Civil Rights Flashcards
What was different about segregation in the north and the south?
Segregation in the north was produced by discrimination.
Segregation in the south was produced by laws.
Give examples for segregation by discrimination.
Badly maintained buildings
Poor facilities
Schools and hospitals dealt with shortages of equipment and supplies
Blacks often had the worst paid jobs
Give examples for segregation through laws.
Jim Crow Laws:
Black children couldn’t go to white schools. Black schools had less state investment which my have no heating or textbooks.
Black people couldn’t eat in white restaurants.
There was segregation in buses.
Cinemas, theatres and churches were segregated.
What are federal laws?
Laws that cover the whole country
How was were federal laws passed in the 1950s?
The legislature is made up of the congress, which passes laws, and the laws cannot be passed until the Senate and the House of Representatives pass these.
The judiciary was made up of the supreme court, who can overrule state laws if unconstitutional.
The executive contains the President, who can control federal troops and can issue Executive Orders that are not passed by Congress.
How were state laws passed in the 1950s?
The legislature contained a State-Congress, a two-house system, like the federal system.
The judiciary contained the State Supreme Court, which is the highest court of appeal in a state.
The executive contained the governor, controlling state troops.
What were the attitudes towards black people in the South?
Southern white people were brought up to see black people as racially inferior, unintelligent and lazy.
Many black people worked on farms or as domestic servants, and few black people in Southern towns could find work in factories.
White people called black people by their first names, or ‘boy’ or ‘girl’.
White Southerners were unlikely to shake hands with a black person, as that’s a sign of equality.
White people who objected to discrimination faced the same violence that black Americans faced.
The white officials didn’t support complaints of black people, and are unfairly biased towards blacks in court, getting punished for crimes that they didn’t commit. Blacks had no power in court.
What was the first effect that added pressure onto the federal government to improve the quality of life of black people?
World War 2, the racial inequality was an embarrassment for the USA, and they went to war in 1941 to fight for freedom, and was also see as the leader of the ‘free world’.
How many Southern towns had black policemen in 1954?
143, in comparison to the very few of them before the war.
What percentage of black people were registered to vote in 1956?
20%, in comparison to the 3% before WWII.
How did white people stop black people from voting?
White employers threatened to sack black employees if they registered to vote or voted.
On voting and registration days white gangs gathered outside registration and voting places. They physically stopped black Americans from voting, and often beat them up for trying.
Black people who went to court to defend their right to vote (and the lawyers and civil rights activists who helped them) faced beatings or even murder.
States set their own rules for state elections. Some passed laws making it harder for black people to vote. Others said political parties were ‘private organisations’ that could choose their members.
Most states had a literacy qualification to register to vote, which involved either reading a passage of text or passing a written test. A common way of preventing black people from registering to vote was to give them a far harder passage to read, or written test to complete, than they gave to white people.
Give 7 reasons to why the civil rights movement grew in the 1950s.
Education (better education for blacks, led to professionalism).
Migration (poor blacks moved north, liberal whites moved south).
New ideas (research showed no races were genetically inferior, and segregated education did make black children feel inferior).
Second world war (seen integration abroad, some whites saw blacks as more able, having worked with them).
Television (people became more aware of racist injustice).
Southern cities grew (giving black people different job opportunities).
The cold war (this made the US government sensitive to international criticism about how black Americans were treated).
Did the civil rights movement in the 1950s have a bigger impact in the north or the south?
The north
When were the NAACP founded, and when did they set up the Legal Defence Fund?
1909, 1940
What was the purpose of the LDF?
To help wrongly-convicted black people appeal against their convictions, and in the south, they prosecuted white people who murdered black people. It also brought cases to enforce voter registration.
What was so significant about Plessy vs Ferguson?
It said that segregation was acceptable if the facilities provided were equal (decision by the Supreme Court in 1896).
What was the problem even though that the NAACP had fought and won every case they took to the Supreme Court in the 1950s against Plessy?
The locals could easily block it even though laws are passed. Even though legally black people had the same rights as white people, this wasn’t actually accurate in really life.
What did CORE do for the Civil Rights movement?
They held non-violent protests, like boycotts, pickets and sit-ins. CORE also trained members to not react when being spat at or sworn at, and how they should lie in when they would be attacked.
