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Week 7 · Chapter

Chapter 7 — African American Experiences II: Civil Rights and Black Freedom Movements

Introduction to Ethnic Studies Free sample edition

The module's primary reading · ~35–45 minutes · Objective 5 (analyze African American experiences from slavery through emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, and the civil rights and Black freedom movements, reading the laws and court decisions that shaped them), Objective 2 (define and distinguish the course's core concepts: race, ethnicity, and nationality; racialization and racial formation; ethnocentrism; prejudice, individual and institutional discrimination, and structural inequality; and intersectionality as distinct from adding identities together) · Read it first this week; the lecture, the slides, the tutorial, the quiz, and the workshop all build on it.

In plain language

This chapter follows the Black freedom movement from a 1954 Supreme Court decision about schools to a 1968 law about housing. You will read how ordinary people organized, through a bus boycott and a long push for new laws, and what those laws changed. You will also meet redlining (refusing loans to people because of the neighborhood they live in), and you will work a small, made-up lending table to see how one rating rule can sort families without anyone intending it. The chapter separates de jure segregation (separation a law requires) from de facto segregation (separation that exists in practice without such a law). It ends with Black Power (a strand of the movement that stressed self-determination and community pride) and the founding of Black studies, the field that helped start this course.

Why you already care about this

Picture a city bus route (an illustrative scene). It runs 12 stops through downtown and the busy shopping streets. Then it turns and skips one neighborhood entirely. Nobody on the bus is rude to you. Nobody posts a sign. The route map does the work.

If you live in that skipped neighborhood, the trip to a job or a clinic takes longer every single day. You may never meet the person who drew the route. Yet the map shapes your week as surely as any rule. This chapter asks how people in the 1950s and 1960s changed rules like that, and what the new laws changed and left in place.

By the end of this chapter you will be able to:

explain what Brown v. Board of Education (1954) held, what Brown II (1955) ordered, and why segregation did not end at once;
describe the Montgomery bus boycott as an organized movement and place it on the movements thread;
state what the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 did, and work out the years between them and the laws they answered;
define redlining and work the illustrative lending table's approval rates, gap in percentage points, and ratio;
distinguish de jure from de facto segregation, and read a lending rule as institutional discrimination;
describe Black Power and the founding of Black studies.

Carry this sentence with you: A rule can sort people — no single person has to intend it.

Where we are

Already covered: Week 1 gave you the field's questions and its origins in the 1968 and 1969 strikes. Week 2 defined prejudice, discrimination, institutional discrimination, and structural inequality, and sorted the concept-sorting set. Week 3 taught the theories of belonging. Weeks 4 and 5 read Native nations' history and survivance. Week 6 read slavery, emancipation, the Reconstruction amendments, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Jim Crow, and the Great Migration.
This week: Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Montgomery bus boycott, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, redlining and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, de jure and de facto segregation, and Black Power and Black studies.
How they connect: Week 6 showed how law built segregation; this week shows how people organized to take those laws apart, and why some of what the laws built outlasted them.
Where we're going next: Week 8 is the midterm week. It reviews Weeks 1 to 7 by the one distinction each topic asks for and adds oral history as evidence, a method you have been practicing on the archive all term.

Two earlier ideas carry this chapter. From Week 2: institutional discrimination is when an organization's rules or routine practices produce unequal treatment, whether or not anyone intends it, and structural inequality is unequal outcomes built up across many institutions over time. From Week 6: in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) the Supreme Court upheld state-required separation, the "separate but equal" doctrine, and former Confederate states wrote literacy tests into law to block Black voters despite the 15th Amendment (1870).

A word on names, said once. Black and African American are both in common use. Black is the broader term and includes people of recent African and Caribbean origin. This chapter uses both.

1. Read Brown v. Board of Education: a ruling is not the end of the story

Think of a school rule that changes in the spring. The new rule is printed in the handbook, but in the fall some classrooms look the same. A rule on paper and a change in the building are two different things.

In 1954 the Supreme Court changed the rule for public schools across the country. In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Court held unanimously that "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." That holding overruled the "separate but equal" doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) for public schools.

Brown v. Board of Education (1954) — the Supreme Court decision that held unanimously that "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal", overruling the separate but equal doctrine for public schools.
Brown II (1955) — the Court's follow-up order telling the states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed".

Worked example — placing Brown on the timeline. Work out how long "separate but equal" stood in public schools.

Plessy v. Ferguson. The Court upheld state-required separation in 1896.
Brown v. Board of Education. The Court overruled it for public schools in 1954.
The gap. 1954 − 1896 = 58 years.

In words: Brown v. Board of Education (1954) overruled Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) for public schools, 1954 − 1896 = 58 years later. A student who started first grade in 1896 could have had grandchildren in school before the Court changed course.

Now read what came next. In Brown II (1955), the Court told the states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed". Those words set no deadline, and the order met considerable resistance. Here is the honesty note every reader of Brown needs: the decision changed the law, but it did not change every school at once.

Brown also sits on one of the course's cross-group threads. The separate-schools thread (Dataset F) runs from the federal Indian boarding schools you read in Week 4 to Brown v. Board of Education (1954). In Week 9 you will add another case to that thread and read how it relates to Brown.

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) Think of a rule at a school or job that changed on paper before it changed in practice. What stood between the new rule and the change?
(b) "With all deliberate speed" sets no date. Why might a court choose words like that, and who gains from the delay?

Misconception check. Students often think Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ended segregation at once. That is tempting, because the decision is famous and its words are strong. But Brown II (1955) set no deadline, and implementation met considerable resistance. The cure: read Brown for what it held, then ask what it took to carry it out.

2. Trace the Montgomery bus boycott: a movement, not a single act

Picture a group of coworkers who all decide to stop eating at one cafe until it changes a rule. One person skipping lunch changes nothing. Hundreds of people skipping lunch, every day, for a year, is a different matter. That is the plain idea of a boycott: people refuse, together, to buy or use something until it changes.

The civil rights movement is the organized, mass effort of the 1950s and 1960s to end segregation and win equal rights under law for Black Americans. It worked through boycotts, marches, lawsuits, and voter registration. One of its best-known actions began on a city bus.

In December 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama. Black residents of Montgomery then refused to ride the city's segregated buses. The Montgomery bus boycott lasted 381 days. It ended in December 1956, after the Supreme Court upheld a ruling that bus segregation violated the 14th Amendment.

Read that last sentence slowly. The boycott and the courts worked together. People walked and shared rides for more than a year, and a ruling based on the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause, which you read in Week 6, gave the change its legal force.

You will not be quizzed on the boycott's length. What matters is its shape: a movement is many people acting over time, not one person on one day.

Worked example — placing the boycott on the movements thread. Use the course's movements thread (Dataset F).

The boycott. It began in 1955, the year after Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
The campus strikes. The San Francisco State strike began in 1968, which you met in Week 1.
The span. 1968 − 1955 = 13 years separate the two movements on the thread.

In words: the movements thread runs from a bus boycott in 1955 to a campus strike in 1968, 13 years apart, and both are organized actions by many people, not single acts.

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) Think of a time a group you belonged to changed a rule by acting together. What made the group hold together?
(b) A boycott costs the people who join it, too. What might a family in Montgomery have given up to keep it going?

Misconception check. Students often think the boycott was one woman's single act of refusal. That is tempting, because one arrest is easy to picture. But the boycott was an organized refusal by a whole community that lasted 381 days and ended with a court ruling. The cure: name the people who kept acting, not only the person who started it.

3. Read the 1964 law and the 1965 law: rights written into federal law

Think of a restaurant with a sign that says who may sit at the counter. Or think of a voting office that hands one person an easy reading test and another person a hard one. In Week 6 you saw rules like these written into state law. This section reads the two federal laws that outlawed them.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in employment and in places of public accommodation, among other areas. A place of public accommodation is a business that serves the public, such as a restaurant, a hotel, or a theater.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 enforced the 15th Amendment and banned literacy tests as a condition of voting.

Worked example — measuring how long a promise waited. Work two gaps on the timeline.

The 15th Amendment. It was ratified in 1870 and barred denying the vote "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude".
The Voting Rights Act. It came in 1965 and banned the literacy tests that had blocked Black voters.
The first gap. 1965 − 1870 = 95 years passed before the law that enforced the amendment.
The second gap. Brown v. Board of Education came in 1954 and the Civil Rights Act in 1964, so 1964 − 1954 = 10 years.

In words: the 15th Amendment promised the vote in 1870, but it took 95 years and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to ban the literacy tests that blocked it, and 10 years passed between Brown and the 1964 law.

Notice the pattern from Week 6. A right on paper (the 15th Amendment) was narrowed by state law in practice (literacy tests). The 1965 law closed that gap by banning the tests. That is the same move you saw when you compared the 15th Amendment with the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) A right promised in 1870 was enforced in 1965. What would you want to know about the people who lived in between?
(b) Why might a law need to name a specific practice, such as literacy tests, instead of only repeating a promise?

Misconception check. Students often think the civil rights laws ended discrimination the day they were signed. That is tempting, because the laws are clear about what they outlaw. But a law is enforced over time, and some of what earlier rules built did not disappear when the rules did. The cure: read each law for what it made unlawful, then ask what it could not undo.

4. Work the lending table: how redlining sorts neighborhoods

Picture a bank with a big map on the wall. Each neighborhood is shaded with a letter rating. Before anyone reads your application, the loan officer checks where you want to buy. Your own record matters less than the color of the block.

That is the plain idea behind redlining.

Redlining is refusing loans or other credit to people because of the neighborhood they live in, whatever their own creditworthiness.

The word has a history. In the 1930s the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, a federal agency created after the Great Depression's mortgage crisis, drew maps that graded city neighborhoods A through D by the racial, ethnic, and economic characteristics of residents. The lowest grade was outlined in red. We describe the real maps in words. To see how a rating rule works, we use a model.

The course's lending table (Dataset D) is an illustrative model in the style of those maps. It is not a reconstruction of any real city or lender. In it, a city's 50 neighborhoods are graded A to D, and lenders approve loans by the letter. From here on we call each letter a rating, so an A-rated neighborhood is one the map put at the top.

The table below lets you see every count the worked example uses.

Illustrative lending table: neighborhoods, applications, and approved loans by rating (a model, not a real city)
Rating	Neighborhoods	Applications	Approved
A	10	200	180
B	15	300	240
C	15	300	150
D	10	200	20
Total	50	1,000	590

Approval rate — the share of loan applications approved: approved loans ÷ applications × 100, a percent.
Percentage point — the unit for a difference between two percentages.

Worked example — the illustrative lending table. Work it step by step, like a teacher at a whiteboard.

Check the totals. 10 + 15 + 15 + 10 = 50 neighborhoods; 200 + 300 + 300 + 200 = 1,000 applications; 180 + 240 + 150 + 20 = 590 approved.
Rating A. 180 ÷ 200 × 100 = 90 percent.
Rating B. 240 ÷ 300 × 100 = 80 percent.
Rating C. 150 ÷ 300 × 100 = 50 percent.
Rating D. 20 ÷ 200 × 100 = 10 percent.
Overall. 590 ÷ 1,000 × 100 = 59 percent.
The gap. 90 − 10 = 80 percentage points between rating A and rating D. It is a difference between two percentages, so it is in percentage points, not percent.
How many times as often. 90 ÷ 10 = 9, so an applicant in an A-rated neighborhood is approved 9 times as often as one in a D-rated neighborhood.
Per neighborhood. Rating A: 180 ÷ 10 = 18. Rating B: 240 ÷ 15 = 16. Rating C: 150 ÷ 15 = 10. Rating D: 20 ÷ 10 = 2.
The ratio. 18 ÷ 2 = 9, so A-rated neighborhoods receive approved loans at 9 to 1 against D-rated neighborhoods.

In words: an applicant in an A-rated neighborhood is approved 90 percent of the time, versus 10 percent in D-rated neighborhoods, a 9-fold difference and a gap of 80 percentage points, and A-rated neighborhoods receive 18 approved loans each against 2 in D-rated neighborhoods, a ratio of 9 to 1.

Now name the concept. Every lender follows the same rating. No single lender needs to intend the result for the result to be unequal. That is institutional discrimination, the pattern of N1 in the concept-sorting set (Dataset E): "A lender follows a written rule that rates every loan in a D-rated neighborhood as too risky, no matter who applies." The decades of lower home values, less family wealth, and thinner school budgets that follow are structural inequality, the pattern of S1: homes in once-redlined areas are worth less, families there have less wealth to pass on, and schools funded by local property taxes have less money.

Then hear the rule from the inside. E2 (Dataset A, illustrative) is a woman whose family moved north in the Great Migration in the 1940s, interviewed in the 1990s.

"In the new city nobody told us where to sit, but there were neighborhoods where the bank would not lend to us. My mother said it was different, not finished." (E2, illustrative)

The table shows the rule her family met from the outside. Her line shows it from the inside.

The law answered in 1968. The Fair Housing Act of 1968, Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, made discrimination in the sale, rental, or financing of housing unlawful. It came 1968 − 1964 = 4 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The reading in one plain sentence: the lending rule is institutional discrimination, because every lender applies the same rating and D-rated applicants are approved 10 percent of the time against 90 percent in A-rated neighborhoods, a gap of 80 percentage points, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 made that kind of lending discrimination unlawful without undoing the inequality it had already built.

A caveat about the model: the table's numbers are engineered so the arithmetic is clean. They teach how a rating rule works. They are not a count from any real city.

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) Think of a rating you have been given by where you live, such as an insurance quote or a delivery fee. What did the rating know about you, and what did it miss?
(b) If you were a loan officer told to follow the rating, what would you need to see to notice the rule was unfair?

Misconception check. Students often think redlining was only private prejudice, a few bankers who disliked certain families. That is tempting, because discrimination is easy to picture as one person's choice. But the 1930s maps were drawn by a federal agency, and in the table every lender follows the same rule with no ill will required. The cure: look for the rule, not only the person.

5. Draw the line between de jure and de facto segregation

Think about two schools in one town. In the first town, a law says which children go to which school. In the second town, no law says so, but a highway splits the town and the attendance boundary follows the highway. The children on each side of the road end up in different schools anyway.

De jure segregation is separation required by law, like the school laws Brown v. Board of Education (1954) struck down.
De facto segregation is separation that exists in practice without a law requiring it, often built by housing patterns and lending.

Worked example — sorting two cases. Read each case and ask: does a law require the separation?

A state law assigns Black and white children to separate schools. A law requires it, so it is de jure segregation. This is the kind of law Brown struck down.
A school boundary drawn along a highway (illustrative) puts one neighborhood's children in one school and the other side's children in another. No law names any group, but the boundary and the housing on each side do the sorting, so it is de facto segregation.
Where the housing came from. If the neighborhoods on each side were shaped by lending ratings like those in the illustrative table, the de facto line was built by a rule. It did not happen by accident.

In words: de jure segregation is written in a law; de facto segregation is built by practices such as lending and boundaries, and that makes it a product of choices, not of chance.

This distinction also cures a second wrong turn. Many people picture the civil rights movement as only Southern. But E2's northern city had no posted seating rules, and the bank's map still sorted where families could buy. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 is a national law. And the strikers who demanded Black Studies in 1968 and 1969 were in California. The freedom movement answered both kinds of segregation, wherever they were.

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) Look at a map of a place you know. Where does a road, a rail line, or a river divide one part from another, and who decided where it went?
(b) Why might de facto segregation be harder to challenge in court than de jure segregation?

Misconception check. Students often think de facto segregation is accidental, the way people happen to settle. That is tempting, because no law is posted. But housing patterns were shaped by rules like the lending ratings, and boundaries are drawn by people. The cure: when no law requires the separation, look for the practice that built it.

6. Name Black Power and Black studies: self-determination and a new field

Think of a neighborhood group that stops asking an outside agency for help and starts running its own after-school program. The members pick the books, hire the tutors, and teach the history they think their children need. The plain idea is control over your own community's institutions.

Black Power, a phrase popularized in 1966, named a strand of the Black freedom movement that stressed self-determination, community control, and cultural pride.
Black studies is the academic field that studies the history, cultures, and experiences of people of African descent.

Read the two together. Black Power asked for community control. On campuses, that ask became a demand for courses and departments that studied Black history and life. At San Francisco State, the strikers of 1968 and 1969 demanded a Black Studies department, one of the four departments in the College of Ethnic Studies you met in Week 1.

That makes this a fitting place to close the African American unit. The movement this chapter traces did not end with new federal laws. It also built a field of study, and that field is one of the roots of the course you are taking now.

Here is a limitation to keep in view. Black Power was one strand of the movement, not the whole of it, and people within the movement disagreed about methods and goals. Reading it as a strand lets you see both its demands and the wider movement around it.

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) Think of a class or club that taught you history you did not get elsewhere. Who started it, and why?
(b) Why might students in 1968 and 1969 have demanded a department, not a single course?

Misconception check. Students often think Black Power and the civil rights movement were two unrelated stories. That is tempting, because they are often taught in separate chapters. But Black Power was a strand of the same Black freedom movement, and the campus strikes that founded Black studies grew out of the same years. The cure: read both as parts of one movement with more than one strategy.

Key terms

Brown v. Board of Education — The Supreme Court decision that held unanimously that "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal", overruling the separate but equal doctrine for public schools. (first used: 1. Read Brown v. Board of Education: a ruling is not the end of the story)
Brown II — The Supreme Court's follow-up order telling the states to desegregate their schools "with all deliberate speed"; the order met considerable resistance, so segregation did not end at once. (first used: 1. Read Brown v. Board of Education: a ruling is not the end of the story)
Civil rights movement — The organized, mass effort of the 1950s and 1960s to end segregation and win equal rights under law for Black Americans, through boycotts, marches, lawsuits, and voter registration. (first used: 2. Trace the Montgomery bus boycott: a movement, not a single act)
Montgomery bus boycott — The organized refusal of Black residents of Montgomery, Alabama, to ride the city's segregated buses, which began after Rosa Parks was arrested in December 1955 and lasted 381 days, ending after the Supreme Court upheld a ruling that bus segregation violated the 14th Amendment. (first used: 2. Trace the Montgomery bus boycott: a movement, not a single act)
Civil Rights Act of 1964 — The federal law that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in employment and in places of public accommodation, among other areas. (first used: 3. Read the 1964 law and the 1965 law: rights written into federal law)
Voting Rights Act of 1965 — The federal law that enforced the 15th Amendment's bar on denying the vote by race and prohibited literacy tests as a condition of voting. (first used: 3. Read the 1964 law and the 1965 law: rights written into federal law)
Redlining — Refusing loans or other credit to people because of the neighborhood they live in, whatever their own creditworthiness; the word comes from the 1930s lending maps that outlined the lowest-graded neighborhoods in red. (first used: 4. Work the lending table: how redlining sorts neighborhoods)
Home Owners' Loan Corporation — A federal agency created in the 1930s in response to the Great Depression's mortgage crisis, which drew maps that graded city neighborhoods A through D by the racial, ethnic, and economic characteristics of their residents. (first used: 4. Work the lending table: how redlining sorts neighborhoods)
Approval rate — The share of loan applications that a lender approves, found by dividing approved loans by applications and multiplying by 100 to give a percent. (first used: 4. Work the lending table: how redlining sorts neighborhoods)
Percentage point — The unit for a difference between two percentages: an approval rate of 90 percent against one of 10 percent is a gap of 80 percentage points, not 80 percent. (first used: 4. Work the lending table: how redlining sorts neighborhoods)
Fair Housing Act of 1968 — Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which made it unlawful to discriminate in the sale, rental, or financing of housing on account of race, color, religion, or national origin. (first used: 4. Work the lending table: how redlining sorts neighborhoods)
De jure segregation — Separation of groups that a law requires, such as the state school laws that the Supreme Court struck down in 1954. (first used: 5. Draw the line between de jure and de facto segregation)
De facto segregation — Separation of groups that exists in practice without a law requiring it, often built by housing patterns, lending rules, and school boundaries rather than by accident. (first used: 5. Draw the line between de jure and de facto segregation)
Black Power — A phrase popularized in 1966 that named a strand of the Black freedom movement stressing self-determination, community control, and cultural pride. (first used: 6. Name Black Power and Black studies: self-determination and a new field)
Black studies — The academic field that studies the history, cultures, and experiences of people of African descent; at San Francisco State the strikers of 1968 and 1969 demanded a Black Studies department. (first used: 6. Name Black Power and Black studies: self-determination and a new field)

Summary

Brown v. Board of Education (1954) held that separate schools are inherently unequal.
Brown II (1955) set no deadline, and segregation did not end at once.
The Montgomery bus boycott was an organized movement that ended with a court ruling.
The 1964 law outlawed discrimination in jobs and public places; the 1965 law banned literacy tests.
Redlining refused loans by neighborhood; the lending table shows a 9-to-1 result from one rule.
A gap between two percentages is in percentage points.
De jure segregation is written in law; de facto segregation is built by practice.
Black Power stressed community control; the 1968 and 1969 strikes founded Black studies.

Check your understanding

Work these before looking at the answers — they are ungraded, and the answers (with reasoning) are at the bottom of the page.

An illustrative city (not a real one) runs a small-business grant program in two districts. In the Riverside district, 45 of 60 applications are approved. In the Hilltop district, 15 of 60 are approved. Work out each district's approval rate, the gap between them, and how many times as often a Riverside applicant is approved.
A classmate writes, "In 1954 the Supreme Court ended school segregation." Explain what is wrong with the sentence and how to fix it.
In an illustrative town, no law assigns children to schools by race, but a rail line splits the town and the school boundary follows it, and the two sides were built under different lending ratings. Is this de jure or de facto segregation? Explain.
A summary says, "The approval rate fell from 70 percent to 35 percent, a drop of 35 percent." Name the error and rewrite the sentence.

Answers (worked reasoning — read after attempting)

Riverside: 45 ÷ 60 × 100 = 75 percent. Hilltop: 15 ÷ 60 × 100 = 25 percent. The gap is 75 − 25 = 50 percentage points, and 75 ÷ 25 = 3, so a Riverside applicant is approved 3 times as often. Notice these are fresh, illustrative districts, not the course's lending table.
The sentence reads Brown v. Board of Education (1954) for more than it did. The Court held that separate schools are inherently unequal, but Brown II (1955) told the states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed", with no deadline, and the order met considerable resistance. A fixed sentence: "In Brown v. Board of Education (1954) the Supreme Court held that separate schools are inherently unequal, but desegregation did not happen at once."
It is de facto segregation, because no law requires the separation. But it is not accidental: the boundary follows the rail line, and the housing on each side was shaped by lending ratings, so practices built the separation.
A difference between two percentages is in percentage points, not percent. 70 − 35 = 35, so the rate fell by 35 percentage points. A fixed sentence: "The approval rate fell from 70 percent to 35 percent, a drop of 35 percentage points." The new rate is also half the old one, since 35 ÷ 70 × 100 = 50 percent.

Next up in this module: the lecture, the slide deck, the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz — and next week, the midterm week reviews Weeks 1 to 7 and adds oral history as a method for reading accounts like E2's.

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