Early Steps in the Civil Rights Movement (1940s and 1950s)

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for how the World War II Double V campaign and A. Philip Randolph's threatened March on Washington produced the first wartime federal action against employment discrimination, Executive Order 8802 of 1941.
• Describe how Jackie Robinson's integration of Major League Baseball in 1947 and President Truman's Executive Order 9981 of 1948 desegregated two of the most visible institutions of American national life.
• Explain how Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund built the case that produced the unanimous Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education on May 17, 1954.
• Account for the white-supremacist Massive Resistance campaign that followed Brown, including the Southern Manifesto of 1956, the school closures in Prince Edward County, and the federal-troop response to the Little Rock Nine standoff in 1957.
• Trace how the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956 and the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957 established nonviolent direct action as the strategic core of the modern Civil Rights Movement.

The modern Civil Rights Movement did not begin with the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955. It began during World War II, when Black Americans saw a chance to convert wartime mobilization into a federal commitment to racial equality, and it accumulated legal, institutional, and grassroots momentum across the late 1940s and 1950s before exploding into the streets in the 1960s. Topic 8.6 covers the foundational fifteen years of that arc: the Double V campaign, the desegregation of the armed forces, Brown v. Board of Education, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the white-supremacist Massive Resistance that pushed back against every legal gain (KC-8.2.I, KC-8.2.I.B.i; Theme SOC).

The story opens with the Double V campaign. In February 1942, the Pittsburgh Courier, the largest Black newspaper in the country, called on Black Americans to fight for a double victory: against fascism abroad and against racial discrimination at home. The campaign reached millions of Black readers and gave a moral framework to the wartime push for federal action against Jim Crow. A few months earlier, in the summer of 1941, the labor leader A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, had threatened to lead one hundred thousand Black workers in a march on Washington unless President Roosevelt banned discrimination in the rapidly expanding defense industries. Roosevelt, unwilling to expose the war effort to that kind of civil-rights protest, signed Executive Order 8802 on June 25, 1941, prohibiting racial discrimination in defense employment and federal vocational programs and creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee to enforce the order. Randolph then called off the march. The episode established a pattern that would define the next twenty years: organized Black pressure could move a reluctant federal executive to act on racial equality (KC-8.2.I.A, KC-8.2.I.B.i).

The postwar years pressed the same lesson into national institutions. In April 1947, Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers and broke the color line that had segregated Major League Baseball since the 1880s. Robinson endured a season of spiking, beanballs, and racial abuse from opposing players and fans, won the Rookie of the Year award, and made the integration of professional baseball look both inevitable and overdue. A year later, on July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981, declaring it the policy of the United States that there be equal treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin. Truman's order followed his Committee on Civil Rights report of 1947 (To Secure These Rights), which had documented the gulf between the country's professed ideals and its racial practice, and it set in motion the desegregation of the United States military across the Korean War. Together, Robinson's debut and Executive Order 9981 made it harder for white Americans to argue that segregation was the natural order of things; the country's most popular sport and its largest federal employer had begun to integrate (KC-8.2.I.A).

The legal hinge of the early movement is Brown v. Board of Education. The case consolidated five separate school-segregation challenges from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and the District of Columbia. Thurgood Marshall, the chief counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, had been building toward the case for nearly two decades; the Legal Defense Fund had won graduate-school cases at the University of Maryland (Murray, 1936), the University of Missouri (Gaines, 1938), and the University of Texas Law School (Sweatt, 1950) that progressively narrowed the separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren read a unanimous opinion that struck down racial segregation in public schools. Warren wrote that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal, citing the social-science research of Kenneth and Mamie Clark on the harmful psychological effects of segregation on Black children. The decision overturned the separate-but-equal doctrine that had governed American race relations since 1896 and gave grassroots organizers across the South a federal Supreme Court ruling to point to (KC-8.2.I.B.i). A second decision in 1955, sometimes called Brown II, ordered desegregation to proceed with all deliberate speed, a phrase that southern resistance would soon stretch into more than a decade of delay.

The white South responded with the campaign known as Massive Resistance. In March 1956, ninety-nine southern members of Congress signed the Southern Manifesto, denouncing Brown as a clear abuse of judicial power and pledging to use all lawful means to reverse the decision. Local resistance ran further. Prince Edward County, Virginia closed its public schools in 1959 rather than integrate them and kept them closed for five years, leaving Black children without public education and white families enrolled in private segregation academies funded with state tuition vouchers. In Mississippi, the Citizens' Councils, founded in 1954, used economic pressure, evictions, and the threat of violence to stop Black families from enrolling children in white schools. The most public confrontation came in September 1957, when Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas called out the state National Guard to bar nine Black students, the Little Rock Nine, from entering Little Rock Central High School. President Eisenhower, after weeks of failed negotiation, federalized the Arkansas National Guard and dispatched the 101st Airborne Division to escort the students into the school under federal bayonets. The episode established that the federal executive would, when forced, defend a federal court order with federal troops (KC-8.2.I.B.i; Theme SOC).

The summer before Little Rock had already produced the moral image that would define the movement. In August 1955, a fourteen-year-old Black boy from Chicago named Emmett Till was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in Money, Mississippi after a white storekeeper accused him of speaking inappropriately to a white woman. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted on an open-casket funeral so that the country could see what had been done to her son. Photographs of his disfigured body in Jet magazine reached millions of Black households, and the acquittal of his killers by an all-white jury exposed the impunity of southern racial violence to a national audience. Rosa Parks would later say that she was thinking of Emmett Till when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus four months later (KC-8.2.I.A).

The Montgomery Bus Boycott ran from December 1, 1955 to December 20, 1956, and it introduced the strategic combination that would define the next decade of civil rights organizing. Rosa Parks, a longtime NAACP secretary who had attended the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, was arrested for refusing to surrender her seat to a white passenger. The Women's Political Council distributed thirty-five thousand leaflets calling for a one-day boycott. The boycott was so successful that local Black ministers organized the Montgomery Improvement Association to extend it indefinitely and elected a twenty-six-year-old Baptist preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. as its president. King had earned a doctorate at Boston University, was a recent arrival in Montgomery, and was acceptable to both the conservative older ministers and the younger activists. The boycott lasted three hundred and eighty-one days. Black residents organized carpools, walked to work, endured the firebombing of King's home, and refused to ride the buses until the Supreme Court ruled in Browder v. Gayle on November 13, 1956 that bus segregation was unconstitutional. The boycott proved that mass nonviolent direct action, sustained over months and led by Black ministers and Black women's organizations, could win against southern segregation, and it made Martin Luther King Jr. a national figure (KC-8.2.I.B.i).

In January 1957, sixty Black ministers from ten southern states gathered in Atlanta and founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), with King as its first president. The SCLC was conceived as a region-wide vehicle for nonviolent direct action grounded in the Black church. It would lead the campaigns in Albany, Birmingham, and Selma across the next decade. Three years later, in February 1960, four Black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University would sit down at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refuse to leave. The Greensboro sit-ins are formally part of Topic 8.10, but they belong to the same arc: by 1960, the legal-strategy story (Brown, Browder), the federal-action story (Executive Order 8802, Executive Order 9981, Little Rock), and the grassroots-protest story (Montgomery, Emmett Till, the SCLC) had converged into a movement that was ready to take the next decade by storm. Topic 8.6 establishes the foundations; Topic 8.10 carries them forward.

The four sources below sample the legal, the federal-executive, and the grassroots strands of the early movement. Together they document the bridge from World War II to the moment the Civil Rights Movement enters the streets.

1. (Causation) Account for how World War II reshaped the politics of race in the United States. Why did Black Americans believe that wartime mobilization opened a new opportunity for civil rights action, and how did the Double V campaign and Executive Order 8802 demonstrate that calculation?
2. (Continuity and Change) Compare the legal strategy of Brown v. Board of Education with the grassroots strategy of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. What did each approach require of its participants, and what did each accomplish that the other could not?
3. (Comparison) Compare the federal response to the Little Rock Nine standoff in 1957 with the federal response to earlier southern resistance, including the response to lynching in the 1920s and 1930s. What had changed about the role of the federal executive by 1957, and why?
4. (Causation) The murder of Emmett Till in August 1955 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott four months later are often paired in civil rights histories. Account for the causal relationship between the two events and the ways in which the photograph of Till's funeral shaped the strategic decisions of the boycott organizers.
5. (Argumentation) Defend or refute the claim that the modern Civil Rights Movement began with the Double V campaign of 1942 rather than with the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955. Cite at least three specific developments from the period in your answer.

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.