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The Early Civil Rights Movement |
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Following a particularly violent race riot in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908, a group of humanitarian whites formed a new organization to help combat racial discrimination. Joining forces with a group of black intellectuals, they met in New York to organize the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
It is important to note the NAACP was formed by both blacks and whites. Integration of the races was the goal and practice of the organization from the moment of its founding. Even more important was the principal technique adopted by the NAACP - the use of the Constitution and the court system of the United States to bring equality for African Americans through law. This emphasis on having lawyers file lawsuits to guarantee blacks their legal rights as United States citizens identified the NAACP as a "conventional" and "mainstream" American interest group.
Some early gains for blacks came from the Supreme Court. In 1938 in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, the court took up the question of whether the "separate" black facilities were indeed "equal" to the white facilities. The facility in question was the University of Missouri's whites-only law school, and Missouri had no equivalent black law school. The court ruled that Missouri must provide its black citizens with a black law school equal to the white law school.
This decision was a step forward in the cause of black civil rights. Anywhere it could be shown that segregated black facilities were not equal in quality to the equivalent white facilities, a suit could be filed seeking improved facilities for blacks.
Throughout the early 20th Century, there was a slow but steady movement of blacks out of the South and into the North, particularly into the central cities of large Northern metropolitan areas. In 1900 only 10 percent of American blacks lived outside the South, but by 1930 more than 20 percent of blacks lived outside of Dixie.
In the South most blacks were prevented from voting by literacy tests, a technique by which white election judges refused to allow blacks to register to vote if the blacks could not read and analyze an obscure section of the state constitution. When blacks moved to the North, however, they came into a political arena where they could register and vote and have an impact on state and national politics.
As the percentage of blacks living outside the South swelled to 23 percent by 1940, significant numbers of U.S. senators and U.S. representatives from the North came to have sizable numbers of black constituents living and voting in their states and congressional districts. There thus came into existence a sizable group of U.S. senators and U.S. representatives from the North who were interested in actively pursuing the cause of black civil rights on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.
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