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Civil Rights Movement: Solid South
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[One] major factor that helps explain the rise of the Civil Rights movement is the mechanization of agriculture in the South beginning in the 1930s. With the introduction of heavy machinery to plant and harvest their crops, Southern farmers were increasingly laying off the Black families who had worked on their farms for generations. As a result, from the 1930s on there was a Black exodus from the rural agricultural South to the urban, industrial South. This movement of Blacks into Southern cities in the 1940s and 1950s helped jump-start the lagging Southern attempts to industrialize like the North and the West. Realizing that they now had to attract Northern and global financial investors to invest in their plants and industries, Southern industrialists and business leaders began to move to end Jim Crow and racial violence; they hoped that by ending Jim Crow, they could convince Northern investors that the South was now a safe place to invest their money in; it was no longer a region dominated by racial conflict and social strife that everyone believed it was.
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The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s was not the first attempt to fight racism and segregation. There were protests and sometimes riots in both southern and northern communities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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SNCC played an influential role in another form of nonviolent direct action employed in the civil rights movement: sit-ins. These demonstrations often focused upon the whites-only lunch counters across the South. Armed only with a strict code of conduct that forbade them to strike back or curse their opponents, demonstrators endured jeers, spitting, and blows by angry whites. One tactic associated with this strategy was the jail-in — ... called jail, no bail — in which hundreds of people, many of them underage youths, arrived in waves at segregated lunch counters, were arrested for trespassing, and proceeded to overcrowd local jails. Jail-ins bogged down local governments and drew national attention to the cause. In the North, activists responded by picketing businesses, including the Woolworth chain of stores, that operated segregated lunch counters in the South.
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Students and seminarians in both the South and the North played key roles in every phase of the civil rights movement--from bus boycotts to sit-ins to freedom rides to social movements. The student initiated group The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee or SNCC (pronounced "snick") was a powerful force in the movement. The student movement involved such celebrated figures as John Lewis, the single-minded activist who "kept on" despite many beatings and harassments; James Lawson, the revered "guru" of nonviolent theory and tactics; Diane Nash, an articulate and intrepid public champion of justice; Bob Moses, pioneer of voting registration in the most rural--and most dangerous--part of the South; and James Bevel, a fiery preacher and charismatic organizer and facilitator. Other prominent student activists included Charles McDew, Bernard Lafayette, Charles Jones, Lonnie King, Julian Bond (associated with Atlanta University), Hosea Williams (associated with Brown Chapel), and Stokely Carmichael, who later changed his name to Kwame Toure.
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The civil rights movement has been called the Second Reconstruction, referring to the Reconstruction imposed upon the South following its loss in the Civil War. During this period, the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) — granting equal protection of the laws — and Fifteenth Amendment (1870) — giving the right to vote to all males regardless of race — were ratified, and troops from the North occupied the South from 1865 to 1877 to enforce the abolition of slavery. However, with the end of Reconstruction in 1877, southern whites again took control of the South, passing a variety of laws that discriminated on the basis of race. These were called Jim Crow laws, or the Black Codes. They segregated whites from blacks in education, housing, and the use of public and private facilities such as restaurants, trains, and rest rooms; they ... denied blacks the right to vote, to move freely, and to marry whites. Myriad other prejudicial and discriminatory practices were committed as well, from routine denial of the right to a fair trial to outright murder through lynching.
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The Johnson Administration's voting rights bill was greatly influenced by what had happened with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Justice Department began immediate negotiations with Everett Dirksen of Illinois, the Republican leader in the Senate, and a "consensus" on the provisions of the bill was reached early in the bill's consideration by Congress. As a result, the Senate debate on the voting rights bill ended early with a successful cloture vote on May 25, 1965. The southerners had barely gotten their filibuster going when the cloture vote stopped them. It was the second time in two years - but only the second time in the nation's history - that the Senate had voted to forcefully end debate on a civil rights bill.
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