US Civil Rights: African Americans - Hinderences

(-) Slaughterhouse Case (1873) - decided that the rights of citizens were under state control, leading to the implementation of Jim Crow

(-) Plessy v Ferguson (1896) - 'separate but equal'

(-) Mississippi v Williams (1898) - allowed state legislation that excluded AAs from the voting register

(-) University of California v Bakke (1978) - upheld affermative action but declared racial quotas unconstitutional

• Began a partial reaction away from too much affermative action

(-) Freeman v Pitts (1992) - ruled SC would not continue to aid segragation which had started to appear due to house ownership patterns amoung blacks and whites

• Strategy of gaining support from the CR movement from whites seemed on course - militancy and violence of Black Power had ruined the movement - contributed to the 'white backlash'
• Fragmented and divided the CR movement
• Whites and moderates felt alienated - loss of support and funding
• Federal government - Black Panthers = the  'greatest threat to the internal security' of the US - gave the impression that the CR movement had become criminal and threatened the American way of life
• Republican domination 1969 - 1993 (with the exception of Carter) can be at least partially attributed to the reaction against the Black Panthers/Black Power radicalism

HOWEVER:

• Helped develop black self esteem and capacity for self-help
• Important in politically awakening those sidelined by the mainstream CR movement
• Provided practical, socio-economic support for northern AAs living in ghettos eg. breakfast programmes for children
• Black radicalism/urban rioting can be said to have accelerated CR by forcing the authorities to tackle the worst problems eg. 1968 Fair Housing Act was partly a response to the urban riots- the Kerner Commision acknowledged the riots were a response to deprivation and racism

First KKK - saw terror as the way to enforce racial segragation 

• Activites were characterised by intimidation and lynchings
• Attacked members of the Freedman's Bureau, just as their counterparts in the 1960s attacked CR workers
• Intimidated AAs who attempted to vote and tried to stop black children attending segragated schools
• Did not last long but helped foster an atmosphere of racial hostility and terror eg. in New Orleans in July 1866 AA soldiers travelling to vote were killed; riots ensued in which 34 people were killed and over 100 people were injured - this atmosphere remained a crucial fact of life in the south and was a major impedement to the development of black CR

Second KKK - 'The Birth of a Nation' (1915) promotes recuitment drive

• President Truman nearly joined but decided against this due to the Klan's anti-Catholicism
• Klansmen were unlikely to be convicted by local southern (white) juries
• Ceased to be a major organisation by 1944, at least in part due to a sex scandal involving the Grand Wizard but the tradition still remained and there was still a membership - in 1961 some members attacked the Freedom Riders with the tacit approval of Southern police authorities

Jim Crow

• De jure segragation was rigidly enforced in the south where while democrat politicians frequently played the race card and promised to maintain 'state's rights' in order to gain electoral support
• Educational inequalities were obvious; far less money spend on black educational facilities than white ones - in South Carolina in 1930, $53 was spent on every white child and $5 on every black child
• White opinion (especially in the south) until at least the 1950s/60s seemed determined to maintain the existing system of race relations

White Citizen's Councils

• Formed after Brown v BoE (1954) in order to protest school segragation
• Encouraged intimidation of AAs trying to register to vote and hostile actions against CR initiatives
• Opposed bussing 

Lynching 

• A form of 'mob justice'
• If an AA man was accused of a crime he was denied a trial and often beaten, tortured and hanged by a white mob baying for blood
• In the Springfield Riot (1908) an 84 year old African American man was lynched for being married to a white woman for 32 years
• The murder of 14 year old Emmet Till in 1955 for talking to a white woman showed that whites were desperate to maintain segregation and would attempt to do so violently
• This alongside violent threats produced a climate of fear in many AA communities which impoverished their quality of life, even if they were not directly affected themselves

Prevented from voting - literacy tests, grandfather clauses etc.

• Extremely difficult to challenge white political domination, especially in the south
• Politicians saw no need to appeal to blacks as theu did not have a vote, and they did not want to lose white voters, therefore did not often champion CR

• In the south, the Black Codes (developed in 1865-6) banned interracial unions and barred African Americans from giving evidence against a white person or serving on juries
• Bankrupt state governments would lease out African American convicts to businessmen to be used as cheap labour in terrible conditions (known as convict leasing)
• The Jim Crow Laws(developed from 1887-91) introduced formal segregation in the south on trains, in schools and later in all public places
• States tried to cling on to the argument of 'state's rights' in order to keep control of CR issues and maintain segregation, however they were ultimately defeated by the CR movement in the 1960s
• Some southern states would not give police protection to African Americans, such as during Little Rock in 1957 and the Freedom Rides in 1961