Opposition to the Civil Rights Movement (Edexcel GCSE History): Revision Note

Timeline

Summary

The civil rights movement faced opposition from several areas. Some opposition, such as the Ku Klux Klan, used deadly violence to maintain segregation. Others used political means to argue in Congress and in the Senate that it was up to the individual states to decide on their laws. They did not believe that the national government should interfere in state laws.

What was the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)?

• The Ku Klux Klan was a secretive racist organisation

• Its members hid their identities at Klan meetings by wearing long white robes with pointed hoods that completely concealed their faces

• Klan members were White protestant Americans who believed they were superior to Black people and should therefore be in charge of Black Americans

  • White protestant Americans sometimes referred to themselves as WASPS which stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestants and refers to their British or German ancestry

• The Klan members terrorised Black Americans through beatings and lynchings

  • A lynching involves executing a person, normally by hanging from a tree, for an alleged crime without the victim having a trial

  • Often, the victim’s bodies were then mutilated by covering them in tar and feathers

  • Between 1882 and 1968, there were around 5,000 recorded lynchings in the South

• Punishment for these crimes was extremely rare as judges and police officers were often members of the KKK

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Who was Emmett Till?

• Emmett Till was a 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955

  • There was no segregation where he came from in the North but he was killed whilst visiting his cousins in the South

Why was Emmett Till murdered?

• Emmett Till was accused of flirting with, whistling at and touching the white 21-year-old wife of store owner Roy Bryant

  • Several nights later, Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, abducted Till at gunpoint from his uncle’s house

  • His body was discovered floating in a river days later, having been severely beaten and shot in the head

The significance of Emmett Till to the civil rights movement

• Emmett Till’s mother decided to have an open casket at his funeral and photographs of his mutilated face were published by many national newspapers

  • The images and story of the boy’s death caused an uproar and Bryant and Milam were arrested 

  • They became the first white men ever to be charged with the murder of a Black person in Mississippi

• When Bryant and Milam stood trial, an all-white jury took less than one hour to find them not guilty

  • Bryant and Milam then sold their story to a magazine for an enormous sum of money

• The trial generated anger and publicity, leading many more people to become sympathetic to and involved with the civil rights movement 

  • This included Black and White Americans

• The killers of Emmett Till, along with the local police, were believed to be members of the KKK and were never punished

Opposition to civil rights: Congress

• The success of the civil rights movement in challenging segregation led to a furious response from politicians who were opposed to it

• This opposition increased after the ruling in the court case of  Brown v. Topeka, which stated that segregation in schools went against the constitution

  •  In Congress, 19 senators and 77 members of the House of Representatives declared the Brown v.Topeka ruling “a clear abuse of judicial power” 

  •  They believed that the Federal government had no right to interfere in an individual state’s education policy

  • The politicians all signed the Southern Manifesto, which encouraged states to resist any changes to improve civil rights

Opposition to civil rights: Dixiecrats

•  There are two main political parties in the United States; the Republican Party and the Democratic Party

• The civil rights movement caused deep divisions within the Democratic Party

•  Democrats from the South who were opposed to ending segregation became known as Dixiecrats

  • The term comes from combining the words ‘Dixieland’, which is a nickname for the South, and Democrat

  • Their numbers meant they were influential, and they frequently slowed or prevented new civil rights laws from being passed

  • Dixiecrats claimed that they weren’t racist because their opposition was about the principle of states deciding on their own laws, rather than the Federal government