The Civil Rights Movement

• Author: Jack Fruchtman
• Profession: Professor of Political Science and Director of the Program in Law and American Civilization at Towson University, Maryland
• Pages: 172-185

American Constitutional History: A Brief Introduction, First Edition. Jack Fruchtman.

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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The Civil Rights Movement

In 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored

People (NAACP) was founded to end racial segregation and the lynch-

ing of blacks. Education became its main focus after 1935 when its

new legal director, Charles Houston, who had served as dean of the

Howard University School of Law, hired his former student, Thurgood

Marshall, to litigate segregation cases. In 1940, Thurgood Marshall

became chief counsel of the NAACP. In the early 1950s, the organiza-

tion persuaded the Supreme Court that segregated graduate and

professional schools violated the equal protection clause, but did not

order integration. Many cases involved nonexistent or unequal facil-

ities in the states for minority students. Schools had to upgrade their

facilities or create them if they did not exist. Once Marshall realized

that the focus on graduate and professional education was misguided

in attacking segregation, he decided to concentrate on elementary and

secondary schools.

School Desegregation

The civil rights movement began with the Supreme Court’s 1954 rul-

ing in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas desegregating

public schools. Based on the sociological studies undertaken by Harvard

researcher Kenneth B. Clark, Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded that