We like to think that after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., death in 1968, all of America, except a few extreme nutcases, began to realign their thoughts on race and bigotry and all of the American People became one big happy family, singing "Kum-buy-yah" together around a metaphorical campfire of peace and harmony.
In a pig's eye.
The Civil Rights movement arose out of the fact that the white majority in the South were unwilling to share power with the newly freed slaves after the Civil War. The rights of Afro-Americans, to use Malcolm X's term, were continuously curbed in the South from the end of Reconstruction in 1877, until the Supreme Court decided Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, which formally established segregation as the law of the land. At this point, Afro-Americans were little better off in the South than they had been before the Civil War, and their treatment elsewhere in the United States was not much better. (See Douglas A. Blackmon's book Slavery by Another Name, for more on this subject.) Nor was it better for Hispanics, Asians, or Native Americans. It was one of the darkest periods in our history, and "race riots" in this era were almost always instigated by whites against the minorities, sometimes destroying whole towns like Rosedale, Oklahoma.
For almost sixty years, minorities in America could not, for the most part, engage in the simplest and most important duties of a citizen of the United States: voting, jury duty, serving beside their fellow white citizens in the military. Nor could they use the same public facilities to play sports or eat or sleep or travel, or play in sports beside white men.
Then the Second World War came along, which was the penultimate ingredient for the cause of Civil Rights in America. First, it was a long war, longer than any war our nation had fought up to that time save the Civil War, which was divisive rather than inclusive. Large numbers of people from different walks of life and different parts of America shared foxholes and bunk space with each other for as much as three years at a time. Although segregation of black (and Nisei--Americans born of Japanese descent--but that's another story) and white troops continued, as it had since the Civil War, this war saw a wide-scale integration of Native Americans and Latinos into the white American military for the first time. Afro-Americans were, however, permitted for the first time to have their military triumphs lauded by the American media with tales of the Tuskegee Airmen (332nd Fighter Group), and the 761st Tank Battalion--who fought under General Patton in the Battle of the Bulge. In the infernos of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, Afro-American Marines, who had been limited to supply duties before these battles, were used to plug manpower holes in the depleted Marine Divisions on both islands. They acquitted themselves with the honor that befitted a United States Marine.
After the war, Afro-Americans returned home asking themselves a simple question: if they were good enough to die for America, why were they not good enough to enjoy the same rights as everyone else who had served in the war. The Dixiecrat (Southern Democrats like Strom Thurmond) support for the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 was in part an attempt to undercut the unions, and prevent organized labor from adding civil rights for Afro-Americans to their agenda, in addition to preventing the establishment of worker's rights in the South.
Jackie Robinson's breaking of major league baseball's color barrier in 1947, and President Truman's Executive Order desegregating the military in 1948, were the next two milestones to fall in America's still incomplete journey to racial equality.
It was the five remaining "New Deal" Supreme Court Justices appointed by FDR (Hugo Black, Stanley Reed, Felix Frankfurter, William Douglas, and Robert Jackson) who were at the heart of overturning the "separate but equal" standard of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), by properly applying the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to civil rights laws for Afro-Americans in Brown v. The Board of Education (1954), then applying the same standard for other "races" in Hernandez v. Texas that same year.
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