The Struggle for Racial Equality
By the late 1940s, most Americans had come to accept the need for government to play an active role in promoting social welfare. However, there was still great disparity in the treatment of people of color. While the federal government was desegregated in the late 1940s, numerous states and localities relied on Plessy v. Ferguson in maintaining a dual system of facilities that were rarely equal for people of different races.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) sponsored a series of lawsuits in the 1930s and 1940s that succeeded in showing that the facilities for people of color were far inferior than those for whites. The organization’s ultimate goal was to overturn Plessy, which it sought to do through a series of lawsuits against segregated school districts. Five of these cases reached the Supreme Court in 1952 under the caption Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Two years later, Chief Justice Earl Warren’s unanimous opinion held that segregated public education violated the Equal Protection Clause.
This decision gave substantial credibility to advocates of equality, who sought to dismantle legalized segregation and create a country that prohibited discrimination on the basis of race. This was not an easy struggle, as segregationist refused to back down for almost two decades. One of the leaders of the struggle was Martin Luther King Jr., a minister who used a campaign of non-violent civil disobedience to demonstrate how race affected the treatment of Americans. He was a powerful writer and speaker, and his Letter from the Birmingham Jail and Speech at the Lincoln Memorial illustrate the method of non-violent protest that he promoted to change law and society. Malcolm X (he later took the name Malik el-Shabazz) initially called for blacks to withdraw into separate enclaves, but later recognized that an integrated country was preferable. In a speech that became known for its phrase “the ballot or the bullet,” X contended that if the federal government failed to ensure voting rights for blacks, there would be no option but resorting to violent protest. After his assassination in 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act to protect the voting rights of racial minorities.
