Lecture: African American Experiences II: Civil Rights and Black Freedom Movements
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 7
Opening
Picture a city bus route. It runs through downtown and the busy shopping streets, and 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 the skipped neighborhood, every trip to a job or a clinic takes longer, and you may never meet the person who drew the map.
Hold on to that picture, because it's the key to this lecture. Some rules sort people loudly, with a sign on the wall. Others sort people quietly, with a map. In this lecture you'll see how people in the 1950s and 1960s fought both kinds.
Last week, in Week 6, you read how law built slavery and segregation. You read Plessy v. Ferguson, from 1896, which upheld state-required separation, the "separate but equal" doctrine. You saw former Confederate states write literacy tests into law to block Black voters, despite the 15th Amendment. And you met E2, a woman from the course archive whose family moved north in the 1940s. Back in Week 2, you learned the difference between institutional discrimination and structural inequality. We'll need all of that.
Here's the plan. We'll start with a Supreme Court decision about schools, then a bus boycott, then two federal laws. After that comes redlining, where we'll work a small, made-up lending table together. Then we'll separate two kinds of segregation, and we'll close with Black Power and the founding of Black studies. One note on names before we begin: Black and African American are both in common use, and Black is the broader term, including people of recent African and Caribbean origin.
1. Brown v. Board of Education
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 exactly the same as before. A rule on paper and a change in the building are two different things. Keep that gap in mind.
In 1954 the Supreme Court changed the rule for public schools. In Brown v. Board of Education, the Court held unanimously that "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." That one sentence overruled the "separate but equal" doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson for public schools. Let's count how long that doctrine stood. Plessy came in 1896, and Brown came in 1954. Take 1896 away from 1954, and you get 58 years.
Now here's the part people forget. A year later, in 1955, the Court issued a follow-up order we call Brown II. It told the states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed." Listen to those words again. "With all deliberate speed" sets no deadline. And the order met considerable resistance. So the honest way to say it is this: Brown changed the law, but it didn't change every school at once.
Brown also sits on one of the course's threads across groups, the separate-schools thread. That thread starts with the federal Indian boarding schools you read in Week 4, and it runs through Brown in 1954. In Week 9, you'll add another case to it.
Pause and try this. A classmate says Brown v. Board of Education ended school segregation in 1954. What's wrong with that sentence?
Take a breath, and try fixing the sentence yourself.
Here's the answer. Brown held that separate schools are inherently unequal, but Brown II in 1955 set no deadline and met considerable resistance. The ruling changed the law, and desegregation came slowly and unevenly after it.
2. The Montgomery bus boycott
Picture a group of coworkers who decide to stop eating at one cafe until it changes an unfair rule. One person skipping lunch changes nothing. Hundreds of people skipping lunch, every day, for a year, is a different story. That's 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.
Notice how two forces worked together there. People walked and shared rides for more than a year. And a court ruling, built on the 14th Amendment's promise of equal protection from Week 6, gave the change its legal force. Neither one alone tells the whole story.
The course places the boycott on its movements thread. The thread runs from this boycott in 1955 to the campus strike at San Francisco State in 1968, which you met in Week 1. Both were organized actions by many people over time.
Pause and try this. Why is it more accurate to call Montgomery a movement than one woman's single act?
Think about who kept the boycott going for a year.
Here's the answer. One arrest started it, but a whole community kept refusing to ride for 381 days, and a court ruling finished it. A movement is many people acting over time, not one person on one day.
3. The 1964 law and the 1965 law
Picture a restaurant with a sign saying who may sit at the counter. Or picture 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. Now let's read 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. A place of public accommodation is a business that serves the public, like a restaurant, a hotel, or a theater. So the sign at the counter became illegal.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 enforced the 15th Amendment and banned literacy tests as a condition of voting. So the unfair reading test became illegal too.
Let's measure how long that promise waited. The 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870. The Voting Rights Act came in 1965. Take 1870 away from 1965, and you get 95 years. For 95 years, a right written into the Constitution was narrowed by state law in practice. That's the same pattern you saw in Week 6, when you compared the 15th Amendment with the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. A right on paper, narrowed by state law, and then a later law to close the gap.
One more gap is worth knowing. Brown came in 1954, and the Civil Rights Act came in 1964. That's 10 years from a ruling about schools to a law about jobs and public places.
Pause and try this. Which of the two laws banned literacy tests, and which amendment did it enforce?
Say both answers before you keep listening.
Here's the answer. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned literacy tests, and it enforced the 15th Amendment, which had barred denying the vote on account of race since 1870.
4. Redlining and the lending table
Picture a bank with a big map on the wall. Each neighborhood is shaded with a letter. Before anyone reads your application, the loan officer checks where you want to buy. Your own record matters less than the letter on your block.
That's 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 letter was outlined in red.
To see how a rule like that works, the course uses a model: the illustrative lending table. It's made up for teaching, not a count from any real city. A city has 50 neighborhoods, each with a rating from A to D, and lenders approve loans by the rating. I'll walk you through it in words.
The A-rated neighborhoods sent in 200 applications, and 180 were approved. Divide 180 by 200 and multiply by 100, and you get 90 percent. The D-rated neighborhoods also sent in 200 applications, but only 20 were approved. Divide 20 by 200 and multiply by 100, and you get 10 percent. The B and C neighborhoods sit in between, at 80 percent and 50 percent. Across all 1,000 applications, 590 were approved, which is 59 percent.
Now the gap. Take 10 percent away from 90 percent, and you get 80. But careful with the unit. A difference between two percentages is measured in percentage points, so the gap is 80 percentage points, not 80 percent. Another way to see it: 90 divided by 10 is 9, so an applicant in an A-rated neighborhood is approved 9 times as often as one in a D-rated neighborhood.
Count per neighborhood, and the picture is the same. The 10 A-rated neighborhoods got 180 approved loans, which is 18 each. The 10 D-rated neighborhoods got 20, which is 2 each. So it's 18 to 2, a ratio of 9 to 1.
Here's the concept. Every lender follows the same rating. No single lender needs to intend the result for the result to be unequal. That's institutional discrimination, the pattern of N1 from Week 2's concept-sorting set. And the decades of lower home values, less family wealth, and thinner school budgets that follow are structural inequality, the pattern of S1.
Now hear the rule from the inside. E2 says that in her family's new city, "there were neighborhoods where the bank would not lend to us." The table shows the rule from the outside. Her words show it from the inside.
The law answered in 1968. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 made discrimination in the sale, rental, or financing of housing unlawful. That's 4 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But a law that stops a practice doesn't undo what the practice already built.
Pause and try this. The approval rates in the table are 90 percent and 10 percent. Is the gap 80 percent or 80 percentage points, and why?
Think about what kind of number you're subtracting.
Here's the answer. It's 80 percentage points, because it's a difference between two percentages. A share of a total is a percent; the distance between two percents is in percentage points.
5. De jure and de facto segregation
Think about two towns. In the first town, a law says which children go to which school. In the second town, there's no such law. But a highway splits the town, and the school boundary follows the highway. The children on each side end up in different schools anyway.
Those two towns show two kinds of segregation. De jure segregation is separation required by law, like the school laws Brown struck down. De facto segregation is separation that exists in practice without a law requiring it, often built by housing patterns and lending.
Here's the trap. Because no law is posted, people assume de facto segregation is an accident, the way people happen to settle. But look back at the lending table. If the neighborhoods on each side of that highway were shaped by lending ratings, then the line between them was built by a rule. And a school boundary is drawn by people. De facto doesn't mean accidental. It means the rule lives in a practice instead of a statute.
This also fixes a second wrong idea, that the civil rights movement was only Southern. E2's northern city had no posted seating rules, and the bank still sorted where families could buy. The Fair Housing Act is a national law. And the students who demanded Black Studies in 1968 and 1969 were in California. The freedom movement answered both kinds of segregation, wherever they were.
Pause and try this. A town has no law about schools, but a school boundary follows a highway built through a neighborhood. Is that de jure or de facto?
Ask yourself one question: does a law require it?
Here's the answer. It's de facto, because no law requires the separation. But it isn't accidental: the boundary and the housing on each side were shaped by choices and rules.
6. Black Power and Black studies
Picture a neighborhood group that stops asking an outside agency for help. It starts running its own after-school program instead. The members pick the books, hire the tutors, and teach the history they think their children need. That's the plain idea of community control.
Black Power, a phrase popularized in 1966, named a strand of the Black freedom movement that stressed self-determination, community control, and cultural pride. On campuses, that call for community control became a demand for courses and departments that studied Black history and life.
Black studies is 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. It was one of the four departments in the College of Ethnic Studies you met in Week 1.
One honest limit 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 its demands and the wider movement around it.
And notice where this leaves you. The movement in this lecture didn't stop at new federal laws. It also built a field of study, and that field is one of the roots of the course you're taking now.
Pause and try this. What did the strikers at San Francisco State demand that connects Black Power to this course?
Think back to the four departments from Week 1.
Here's the answer. They demanded a Black Studies department, one of the four in the College of Ethnic Studies, so the call for community control helped found the field this course belongs to.
Closing
Let's pull it together, in the order we went. Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, held that separate schools are inherently unequal, but Brown II set no deadline, and change came slowly. The Montgomery bus boycott was a movement, a whole community refusing to ride for 381 days, finished by a court ruling. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination in jobs and public places, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned literacy tests, 95 years after the 15th Amendment.
Redlining refused loans by neighborhood. In the illustrative table, one rule produced a gap of 80 percentage points and a ratio of 9 to 1, with no single lender needing to intend it. De jure segregation is written in law, and de facto segregation is built by practice, not by accident. And Black Power's call for community control helped found Black studies.
E2's mother called her family's new city "different, not finished." That's a fair summary of this whole week.
Next in this module, you'll find the slide deck, the Readings and Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz. Next week is the midterm week, where you'll review Weeks 1 to 7 and learn to read oral history as evidence.
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