Unit 2H.2 - The USA, 1955-92: conformity and challenge
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History for Edexcel A Level: Democracies in change: Britain and the USA in the twentieth century
· This includes detailed revision notes of the first chapter of Edexcel History A-level Option 2H.2: The USA, 1955–92: conformity and challenge.
· This chapter is Protest and reaction, 1963–72
· It covers everything on the specification and is laid out in an easy-to-understand way!
· If...
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Unit 2H.2 - The USA, 1955-92: conformity and challenge
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1 Civil Rights
The 1964 Civil Rights Act:
● Ended de jure segregation in the South,
○ Racial discrimination was no longer enshrined in law.
○ Public facilities were to be desegregated by 1965.
○ The Act forbade discrimination in employment on grounds of race, religion
and sex and established an Equal Employment Commission.
● Congress passed the Act because of:
○ the activism of civil rights organisations such as the NAACP, the SCLC, the
CORE and the SNCC
○ the sympathetic response of Northern whites to the civil rights movement
○ A tribute to the assassinated President Kennedy, who had introduced the bill
○ President Johnson's commitment to civil rights and his persuasion of
Congress.
● Although the Act said schools should be desegregated, 68% of Southern black
school children still attended segregated schools in 1968.
● Although that statistic improved dramatically by 1973, when nearly 50% of black
children attended majority-white schools, a process of re-segregation began after
that year.
● The greatest weakness of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was that it did little to facilitate
black voting in the Deep South.
The Selma Campaign, March 1965:
● Selma, Alabama had a population of 29,000.
○ 14,500 (50%) were black.
○ However, despite an SNCC campaign, only 23 were registered voters.
○ King, therefore, organised a campaign against disfranchisement in Selma,
because he knew Sheriff Jim Clark would react violently to protest.
● King aimed to expose white brutality and black disfranchisement in Selma in the
hope that it would force Congress to respond to President Johnson's request for
voting rights legislation.
○ When King led would-be voters to try to register, whites threw venomous
snakes at them, a trooper shot a youth trying to shield his mother from a
beating and Sheriff Clark clubbed a black woman.
● The SCLC and the SNCC organised a march from Selma to the state capital
Montgomery in order to further publicise their cause.
○ When state troopers attacked the marchers with clubs and tear gas, black
activists christened this ‘Bloody Sunday’.
○ ‘Bloody Sunday’ made worldwide headlines and prodded Congress into
passing a Voting Rights Act (1965) that transformed the South.
,The Voting Rights Act, 1965:
● The Voting Rights Act disallowed the literacy and constitutional interpretation tests
that Southern white registrars traditionally used to stop black voter registration.
○ The power of Southern white registrars was decreased with the establishment
of federal registrars.
● The Voting Rights Act was a great success.
○ By 1968 even Mississippi had 59% of its black population registered to vote.
○ As a result, the number of black Americans elected to office increased sixfold
from 1965 to 1969, then doubled from 1969 to 1980.
○ In 1969, Charles Evers became the first black man to be elected as mayor of
Fayette, Mississippi.
Ghetto Problems:
● Housing was invariably poor and white prejudice made it difficult for black Americans
to move elsewhere.
○ Furthermore, many were too poor to consider moving.
● Poor-quality education made it hard to break out of the poverty cycle.
○ In the early 1960s, only 32% of black students graduated from high school,
compared to 56% of whites.
○ Black people constituted 11% of Americans but 46% of the unemployed.
■ This was because of poor education and the decreased number of
jobs for unskilled workers due to increased automation.
● The vast majority of policemen were white and racist.
The Watts Riots, 1965:
● Black Americans rioted in some big city ghettos in the summer of 1964, but the first
large-scale ghetto riot was in Watts in Los Angeles.
○ In August 1965 black mobs crying ‘Long live Malcolm X’ set fire to several
blocks of stores in Watts.
○ Martin Luther King began defining ‘freedom’ in terms of economic equality,
called for a better distribution of the wealth of America and planned his
Chicago campaign.
The Chicago campaign, 1966:
● King staged a campaign in Chicago for two reasons.
○ De facto (not in law) segregation and social and economic inequality
continued in the ghettos.
○ Second, many ghetto residents believed that the moderate civil rights leaders
did not understand their problems and were no help in solving them.
■ As a result, many were turning to radicalism and violence.
■ Fearing that this would alienate whites and prevent further federal
support, King hoped his Chicago campaign would encourage black
, ghetto residents to reject radicalism and violence and support the
moderate wing of the civil rights movement.
● Chicago's population of 3 million included 700,000 black Americans who suffered
unemployment, housing and education problems in the ghetto.
● King's campaign aimed to draw attention to the appalling living conditions in the
ghetto and the difficulties facing any black family that tried to move out.
○ In order to demonstrate and publicise the housing issues, King led reporters
around rat-infested ghetto apartments that lacked heating for freezing winters
or air conditioning for boiling summers.
○ He also led marches into white districts where black people could not buy or
rent homes.
○ The marchers were met with white abuse and violence.
■ After two months of publicity, marches and protests, Mayor Daley
made an agreement with King that the housing situation would be
improved and King left Chicago in the belief that some progress had
been made.
■ However, Mayor Daley reneged on the agreement after King left
Chicago.
The Chicago campaign's significance:
● Whites knew that if blacks moved into white working-class areas such as Cicero,
property values would fall and schools would decline.
● Furthermore, helping the ghettos would cost taxpayers money and white Americans
were unwilling to pay for improvements.
● Not surprisingly, King's Chicago campaign achieved little.
○ It alienated whites and despite a $4 million federal government grant for
Chicago housing and a legacy of community action, many black Chicagoans
lapsed into uninterest.
● Some turned to the Black Power movement.
● King continued as he wanted all types of poor Americans to come together to camp
out in Washington DC to draw national attention to their poverty.
○ However, he soon admitted his idea ‘just isn't working. People aren't
responding’.
● In March 1968 a white racist assassinated King in Memphis, Tennessee.
The impact of King’s assassination:
● Within weeks of King's assassination in 1968, Congress was shamed into passing a
Fair Housing Act.
○ The Act prohibited racial discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.
○ However, white resistance made it difficult to enforce and discrimination in
housing continued.
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