Focus Task: Optimists and Pessimists

Given the events of 1968, it is possible to take either an optimistic or a pessimistic view of race relations in the United States in the late 1960s.

1. Start by working through pages 376-383 looking for evidence to support the optimistic view that great progress has been made.

• Africans Americans  had officially been given the right to vote early in the century.
• In December 1956, the Supreme Court declared Montgomery's bus laws to be illegal. This meant that all other such bus services were illegal and by implication that all segregation of public services was illegal, which thus forced the buses to be unsegregated.
• In February 1960 in Nashville, Tennessee, 500 students organised sit-ins in restaurants, libraries and churches. Their college expelled them, but then backed down when 400 teachers threatened to resign. The students were attacked and abused, but eventually Mayor Ben West was convinced by their actions. By May 1960 the town had been desegregated.
• In Greensboro, North Carolina, SNCCstudents began a campaign to end segregation of restaurants in the town in 1960. Within a week, 400 black and white students were organizing sit-ins at lunch counters in the town.
• The NAACP organized courses for African Americans in voting procedures and how to register to vote, thus encouraging them to vote.
• In May 1963, President Kennedy intervened with the crisis in Alabama and pressured Governor George Wallace to force the police to release all the protesters and to give more jobs to black Americans and allow them to be promoted. As a result, Birmingham was desegregated.
• President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which made it illegal for local governments to discriminate in areas such as housing and employment.

2. Now work through the same pages and look for evidence to support the pessimistic view that the United Stats remained racially divided.

• Black Americans faced official and legal discrimination in areas such as employment and education. In the south, white teachers earned 30 per cent more than black teachers.
• Police officers  failed to stop attacks on black people and they also frequently took part in them. White juries almost always acquitted whites accused of killing blacks.
• The best universities were closed to blacks. In 1958, a black teacher called Clemson King was committed to a mental asylum for applying to the University of Mississippi.
• In September 1963 a Ku Klux Klan bomb killed four black children in a Birmingham church.
• In April 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. organized a march on Birmingham, Alabama. Six years after the Montgomery decision, this city had still not desegregated. Its police force was notoriously racist and had links to the Ku Klux Klan
• King Jr. organized a march in Selma, Alabama where 600 African Americans were brutally attacked.
• Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a hired killer in 1968 which then ended an era of for the civil rights movement.

3. Now decide whether you think there were more reasons for optimism or more reasons more pessimism.
      I believe that there were more reasons for optimism then pessimism because although most of the attempts were insignificant, they were just a small stepping stone to the overall goal of equal rights. In almost every march, protest, etc, there have always been more people against than for the cause, but as time progressed, the Civil Rights Movement started to gain more followers and those marches and protestors become more and more effective.