The US civil rights movement might be considered to have started with the abolitionist movement — the struggle to end slavery. During its early years, it gained very little traction. There were two reasons: Firstly, the US was overwhelmingly christian and the christian bible explicitly condones slavery. For example, Peter 2:18 states: “You who are slaves must submit to your masters with all respect. Do what they tell you—not only if they are kind and reasonable, but even if they are cruel.” Secondly, it was widely recognised that the southern states were economically dependent on slavery and that the abolition of slavery would motivate them to leave the union. Therefore, for practical reasons, moral arguments were largely ignored inside the US.
Two Americas
The US was then, as it is today, comprised of two Americas: one, modern and progressive; the other, racist and regressive. Each had orthogonal economic priorities.
The climate of the south made crops like tobacco, cotton, and sugar economically viable. Because they are labour-intensive crops, they are not suitable for small family farms. This mean that the south was seen by capitalists as attractive for large plantations, and plantations operate best when their labourers are not free to question working conditions and not free to wander away to establish their own farms. Labour shortages were eliminated by cross-Atlantic entrepreneurs.
In the North, the ground was rocky and the growing season short. This favoured subsistence farming suitable for families, and the parcelation of land was adapted to this expectation. Family farms needed no slaves. In the 19th century, the industrial revolution made factory work possible. Slavery was not needed because factory workers were treated little better than slaves. Unlike slaves, factory workers provided their own health care and paid for their own lodging. An injured worker could be simply fired and replaced. Due to its lack of profitability, slavery had no critical place in the North.
Economic differences were revealed when the North sought a series of tariffs against imported manufactured goods. This began at the end of the 18th century and continued throughout the first half of the 19th. This had the effect of either raising the cost of imported goods and promoting (lower quality) domestic goods, which was a price the North was willing to pay in order to protect its fledgling industries. However, for the unindustrialised South, there was no advantage. In fact, the disadvantage fell disproportionately there: low quality manufactured items from the North had little market abroad, while southern agricultural products did, so any retaliatory tariffs affected the export of raw goods, not industrial goods.
The concerns of the time were reflected in Congress’ voting record. Protective tariffs were enacted in 1789, 1816, 1824, and 1828 over the objections of the southern states, but slavery was not outlawed. On the contrary, the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 forced northern states to collaborate in the return of escaped slaves. In other words, the North seemingly had the ability to pass legislation that was opposed by the South, but it did not use that ability to outlaw slavery.
Turning Tides
The publication of the fictional novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in 1853 did much to establish the moral high ground of abolitionists. Written by a white woman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, it pits the institution of slavery directly against christianity. This was an incredible PR reversal. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was the best selling book of the 19th century, after the christian bible itself. With this achievement, the moral battleground was set.
The election of a northerner to the US presidency in 1860 (Abraham Lincoln) triggered the withdrawal of southern states from the union. The northern states realised that raw goods from the South would no longer be cheap once tariffs were placed on them by the new confederacy. Additionally, the South might well prefer to buy manufactured goods from the UK. After fighting two wars with Britain, the North did not wish to see an unfriendly nation along its southern border. Furthermore, it did not wish to see newly-admitted western states join the confederacy, thereby growing into a larger country. In other words, the worst had happened and the North no longer had a reason to tolerate slavery — and every reason to take the moral high ground. The US civil war then turned into a war over slavery. This serves as an important example to modern activists: when moral superiority is aligned against political and economic interests, it goes nowhere. When it can be aligned with economic and political interests, a juggernaut is created.
In 1863, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which effectively freed the slaves. This was nearly three years after the start of the war. It is clear from the wording that this was a strategic and not moral move. Firstly, it freed slaves only in the rebellious states. Secondly, the proclamation cites enlistment of blacks in the armed forces as the primary motivation. It was meant to deprive the South of a resource and put it at the disposal of the North. After all, this was a move made by a man who, only two years prior to the war, said, “I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. ”
This cynical decision nevertheless had enormous PR consequences. It turned a political struggle into a moral struggle. It made potential European supporters hesitant to aid the South, for fear of being seen as pro-slavery: European countries had long before banned it.
The Aftermath of the Civil War
The end of the civil war brought change to the lives of African Americans — but not much. Many former slaves became poverty-doomed share-croppers on land their ancestors once worked as slaves. African Americans were regularly barred from voting by bizarre laws and requirements known as Jim Crow laws. (Jim Crow was the theatrical persona of a white actor (Thomas Rice) playing a black slave which was popular in the South at the time.) Unfortunately, voting requirements were the least of the obstacles that blacks faced.
Southern blacks were subject to quasi-legalised terrorism: White nationalist militias, such as the Ku Klux Klan, tortured and killed African Americans who dared to assert their newly-won citizenship. Photographs of executions were not used as evidence to secure convictions — they were sold as postcards. The security environment for blacks in the south remained degraded for the next century and a half. However, the North was reluctant in the first century to intervene for fear of aggravating old wounds.
The last known (non-police) race-related execution in the South took place on February 23rd, 2020.
Black Activism
The 1950s witnessed a change in the attitudes of black Americans. The biggest reason was arguably their participation under arms in WWII. Blacks had fought for freedoms in Europe that they themselves were denied at home. A crystallizing event was the lynching of 14-year-old Emmet Till in 1955. He had reportedly whistled at a white woman, which led to his being beaten, mutilated, and shot dead. Tens of thousands attended his funeral. Photographs of his corpse were circulated in African-American newspapers in the North. This execution was much on the minds of every civil rights activist thereafter. (In 2020, following another such execution, the federal government passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. )
Montgomery Bus Boycott
In 1955, a civil rights activist named Rosa Parks was going home from her job as a seamstress. She was told to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. She refused. Her protest had been unplanned, but it ended with her arrest and national notoriety. Other African Americans had been arrested for doing the same, but Parks was morally pristine: As a wife, mother, steady job holder, and clean of any hint of scandal, she could represent unjustly injured black citizens. Her case was publicised by every channel available to activists at the time. Four days later, a boycott of public buses in Montgomery, Alabama began.
The Montgomery bus boycott was the least likely to succeed. Bus customers took the bus because they lacked alternatives, so participation in a boycott could not be expected to last long. In addition, the boycott targeted no weakness in its target, the city government. Finally, it was dangerous. Participants were threatened and beaten by whites. Boycott leaders were arrested, two of whose homes were firebombed. Taxis were fined by the town for participating. Cars used in car-pooling were denied insurance. The price for participation was unusually steep. Nearly every aspect of this boycott doomed it to failure.
Amazingly, the boycott held and participation grew. This was undoubtedly due to exhaustion from racial abuse and due to the charismatic influence of its leaders, but the core of the success was technical: A huge logistics effort was launched to be made to carpool and to acquire donations for carpool vehicles. Schedules were made, drivers recruited, cars acquired. This was all done with paper, pencil, and telephone. Women were no small part of this effort. The boycott would last over a year. It was truly phenomenal and attracted national attention.
The boycott failed to change opinions in Montgomery’s government or white population. However, it made Northerners more aware of the plight of black citizens in the South. In the end, it was a Supreme Court decision in 1956 that imposed desegregation on the South. The implementation would be long in coming.
Sit-ins
In 1960, four black students were denied service at the lunch counter of the Woolworth’s department store in Greensboro, North Carolina. They did not leave before closing time. They were not the first to sit in, but for unknown reasons, news of this particular incident spread very quickly. Within days, hundreds of protesters had arrived to join them. The sit-in spread to other stores, and then to other stores in other towns. The activists were harassed both by white police and white volunteers. However, the violence had the effect of strengthening the power of the sit-ins: customers began avoiding these ugly scenes and the restaurants lost a third of their revenue. In addition, images of ill-treatment garnered much sympathy in the North for the activists. Chain department stores, such as Woolworth’s, Kresge’s and McCrory’s, were among the first to end their participation in Southern apartheid.
The sit-ins benefited from one aspect in particular: students who arrived to participate were trained in non-violence practices. They were subjected, in a training environment, to endure the ill-treatment that white were ready to mete out. The students were even instructed how to dress. The effect was to cultivate the appearance and manners of the white northerners whose sympathy they very much needed. This was a PR victory.
The Freedom Riders
In 1961, white and black activists rode interstate buses into the South with the intention of demonstrating the South’s commitment to segregationist policies – in contempt of the US constitution. White police arrested the activists, often first permitting them to be beaten by white mobs. However, the activists achieved a PR coup: white northerners were shocked by violence against white activists, many of whom were northerers.
The Children’s March
By spring of 1963, the civil rights movement faced a crisis: the activists who were willing to get arrested had been, and Birmingham’s jails were filled. This had created a parallel crisis for the police chief; he even sought (unsuccessfully) to use a sports stadium as a jail.
Without further action, the movement risked losing momentum and dissolving back into the ocean of general injustice that was the existence of black Americans living in the South.
Fred Shuttlesworth, a Birmingham pastor and civil rights leader, sent out protesters in small groups. Rather than marching in a single phalanx to be beaten and arrested en route to the protest, these groups travelled by different routes to converge on the city center. There, even the beatings and arrests could not restore business as usual. The beatings themselves spoiled the shopping outings of white Southerners. Shuttlesworth had turned a civil rights crisis into a business crisis. Downtown businesses, already coming under pressure from peripheral shopping malls, begged the city government for peace.
Shuttleworth’s next move was to organise teen influencers to mobilise children to march. As adults were jailed and parents intimidated, children were the ideal next wave; they could not be fired for missing work. More significantly, they were susceptible to ideological manipulation; convincing them to march was a short-term project. Children between the ages of 7 and 18 were trained in non-violence techniques and were sent out on the 2nd of May 1963. They were subsequently met with fire hoses and attack dogs. For the white supremacists, it was a PR disaster. President Kennedy, stinging from ridicule by the Soviet Union, called the governor to express his displeasure regarding this Cold War set-back. Shuttlesworth had succeeded in turning a city protest into an international embarrassment.
Shuttleworth has been criticised, in 1963 and thereafter, for instrumentalising children in his campaign. The criticism is justified. It is also true that black children in the American South were already the victims of violence. The highly publicised torture and murder of Emmett Till in 1955 had in no way been forgotten in 1963. There was, in Shuttleworth’s mind, only the question of whether white journalists were present. This last matter, he took in hand.
Newspaper photographs of children brutalised by white police garnered much sympathy nationwide for the civil rights movement. Most importantly, those images reinvigorated the civil rights movement itself. Its ranks began to fill with new volunteers.
On the 11th of June, 1963, a month after the Children’s March, President Kennedy proposed new civil rights legislation which would cripple segregation. It would indeed become law one year later.
In the civil right’s movement’s darkest hour, Shuttlesworth saw opportunity. It was the turning point.
Civil Unrest
In the late 1960s, patience among African Americans was growing thin. The African American militia group, the Black Panthers, began following and observing traffic stops conducted by white policemen.
In predominantly black neighbourhoods, spontaneous rioting broke out, most notably in Chicago and Los Angeles. White Americans were shocked by the realisation that a monster was living in their own basement which could at any moment surge above ground.
On the 4th of April of 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King was assassinated. As a preacher of non-violence, the message conveyed by his murder was clear: violence works. Thus, riots broke out across 110 US cities. The response was swift: on the 11th of April, seven days later, a new civil rights act was passed by the federal government, this time, criminalising hate crimes. Nearly a century after the civil war, attacking someone due to race became a new, and more serious, category of crime.
What Was the Key to the Success of the Movement?
Fifty years after the mass protests of the civil rights movement, their goal — equality of citizens — cannot be declared achieved. Yet, the movement did have achievements. Its success is often attributed to charismatic leaders such as Martin Luther King. It is important to remember that such characters existed throughout the 19th century, namely, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Clearly, charisma, eloquence, logic, and emotional appeals were not enough.
White southerners were never convinced of the equal status of African Americans. No amount of pleading, begging, complaining, and shaming — in 200 years — had brought about change. Only the willingness of northern states to use military force was decisive. The first case is the brief military occupation that followed the civil war. The second case was President Dwight Eisenhower’s decision to send a thousand troops from the 101st Airborne division to enforce school desegregation in Arkansas. Another case took place in 1963, when President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert sent soldiers to Alabama in order to enforce the right of African Americans to attend desegregated schools. This created a PR quandary for Southern politicians. They would have to either confront the federal government (and lose) or be seen as being weak. The only way out was to permit desegregation but continue to make defiant statements.
Again, the following lesson cannot be emphasized too much: The place where blacks suffered the most was not the place where the PR battle was fought.
The US civil rights movement, to the extent that it has had any success, has been successful because it had inadvertently combined several elements at the same time:
- It had educated and eloquent spokespersons.
- It was able to document/photograph/film abuse for the mass media.
- It had many activists on the ground committed to principled resistance.
- Civil unrest made civil rights a more palatable alternative.
- The movement managed to prepare public opinion for possible military intervention.
The US civil rights movement, spanning two centuries, is the longest social movement in US history. If the US civil war was about slavery, then the civil rights movement is the bloodiest: more men died in the US civil war than in all its other wars combined. Thousands of blacks have been executed extra-judicially.
In the study of social movements, the civil rights example is the hardest case; it has much to teach.