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In which John Green teaches you about the early days of the Civil Rights movement. By way of providing context for this, John also talks a bit about wider America in the 1950s. The 1950s are a deeply nostalgic period for many Americans, but there is more than a little idealizing going on here.
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Transcript Provided by YouTube:
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Episode 39: Consensus and Protest: Civil Rights LOCKED
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Hi, I’m John Green, this is Crash Course U.S. history and today we’re going to look
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at one of the most important periods of American social history, the 1950s.
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Why is it so important?
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Well, first because it saw the advent of the greatest invention in human history: Television.
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Mr. Green, Mr. Green!
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I like TV!
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By the way, you’re from the future.
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How does the X-Files end?
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Are there aliens or no aliens?
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No spoilers, Me From The Past, you’re going to have to go to college and watch the X-Files
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get terrible just like I did.
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No it’s mostly important because of the Civil Rights Movement We’re going to talk
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about some of the heroic figures like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, but much of the
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real story is about the thousands of people you’ve never heard of who fought to make
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America more inclusive.
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But before we look at the various changes that the Civil Rights Movement was pushing
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for, we should spend a little time looking at the society that they were trying to change.
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The 1950s has been called a period of consensus, and I suppose it was, at least for the white
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males who wrote about it and who all agreed that the 1950s were fantastic for white males.
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Consensus culture was caused first, by the Cold War – people were hesitant to criticize
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the United States for fear of being branded a communist, and, second, by affluence – increasing
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prosperity meant that more people didn’t have as much to be critical of.
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And this widespread affluence was something new in the United States.
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Between 1946 and 1960 Americans experienced a period of economic expansion that saw standards
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of living rise and gross national product more than double.
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And unlike many previous American economic expansions, much of the growing prosperity
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in the fifties was shared by ordinary working people who saw their wages rise.
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To quote our old friend Eric Foner, “By 1960, an estimated 60 percent of Americans
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enjoyed what the government defined as a middle-class standard of living.”[1]
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And this meant that increasing numbers of Americans had access things like television,
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and air conditioning, and dishwashers and air travel.
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That doesn’t really seem like a bonus.
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Anyway, despite the fact that they were being stuffed into tiny metal cylinders and hurdled
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through the air, most Americans were happy because they had, like, indoor plumbing and
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electricity.
01:56
intro The 1950s was the era of suburbanization.
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The number of homes in the United States doubled during the decade, which had the pleasant
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side effect of creating lots of construction jobs.
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The classic example of suburbanization was Levittown in New York, where 10,000 almost
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identical homes were built and became home to 40,000 people almost overnight.
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And living further from the city meant that more Americans needed cars, which was good
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news for Detroit where cars were being churned out with the expectation that Americans would
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replace them every two years.
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By 1960, 80% of Americans owned at least one car and 14% had two or more.
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And car culture changed the way that Americans lived and shopped.
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I mean it gave us shopping malls, and drive thru restaurants, and the backseat makeout
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session.
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I mean, high school me didn’t get the backseat makeout session.
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But, other people did!
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I did get the Burger King drive thru though.
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And lots of it.
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Our whole picture of the American standard of living, with its abundance of consumer
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goods and plentiful services was established in the 1950s.
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And so, for so for many people this era was something of a “golden age” especially
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when we look back on it today with nostalgia.
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But there were critics, even at the time.
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So when we say the 1950s were an era of consensus, one of the things we’re saying is there
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wasn’t much room for debate about what it meant to be an American.
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Most people agreed on the American values: individualism, respect for private property,
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and belief in equal opportunity.
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The key problem was that we believed in equal opportunity, but didn’t actually provide
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it.
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But some people were concerned that the cookie cutter vision of the good life and the celebration
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of the middle class lifestyle was displacing other conceptions of citizenship.
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Like the sociologist C. Wright Mills described a combination of military, corporate, and
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political leaders as a power elite whose control over government and the economy was such as
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to make democracy an afterthought.
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In The Lonely Crowd sociologist David Riesman criticized Americans for being conformist
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and lacking the rich inner life necessary to be truly independent.
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And John Kenneth Galbraith questioned an Affluent Society that would pay for new cars and new
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missiles but not for new schools.
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And we can’t mention the 1950s without discussing teenagers since this was the decade that gave
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us Rock and Roll, and rock stars like Bill Haley and the Comets, Buddy Holly and the
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Crickets, and Elvis Presley and his hips.
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Another gift of the 1950s was literature, much of which appeals especially to teenagers.
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Like, the Beats presented a rather drug-fueled and not always coherent criticism of the bourgeois
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1950’s morals.
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They rejected materialism, and suburban ennui and things like regular jobs while celebrating
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impulsivity, and recklessness, experimentation and freedom.
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And also heroin.
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So you might have noticed something about all those critics of the 1950s that I just
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mentioned: they were all white dudes.
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Now, we’re gonna be talking about women in the 1950s and 1960s next week because their
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liberation movement began a bit later, but what most people call the Civil Rights Movement
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really did begin in the 1950s.
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While the 1950s were something of a golden age for many blue and white collar workers,
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it was hardly a period of expanding opportunities for African Americans.
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Rigid segregation was the rule throughout the country, especially in housing, but also
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in jobs and in employment.
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In the South, public accommodations were segregated by law, while in the north it was usually
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happening by custom or de facto segregation.
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To give just one example, the new suburban neighborhoods that sprang up in the 1950s
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were almost completely white and this remained true for decades.
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According Eric Foner, “As late as the 1990s, nearly 90 percent of suburban whites lived
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in communities with non-white populations less than 1 percent.”
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And it wasn’t just housing.
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In the 1950s half of black families lived in poverty.
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When they were able to get union jobs, black workers had less seniority than their white
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counterparts so their employment was less stable.
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And their educational opportunities were severely limited by sub-standard segregated schools.
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Now you might think the Civil Rights Movement began with Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus
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Boycott or else Brown v. Board of Education, but it really started during WW2 with efforts
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like those of A. Philip Randolph and the soldiers taking part in the Double-V crusade.
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But even before that, black Americans had been fighting for civil rights.
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It’s just that in the 1950s, they started to win.
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So, desegregating schools was a key goal of the Civil Rights movement.
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And it started in California in 1946.
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In the case of Mendez v. Westminster the California Supreme Court ruled that Orange County, of
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all places, had to desegregate their schools.
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They’d been discriminating against Latinos.
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And then, California’s governor, Earl Warren, signed an order that repealed all school segregation
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in the state.
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That same Earl Warren, by the way, was Chief Justice when the landmark case Brown v. Board
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of Education came before the Supreme Court in 1954.
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The NAACP Legal Defense Fund under the leadership of Thurgood Marshall had been pursuing a legal
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strategy of trying to make states live up to the ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson that required
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all public facilities to be separate but equal.
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They started by bringing lawsuits against professional schools like law schools, because
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it was really obvious that the three classrooms and no library that Texas set up for its African
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American law students were not equal to the actual University of Texas’s law school.
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But the Brown case was about public schools for children.
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It was actually a combination of 5 cases from 4 states, of which Brown happened to be alphabetically
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the first.
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The Board of Education in question incidentally was in Topeka Kansas, not one of the states
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of the old Confederacy, but nonetheless a city that did restricted schooling by race.
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Oh, it’s time for the Mystery Document?
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The rules here are simple.
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I read the Mystery Document.
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If I’m wrong, I get shocked.
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“Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect
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upon the colored children.
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The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the
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races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group.
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A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn.
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Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational
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and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they
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would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system.
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[Footnote 10]”[2] Stan, the last two weeks you have given me
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two extraordinary gifts and I am thankful.
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It is Earl Warren from Brown v. Board of Education.
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Huzzah!
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Justice Warren is actually quoting from sociological research there that shows that segregation
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itself is psychologically damaging to black children because they recognize that being
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separated out is a badge of inferiority.
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Alright, let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
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The Brown decision was a watershed but it didn’t lead to massive immediate desegregation
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of the nation’s public schools.
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In fact, it spawned what came to be known as “Massive Resistance” in the South.
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The resistance got so massive, in fact, that a number of counties, rather than integrate
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their schools, closed them.
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Prince Edward County in Virginia, for instance, closed its schools in 1959 and didn’t re-open
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them again until 1964.
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Except they didn’t really close them because many states appropriated funds to pay for
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white students to attend “private” academies.
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Some states got so into the resistance that they began to fly the Confederate Battle flag
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over their state capitol buildings.
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Yes, I’m looking at you Alabama and South Carolina.
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On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama
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and got arrested, kicking off the Montgomery Bus Boycott that lasted almost a year.
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A lot of people think that Parks was simply an average African American working woman
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who was tired and fed up with segregation, but the truth is more complicated.
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Parks had been active in politics since the 1930s and had protested the notorious Scottsboro
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Boys case.
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She had served as secretary for the NAACP and she had begun her quest to register to
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vote in Alabama in 1943.
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She failed a literacy test three times before becoming one of the very few black people
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registered to vote in the state.
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And in 1954 she attended a training session for political activists and met other civil
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rights radicals.
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So Rosa Parks was an active participant in the fight for black civil rights long before
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she sat on that bus.
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The Bus Boycott also thrust into prominence a young pastor from Atlanta, the 26 year old
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Martin Luther King Jr.
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He helped to organize the boycott from his Baptist church, which reminds us that black
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churches played a pivotal role in the Civil Rights Movement.
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That boycott would go on to last for 381 days and in the end, the city of Montgomery relented.
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Thanks, Thought Bubble.
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So that was, of course, only the beginning for Martin Luther King, who achieved his greatest
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triumphs in the 1960s.
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After Montgomery, he was instrumental in forming the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
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a coalition of black civil rights and church leaders who pushed for integration.
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And they needed to fight hard, especially in the face of Massive Resistance and an Eisenhower
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administration that was lukewarm at best about civil rights.
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But I suppose Eisenhower did stick up for civil rights when forced to, as when Arkansas
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Governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard to prevent the integration of Little Rock’s
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Central High School by 9 black students in 1957.
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Eisenhower was like, “You know, as the guy who invaded Normandy, I don’t think that’s
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the best use for the National Guard.”
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So, Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division (not the entirety of it, but some of it) to
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Little Rock, Arkansas, to walk kids to school.
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Which they did for a year.
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After that, Faubus closed the schools, but at least the federal government showed that
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it wouldn’t allow states to ignore court orders about the Constitution.
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In your face, John C. Calhoun.
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Despite the court decision and the dispatching of Federal troops, by the end of the 1950s
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fewer than two percent of black students attended integrated schools in the South.
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So, the modern movement for Civil Rights had begun, but it was clear that there was still
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a lot of work to do.
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But the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement shows us that the picture of consensus in
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the 1950s is not quite as clear-cut as its proponents would have us believe.
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Yes, there was widespread affluence, particularly among white people, and criticism of the government
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and America generally was stifled by the fear of appearing to sympathize with Communism.
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But there was also widespread systemic inequality and poverty in the decade that shows just
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how far away we were from living the ideal of equal opportunity.
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That we have made real progress, and we have, is a credit to the voices of protest.
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Next week we’ll see how women, Latinos, and gay people added their voices to the protests
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and look at what they were and were not able to change in the 1960s.
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Thanks for watching.
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I’ll see you then.
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Now, my face moved, but you can still click on it.
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Thanks again for watching Crash Course and as we say in my hometown, don’t forget to
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be awesome.
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________________ [1] Foner Give me Liberty ebook version p.
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992 [2] http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/347/483/case.html
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video