wright. Photographers Fifteen photographers (ordered by year of hire) would produce the bulk of work on this project. Their diverse, visual documentation elevated government's mission from the "relocation" tactics of a Resettlement Administration to strategic solutions which would depend on America recognizing rural and already poor Americans, facing death by depression and dust. FSA photographers: Arthur Rothstein (1935), Theodor Jung (1935), Ben Shahn (1935), Walker Evans (1935), Dorothea Lange (1935), Carl Mydans (1935), Russell Lee (1936), Marion Post Wolcott (1936), John Vachon (1936, photo assignments began in 1938), Jack Delano (1940), John Collier (1941), Marjory Collins (1941), Louise Rosskam (1941), Gordon Parks (1942) and Esther Bubley (1942). With America's entry into World War II, FSA would focus on a different kind of relocation as orders were issued for internment of Japanese Americans. FSA photographers would be transferred to the Office of War Information during the last years of the war and completely disbanded at the war's end. Photographers like Howard R. Hollem, Alfred T. Palmer, Arthur Siegel and OWI's Chief of Photographers John Rous were working in OWI before FSA's reorganization there. As a result of both teams coming under one unit name, these other individuals are sometimes associated with RA-FSA's pre-war images of American life. Though collectively credited with thousands of Library of Congress images, military ordered, positive-spin assignments like these four received starting in 1942, should be separately considered from pre-war, depression triggered imagery. FSA photographers were able to take time to study local circumstances and discuss editorial approaches with each other before capturing that first image. Each one talented in her or his own right, equal credit belongs to Roy Stryker who recognized, hired and empowered that talent. John Collier Jr. John Collier Jr.   Jack Delano Jack Delano   Walker Evans Walker Evans   Dorothea Lange Dorothea Lange   Russell Lee Russell Lee   Carl Mydans Carl Mydans   Gordon Parks Gordon Parks   Arthur Rothstein Arthur Rothstein   John Vachon John Vachon   Marion Post Wolcott Marion Post Wolcott These 15 photographers, some shown above, all played a significant role, not only in producing images for this project, but also in molding the resulting images in the final project through conversations held between the group members. The photographers produced images that breathed a humanistic social visual catalyst of the sort found in novels, theatrical productions, and music of the time. Their images are now regarded as a "national treasure" in the United States, which is why this project is regarded as a work of art.[14] Photograph of Chicago's rail yards by Jack Delano, circa 1943 Together with John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (not a government project) and documentary prose (for example Walker Evans and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), the FSA photography project is most responsible for creating the image of the Depression in the United States. Many of the images appeared in popular magazines. The photographers were under instruction from Washington, DC, as to what overall impression the New Deal wanted to portray. Stryker's agenda focused on his faith in social engineering, the poor conditions among tenant cotton farmers, and the very poor conditions among migrant farm workers; above all, he was committed to social reform through New Deal intervention in people's lives. Stryker demanded photographs that "related people to the land and vice versa" because these photographs reinforced the RA's position that poverty could be controlled by "changing land practices." Though Stryker did not dictate to his photographers how they should compose the shots, he did send them lists of desirable themes, for example, "church", "court day", and "barns". Stryker sought photographs of migratory workers that would tell a story about how they lived day-to-day. He asked Dorothea Lange to emphasize cooking, sleeping, praying, and socializing.[15] RA-FSA made 250,000 images of rural poverty. Fewer than half of those images survive and are housed in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. The library has placed all 164,000 developed negatives online.[16] From these, some 77,000 different finished photographic prints were originally made for the press, plus 644 color images, from 1600 negatives. Documentary films The RA also funded two documentary films by Pare Lorentz: The Plow That Broke the Plains, about the creation of the Dust Bowl, and The River, about the importance of the Mississippi River. The films were deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. World War II activities During World War II, the FSA was assigned to work under the purview of the Wartime Civil Control Administration, a subagency of the War Relocation Authority. These agencies were responsible for relocating Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast to Internment camps. The FSA controlled the agricultural part of the evacuation. Starting in March 1942 they were responsible for transferring the farms owned and operated by Japanese Americans to alternate operators. They were given the dual mandate of ensuring fair compensation for Japanese Americans, and for maintaining correct use of the agricultural land. During this period, Lawrence Hewes Jr was the regional director and in charge of these activities.[17] Reformers ousted; Farmers Home Administration After the war started and millions of factory jobs in the cities were unfilled, no need for FSA remained.[citation needed] In late 1942, Roosevelt moved the housing programs to the National Housing Agency, and in 1943, Congress greatly reduced FSA's activities. The photographic unit was subsumed by the Office of War Information for one year, then disbanded. Finally in 1946, all the social reformers had left and FSA was replaced by a new agency, the Farmers Home Administration, which had the goal of helping finance farm purchases by tenants—and especially by war veterans—with no personal oversight by experts. It became part of Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty in the 1960s, with a greatly expanded budget to facilitate loans to low-income rural families and cooperatives, injecting $4.2 billion into rural America.[18] The Great Depression The Great Depression began in August 1929, when the United States economy first went into an economic recession. Although the country spent two months with declining GDP, the effects of a declining economy were not felt until the Wall Street Crash in October 1929, and a major worldwide economic downturn ensued. Although its causes are still uncertain and controversial, the net effect was a sudden and general loss of confidence in the economic future and a reduction in living standards for most ordinary Americans. The market crash highlighted a decade of high unemployment, poverty, low profits for industrial firms, deflation, plunging farm incomes, and lost opportunities for economic growth.[19]
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