Read an Excerpt
Civil Rights Movement for Kids
A History with 21 Activities
By Mary C. Turck Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 2000 Mary C. Turck
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61374-051-4
CHAPTER 1
Let the Children Lead
Early Days, the 1950s
Segregation laws were the products of prejudice and, specifically, of racism. ... These laws also increased prejudice by separating people, so that they could not get to know one another and learn about their mistaken beliefs.
Introduction
Imagine laws ordering you not to eat with, ride the bus with, go to school with, or marry someone just because you and that person had different skin colors. Segregation, the separation of persons on the basis of skin color, was the law of the southern United States during the 1950s.
This chapter looks at segregation and the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement that ultimately dismantled segregation laws. The chapter also introduces courageous young people who dared to challenge segregation, and describes their struggles.
Legal segregation was both a product and a cause of prejudice. Prejudice means pre-judging another person or group of people, without regard to facts. For example, some adults say that young people are loud and irresponsible. That is a prejudice against all young people.
Racism is a set of prejudices against people whose skin color or ethnicity is different from your own. An ethnic group is a group of people who share common customs, language, values, and/or national origin.
Segregation laws were the products of prejudice and, specifically, of racism. The laws were made by white men who believed black people were inferior. Segregation laws made it easier to be prejudiced because the law gave respectability to prejudice. These laws also increased prejudice by separating people, so that they could not get to know one another and learn about their mistaken beliefs.
Back to the 1950s
Let's take a trip back in time, back some 50 years ago. Daily life was different then, for children as well as for adults. In 1950, girls wore dresses to school and boys wore pants — but not blue jeans. Children always spoke respectfully to adults. They addressed adults by their last names — "Mr. Johnson" or "Mrs. King." Most adults also addressed each other formally, using last names. This rule of respect was broken when white adults spoke to black adults. Then the white adults usually called the black adults by their first names. Sometimes, even more disrespectfully, they would call a black man "boy."
Fifty years ago, most mothers stayed at home. They took care of their children, homes, laundry, cooking, and cleaning. Women who worked outside the home had few choices. They worked at traditional "women's jobs," such as a cleaning lady or maid, office worker, teacher, librarian, or nurse. Employed women earned far less than men.
Black Americans were even more handicapped than white women in the work market. Many jobs were "for whites only." Black workers were kept in lower-paying jobs. Even if they were doing the same work as white workers, they were paid less.
Fifty years ago, there were no home computers, Internet, or video games. A new technology called television was sweeping the country. In 1946, only 6,000 television sets were manufactured. They showed only black-and-white images. By 1953, factories churned out seven million sets. Color had been introduced, though most televisions and most programs were still black-and-white. Parents worried that children spent more time in front of the television than they did on school and homework.
In 1950, there was not a single McDonald's restaurant in the United States. The first golden arches were built in Chicago in 1955. Rock and roll music began with Elvis Presley in the 1950s. Adults worried that his wild dancing and music would corrupt children.
Barbie was introduced in 1959. More than 200 million Barbie dolls were sold in the next 25 years. Like all other dolls on the market, Barbie was white. Black girls found no dolls that looked like them.
From 1948 to 1952, Harry Truman was president of the United States. Dwight D. Eisenhower followed him, serving from 1952 to 1960. People in the United States were deeply afraid of communism. Many people were fired from their jobs because they were suspected of being communists.
Segregation
Fifty years ago, all across the United States, black people and white people were segregated. Their homes, schools, churches, and social lives were completely separated from one another. Where there were large numbers of Mexican Americans or American Indians, they were also segregated from white people.
In the southern United States, segregation was actually the law. Throughout the South, the law forbade black people from eating in the same restaurants as white people. Black men and women taking the bus to work had to sit in the back. White people sat in the front. Even before they started school, black children learned that they were not allowed to use "white" drinking fountains or "white" bathrooms in gas stations. Black teens could not swim in public swimming pools or at public beaches reserved for whites. Even in old age, segregation separated senior citizens. The law made it a crime for an old black man and an old white man to play checkers together in the park.
In the northern United States, the laws usually did not require segregation. Even without such laws, people's lives were segregated. People of color were not allowed to buy or rent homes in the same neighborhoods as white people. Because they lived in segregated neighborhoods, children attended mostly-white or mostly-black schools.
Fifty years ago, Black Americans were even more handicapped than white women in the work market.
In the North as well as in the South, employers used color as a reason for hiring or not hiring people. For example, most northern police forces and fire departments refused to hire any people of color.
Even before they started school, black children learned that they were not allowed to use "white" drinking fountains or "white" bathrooms in gas stations.
Young people went to strictly segregated dances and social events. Friendships between black and white teens were forbidden by their elders. In many states, the law itself forbade marriage between black people and white people.
In the South, children attended strictly segregated schools from kindergarten on. Black schools got far less money than white schools. They had fewer books and worse buildings and playgrounds, if they had playgrounds at all. Teachers in black schools were paid less than teachers in white schools. The same school boards — made up of white men — ruled over black and white schools in each county.
Black parents and children protested against this inequality. They knew that segregation was legal. The Supreme Court, which makes the final judgment on whether laws passed by Congress or the states are constitutional, had said that segregation was legal as long as the segregated facilities were "separate but equal."
Black parents and children knew that their schools were anything but equal. They also knew it was dangerous to challenge the white people who ran the government. In South Carolina, Reverend J.A. DeLaine tried to get better education for black children. He and his wife and two sisters and a niece were all fired from their jobs. His house was burned to the ground while the fire department watched. His church was stoned. He was threatened with death and survived shotguns fired at him in the night. Finally, he had to flee the town where he had lived his whole life.
Other black people who challenged white power were lynched. When a mob kills someone without due process of law, it is called lynching. Black soldiers, returned from fighting for freedom and democracy during World War II, sometimes objected to being second-class citizens at home. Many were lynched by white mobs. During three weeks of the summer of 1946, six black war veterans were lynched in Georgia.
Despite the danger, some black and white people joined together to work for civil rights for black people. They formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the oldest and largest civil rights organization in the United States. The NAACP was organized in 1909, after rioting whites in Atlanta, Georgia, killed nearly 50 black people in three days in 1906.
Black people were required to use separate doors and seating areas in restaurants or cafes as this 1940 photograph from Durham, North Carolina, shows. Often, they could purchase food but had to take it outside the restaurant to eat.
The NAACP's Web site (www.naacp.org/) states the purpose of the organization:
The principal objective of the NAACP is to ensure the political, educational, social and economic equality of minority group citizens of the United States.
The NAACP is committed to achievement through non-violence and relies upon the press, the petition, the ballot, and the courts, and is persistent in the use of legal and moral persuasion even in the face of overt and violent racial hostility.
Many southerners hated the NAACP and considered it a "subversive" or "communist" organization. Many times, NAACP members in the South were threatened or beaten. Despite the danger, the NAACP continued its activities. During the late 1940s, NAACP lawyers filed lawsuits challenging segregated, unequal education in the South. One of these lawsuits began in 1947, in Prince Edward County, Virginia.
Barbara Johns Speaks Out
In 1947, black students attended Moton High School in the town of Farmville in Prince Edward County, Virginia. Moton did not have enough room for its black students. The county government built three tar-paper shacks as temporary classrooms. The shacks had no real walls, only wooden structures covered by a heavy, black paper.
Moton High School's history teacher had to drive the school bus, too. His other duties included building wood fires in the tar-paper shacks to heat them. The wood fires didn't keep students warm. All through the winter, they studied wearing their coats.
Moton High School had no cafeteria and no lockers. Its science classes did not have even a single microscope. The buses that brought students to school were hand-me-downs given to Moton by the white high school when it got new buses. Black parents asked for new schools. The county promised the black principal a new school, but it never kept this promise.
In the spring of 1951, Barbara Johns was a 16-year-old junior in high school. Johns was a student council member, as was her brother John. Johns had had enough of hand-me-down buses and ramshackle schools. She talked to her brother and to student council president Carrie Stokes and a few other students. Johns knew that action was difficult and dangerous. She and her friends met in secret. They gathered support slowly, and did not tell any adults of their plans.
Johns said that since their elders had not been able to get a decent school, it was time for teens to take action. She told her friends that they would not get a new school for themselves because change would take a long time. Maybe, Johns said, they could get a decent school for their little brothers and sisters.
On April 23, Johns and her classmates set their plans in action. They faked an emergency telephone call to the principal. He left the building to attend to the "emergency." Then they delivered notes "from the principal" calling all classes to a general assembly.
The 450 students and their teachers arrived in the auditorium. Johns stood up in front of the assembly. She announced that this was a special meeting to discuss school conditions. Teachers protested and tried to stop the meeting. Johns took her shoe off and pounded it like a gavel. She ordered teachers to leave and her friends escorted them out of the auditorium.
The NAACP was organized in 1909, after rioting whites in Atlanta, Georgia, killed nearly 50 black people in three days in 1906.
Johns said that since their elders had not been able to get a decent school, it was time for teens to take action.
The students listened to Johns's call for a decent school. They considered her explanation that it was up to them to act. They knew that they were entitled to an equal education. They knew that they should not have to go to class in tarpaper shacks. They also knew the dangers of demanding anything from the white people who ran the county government. They thought about the danger they would face if they took action and the injustice that they suffered so long as no one acted. Then all 450 students followed Johns out of school and on strike.
Johns and her group summoned lawyers from the NAACP. The lawyers thought they would be meeting with adults — they did not want to meet with children. They arrived in town in time to speak to a mass meeting attended by a thousand people. The NAACP lawyers explained that they could not help Johns and her community to get a new, but equal, segregated school. They wanted to do something even more radical than Johns had planned. The NAACP lawyers would sue for integrated schools for all the black and white children of Farmville!
Integration! Integration meant an end to segregation, the separation of people by skin color. Integration was beyond Johns's dreams, but she and the other students and their parents agreed. The NAACP lawyers filed a lawsuit. The Moton High School case was joined with lawsuits from other towns, including one filed in Topeka, Kansas.
In Topeka, a young girl named Linda and her parents believed that she should be able to attend the school closest to her home. They agreed to become part of the NAACP's legal challenge to segregation.
Three years later, the NAACP lawsuits finally reached the Supreme Court of the United States. By now the case was named Brown v. Board of Education. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that school segregation violated the Constitution of the United States. Separate schools were inherently unequal. The highest court in the country ordered that all public schools be integrated.
What happened to Johns while the law took its slow course? A few days after the student strike, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in her family's front yard. The Klan is an organization based on hatred of black people. The Klan also hates other people of color as well as Jews and Catholics. Cross-burnings are warnings that the Klan is ready to attack. Johns's parents hurried her out of town. They sent her to live with an uncle in Montgomery, Alabama.
Did Johns's organizing and protest win a victory? Yes, but that victory was a long time coming. Even after the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Prince Edward County refused to integrate its schools. Instead, public officials closed all the public schools for five years. White children attended private schools. Black children had no schools.
Across the South, school boards and government officials delayed desegregation. Black parents and children, helped by the NAACP, kept up steady pressure. Throughout the years of struggle, brave children carried the burden of grown-up hatred.
Ruby Bridges Goes to School
Ruby Bridges, age six, was the first black child to attend a previously all-white school in New Orleans in 1960. Bridges grew up in Louisiana. She had seven brothers and sisters. In 1960, school integration overshadowed their lives.
Bridges's father, Abon Bridges, did not want her to integrate the William Frantz Grade School. He feared for her future. Her mother, Lucille, insisted that Ruby must do it. Lucille Bridges wanted a better education for all her children.
In a conversation with a television reporter years later, Bridges remembered her first day of school.
Linda Brown attended a black elementary school. She had to travel more than two miles to the segregated school. A white school was just four blocks from her home.
That first morning I remember mom saying as I got dressed in my new outfit, "Now, I want you to behave yourself today, Ruby, and don't be afraid. There might be a lot of people outside this new school, but I'll be with you." That conversation was the full extent of preparing me for what was to come.
Throughout the years of struggle, brave children carried the burden of grown-up hatred.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Civil Rights Movement for Kids by Mary C. Turck. Copyright © 2000 Mary C. Turck. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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