Civic Literacy Curriculum

Background

Although the 14th Amendment guaranteed the equal protection of the laws for all and the 15th Amendment guaranteed the right of non-white American citizens to vote, these amendments soon ceased to be enforced in protecting the rights of black Americans. The most important consequence of this failure to implement the Constitution was the development of the Jim Crow regime of racial segregation and discrimination in the South, starting in the 1880s, although other forms of racial discrimination existed throughout other parts of the country as well. Civil rights activists built a movement seeking to guarantee these constitutional rights and legal equality, and though the movement’s influence grew slowly, by the 1950s the Civil Rights Movement was achieving important progress in its effort to end racial discrimination. 

Arguably the most significant moment was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) in which a unanimous Supreme Court held that the 14th Amendment prohibited a state from segregating public schools. (The Brown decision collected similar challenges from different states, most notably South Carolina, from which came the Briggs v. Elliot case. South Carolina’s Governor James Byrnes,  who had served as US Supreme Court Justice and had been assigned by the president to organize domestic politics during World War II, had already worked to reinforce segregation and had hired former presidential nominee John Davis to defend it before the Supreme Court.) While some southern states grudgingly accepted Brown, others engaged in massive resistance to the Supreme Court’s ruling, closing public schools and even, in the case of Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, using the national guard to try to block school integration. 

The most important civil rights activist was Martin Luther King, Jr., a Christian minister who fought for civil rights and equality via speeches, writings, non-violent protests, and civil disobedience in the 1950s and 1960s. Most famously, in his “I Have a Dream” speech delivered at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, King argued that denying civil rights to non-white Americans violated both the Christian values of most of his American listeners as well as both the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. He argued the Declaration and Constitution had given a “promissory note” to black Americans to participate in freedom and equality, and looked forward to the day that people would “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” King’s activism helped achieve the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to finally enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments and protect the rights of Americans of all races. He was later assassinated for his efforts and beliefs by James Earl Ray in 1968.

But King was not the only important figure in the civil rights movement. For instance, future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall had long organized the legal strategy that eventually culminated in the Brown decision, which he argued. Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white rider and was arrested for it. Marchers, including future Congressman John Lewis, protested the refusal of Alabama officials to let them vote by walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where they were assaulted by local police.