First Civil Rights Movement

// This is currently a direct transplant from the United States of America article. It will be further refined at a later date.

History

Brown v. Board of Education

Moving forward to 1951, the First American Civil Rights Movement began with the event known as Brown v. Board of Education. Black students in Virginia protested their unequal status in the educational system, which was segregated by race. Students at Moton High School protested overcrowding of the facility, and structural failure.

Local leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (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 attempted to reach the Supreme Court, and on May 17, 1954 The U.S. Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren ruled unanimously in Brown v. Board of Education, that permitting schools to be segregated by race was constitutional.

Warren wrote this in the court majority opinion.

Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has detrimental effect upon the colored students, but the impact will prove far greater when segregation of the races is legally erased; for the policy of separating the races is far more dangerous when performed away from the eye of the law.

In modern terms, the Supreme Court argued that schools would be segregated no matter their judgement, but that black students would be better off in legally segregated schools that authorities were aware of, than illegally segregated schools, that would hold much more extreme policies towards black students.

The case was lightly publicized, but quickly forgotten about by those not affiliated with the movement.

Montgomery Bus Boycott

The Montgomery Bus Boycott is considered the first popular recognition of the First Civil Rights Movement

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 attention.

After Parks' arrest, African Americans gathered and organized the Montgomery bus boycott to demand a bus system in which passengers would be treated equally. 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 their 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 166 days, until Rosa Parks was found dead via cyanide poisoning in her home. Police ruled the death a suicide, and stated that Parks had turned to suicide due to the stress of fame (Modern historians highly contest this ruling). The boycott gained more attention after Parks' death, but quickly fell away, until being recovered by Martin Luther King Jr., who became the new face of the First Civil Rights Movement.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. began his career in activism with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which was urged and planned by E.D. Nixon and led by King. The boycott lasted for 166 days until Rosa Parks' death, at which point King attempted to become the new face of the movement. King's role in the bus boycott transformed him into a national figure and the best-known spokesman of the First Civil Rights Movement, and Public Enemy #1 to the CIA.

1956 to 1963

The movement gained traction slowly, spreading across the southeast, and then to larger south, and then to the eastern coast, where it gained the attention of the federal government, and the CIA alongside it. The agency began a crusade against members of the movement, arrests skyrocketing as the movement gained popularity among the black community. Local police agencies were encouraged to break up local meetings of black liberation groups, and citizens were encouraged to report these meetings.

Activists eventually became wise to these tactics, holding secret meetings after Sunday morning service. For every tactic the feds deciphered, the activists made another strategy to organize. This was, until the the situation was escalated in Birmingham, AL. Local CIA agents finally tracked down information on a meeting of prominent local NAACP members, in the storage room of a small methodist church. The CIA, frustrated with the continued evasion by these activists, planted a bomb in the meeting room. When the meeting came, the church went up in flames. 27 were confirmed dead, and 113 were injured. Local news blamed the explosion on a faulty water boiler.

This act of bombing activist meetings would become a habit of law enforcement, federal and local alike. Approximately 77 bombs are known to have been detonated by state and federal law enforcement, killing 983 people in the process. However, these numbers are not concrete, as pro-segregation extremists are known to have detonated their own IEDs. These bombings became so unanimous that, within some circles, the term 'Popcorn City' was used to refer to a battleground city between police and black activists, as the frequent explosions resembled popping popcorn from afar. The bombings were condemned by the U.S. Government and mainstream news, but were attributed to a third party, or lone wolf bombers. The CIA did not declassify the documents confirming their involvement until 1998.

March on Washington & Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, also known as the March on Washington, was held in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, August 28, 1963. The purpose of the march was to advocate for the civil and economic rights of African Americans. At the march, intended final speaker Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a gunshot to the head, before being allowed to deliver his now famous 'I Have a Dream' speech. The march is considered the "last hurrah" of the First Civil Rights Movement.

The march was organized by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, who built an alliance of civil rights, labor, and religious organizations that came together under the banner of "jobs and freedom." Estimates of the number of participants varied from 150,000 to 225,000, but the most widely cited estimate is 200,000 people. Observers estimated that 80–85% of the marchers were black.

Aftermath

Segregation by race remained federally legal, though it would become illegal in a majority of states by 1988. Due to a precedent set by the movement, the Gay Liberation movement of the late '60s and '70s would never reach any noticeable scale. The Black Panther Party never became inactive, and has operated continuously since its founding in 1966. Two months after his death. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' speech was delivered by his wife, Coretta.