“The Help” Notions the Civil Rights Era
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“The Help” notions The Civil Rights era Civil Rights Movement ● Movement with the goal of social justice ● Equal rights for African-Americans in the US ● Took place during the 1950s and 60s ● Mostly in the southern states ● To protect their rights of being free (Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments) ● Their protests stopped the pattern of segregating facilities by skin colour in the South ● Made it okay for people of different skin colours to be together and marry ● And achieved equal rights for all ● Important figures - Martin Luther King, Jr. - important leader of the movement; Rosa Parks - refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white customer; John Lewis - a civil rights movement leader and politician, helped plan the March on Washington ● Some major events - the Montgomery bus boycott, Greensboro sit-in, Freedom Rides Brown vs. Topeka ● The case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ● Linda Brown wanted to go to this school in Kansas, but had to walk a mile to an African-American school ● Her father got support from other parents too ● On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth amendment ● This decision declared that different schools for African-American and white students were very unequal ● The case was a consolidation of 4 suits by the NAACP and African-American students who weren’t allowed to study in all-white public schools ● In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1951), Briggs v. Elliott (1951), and Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (1952), U.S. district courts in Kansas, South Carolina, and Virginia ruled that African-Americans had not been deprived of equal protection because the schools they attended were comparable to the all-white schools or would become so after improvements ordered by the district court ● In Gebhart v. Belton (1952) the Delaware Court of Chancery found that the African-American schools were indeed inferior to all-white schools ● Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was argued on December 9, 1952 (by Thurgood Marshall). The case was reargued on December 8, 1953, to address the question of whether the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment understood it to be inconsistent with racial segregation in public education. The 1954 decision was inconclusive ● Chief Justice Earl Warren argued that the question of whether racially segregated public schools were unequal could be answered by considering “the effect of segregation itself on public education.” Citing the Supreme Court’s rulings in Sweatt v. Painter (1950) and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education (1950), which found inequalities between African-American and all-white schools at the graduate level, Warren held that such inequalities also existed between the schools in the case before him. He agreed with the Kansas district court that the policy of forcing African American children to attend separate schools because of their skin colour created a feeling of inferiority and made them less motivated to learn and deprived them of some educational opportunities. He concluded that “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” ● In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (II) (argued April 11–14, 1955 - decided May 31) Warren ordered the district courts and local school authorities to take to integrate public schools in their jurisdictions “with all deliberate speed.” ● Public schools in Southern states remained segregated until the late 1960s Little Rock Nine ● Little Rock Nine - group of African American high-school students who challenged racial segregation in the public schools of Little Rock, Arkansas ● Members - Melba Pattillo, Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Minnijean Brown, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls, Jefferson Thomas, Gloria Ray, Thelma Mothershed ● They became the centre of the struggle to desegregate public schools ● The events that followed their enrollment in Little Rock Central High School provoked national debate about racial segregation and civil rights ● Summer of 1957, the Little Rock Nine enrolled at Little Rock Central High School, which had been an all-white school. Their enrollment was supported by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which had declared segregated schooling to be unconstitutional ● Warned by the board of education not to attend the first day of school, the nine students arrived on the second day accompanied by a small interracial group of ministers ● They encountered a white mob in front of the school, who began shouting, throwing stones, and threatening to kill the students ● In addition, about 270 soldiers of the Arkansas National Guard, sent by Arkansas Gov. Orval Eugene Faubus, blocked the school’s entrance, he was a known enemy of integration ● Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Governor Faubus, and Little Rock’s mayor, Woodrow Mann, discussed the situation over 18 days, during which time the nine students stayed home. The students returned to school on September 23, entering through a side door to avoid the protesters ● When they got discovered, white protesters became violent, attacking African American bystanders as well as northern reporters ● The students were sent home, but they returned on September 25, protected by U.S. soldiers ● Despite Eisenhower sent the elite 101st Airborne Division = the “Screaming Eagles,” to Little Rock and placed the Arkansas National Guard under federal command ● The Little Rock Nine continued to get attacked by white students throughout their studies at Central High ● One of the students, Minnijean Brown, fought back and was expelled. The remaining eight students attended the school for the rest of the academic year. At the end of the year, in 1958, senior Ernest Green became the first African-American to graduate from Little Rock Central High School ● Governor Faubus was reelected in 1958 and he closed all of Little Rock’s schools ● Many school districts in the South followed Little Rock’s example, closing schools or starting “school-choice” programs that supported white students’ attending private segregated academies ● Little Rock Central High School did not reopen with a desegregated student body until 1960 The role of Rosa Parks ● Lived February 4, 1913, Tuskegee, Alabama, U.S. - October 24, 2005, Detroit, Michigan ● African-American civil rights activist ● Refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white customer and this sparked the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama ● MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT - protest against the bus system of Montgomery, Alabama; lead to a 1956 Supreme Court decision that declared Montgomery’s segregation laws on busses weren’t constitutional ● Busses were segregated in a way that African-Americans would sit at the back and white customers at the front, if the front ran out of seats, then African-Americans had to give up their seats ● Parks refused to move and got jailed for 381 days (bailed out by a civil rights activist) ● After Parks’ arrest, Jo Ann Robinson, a leader of the Women’s Political Counsil and E.D. Nixon and president of her local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Parks was also a secretary here, she also worked as a seamstress), called people to boycott ● For her role in igniting the campaign, which brought King to attention, Parks became known as the “mother of the civil rights movement.” ● In 1957 Parks moved with her husband and mother to Detroit, where she worked (1965 - 1988) as a member of the staff of Michigan Congressman John Conyers, Jr. ● She remained active in the NAACP ● The Southern Christian Leadership Conference established the annual Rosa Parks Freedom Award in her honour ● In 1987 she cofounded the Rosa and Raymond (her husband) Parks Institute for Self Development to provide career training for young people ● She recieved numerous awards, like the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1996) and the Congressional Gold Medal (1999) ● Her autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story (1992), was written with Jim Haskins NAACP, Jim Crow and disenfranchisement ● The NAACP = National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was established in 1909 and is America’s oldest and largest civil rights organization ● It was formed in New York City by white and black activists in response to violence against African-Americans ● And partially in response to the 1908 Springfield race riot in Illinois, in which two black men being held in a Springfield jail for alleged crimes against white people were transferred to a jail in another city, spurring a white mob to burn down 40 homes in Springfield’s black residential district, ransack local businesses and murder two African-Americans ● Founding members - white progressives Mary White Ovington, Henry Moskowitz, William English Walling, Oswald Garrison Villard; African-Americans as W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida Wells-Barnett, Archibald Grimke and Mary Church Terrell ● During the civil rights era in the 1950s and 1960s, the group won major legal victories and today they have more than 2,200 branches and some half a million members worldwide ● Some early members had been involved in the Niagara Movement, a civil rights group started in 1905 and led by Du Bois, a sociologist and writer ● In its charter they promised to get equal rights and eliminate racial prejudice, and to “advance the interest of colored citizens” in regard to voting rights, legal justice and educational and employment ● A white lawyer, Moorfield Storey, became the NAACP’s first president. Du Bois, the only black person on the initial leadership team, served as director of publications and research. In 1910, Du Bois started The Crisis, which became the leading publication for black writers ● In 1917, around 10,000 people in New York City participated in an NAACP-organized silent march to protest lynchings and other racist violence - one of the first mass demonstrations against racial violence in the U.S.