Civil rights in the USA 1954-1964 - OCR AEmergence of the civil rights movement in the 1950s

Learn more about the civil rights movement in this podcast.

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The Civil rights movement emerged in America in the 1950s. Its emergence was accelerated by events that gained national attention from being reported in the media. Americans were able to witness the impact of the movement through reporting and images on television, in cinema news broadcasts and in newspapers.

Several events gained widespread media attention in both the north and south of the country. They captured the attention of campaigners, the government and President Dwight D Eisenhower. Some of these were:

• the case of Brown v Board of Education of Topeka
• the murder of Emmett Till
• the Montgomery Bus Boycott

Brown v Board of Education of Topeka

The Plessy v Ferguson court case in 1896 ruled that segregation of people based on race was legal, providing facilities were 'separate but equal'. This ruling meant that schools in the South continued to be segregated, as the authorities argued that the facilities were 'separate but equal'. In 1954, Thurgood Marshall, a lawyer from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), took up the case of an eight-year-old black schoolgirl called Linda Brown, who lived in Topeka, Kansas. Linda lived near a school for white children but she had to travel a mile to a school for black children.

Marshall acted on behalf of Linda’s father, Oliver Brown. Marshall argued that the Topeka Board of Education was acting unlawfully because education could not be treated as ‘separate but equal’. He said that the education available to black children was not, in reality, equal to that available to white children.

The Supreme Court ruled in Brown’s favour. The ruling was based on the idea that black people had a right to equal educational opportunities. Chief Justice Earl Warren stated that all schools should desegregate 'with all deliberate speed'.‘ However, the court did not set a timescale for school desegregation because:

• racism was well established in southern society and could not be wiped out overnight
• this was the first challenge to the legal segregation of education, so the court was worried about how people would react
• the court was concerned that its judgement might be ignored by state governments and that this would make it look weak

The phrase ‘with all deliberate speed’ was so vague that opponents took it as meaning desegregation could happen slowly.

The role of the NAACP in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka

The NAACP had been essential to the success of Brown v Board of Education of Topeka as it had given the plaintiffs, a group of people who brought the case to court, highly qualified and experienced lawyers, such as Thurgood Marshall. The Brown family would not have been able to afford such a high standard of legal support. The NAACP took responsibility for funding the case, which resulted in Marshall presenting an argument with which all nine Supreme Court justices agreed.