The civil rights movement did not begin in the 1950s. It built on decades of work by the NAACP, on the votes of Black migrants in Northern cities, and on the Double V campaign of World War II. Black veterans came home from fighting fascism determined to end segregation.
Key idea
Early victories: Jackie Robinson integrated major league baseball (1947); Truman ordered the armed forces desegregated (1948); Mendez v. Westminster (1947) ended the segregation of Mexican American children in California schools.
| Year | Victory | Why it mattered |
|---|---|---|
| 1944 | Smith v. Allwright | The Supreme Court struck down the "white primary" in Texas |
| 1947 | Jackie Robinson joins the Brooklyn Dodgers (April 15) | A national symbol of integration in the most popular sport |
| 1947 | Mendez v. Westminster (Ninth Circuit) | Segregating Mexican American children was unlawful; Governor Earl Warren signed a repeal of California's school segregation laws |
| 1948 | Executive Order 9981 (July 26) | Equal treatment in the armed forces; the military was largely integrated by the mid-1950s |
| 1948 | Shelley v. Kraemer | Courts could not enforce racial covenants in deeds |
| 1950 | Sweatt v. Painter | Texas had to admit a Black student to its law school: a separate school was not equal |
Why it works
Why did progress come first in courts, the military and sports? The NAACP's lawyers, led by Charles Hamilton Houston and then Thurgood Marshall, chose cases carefully, starting with graduate and law schools, where states could not credibly claim that hastily built separate schools were equal. The President could change the military by order, without Congress, where Southern senators blocked civil rights bills by filibuster. Truman's committee report To Secure These Rights (1947) called for an end to segregation; in 1948 some Southern Democrats walked out of their party's convention and ran their own candidate.
Work it through
Worked example: Building a legal strategy
Why did the NAACP attack segregation in law schools before attacking it in elementary schools?
- Plessy allowed "separate but equal," so the first cases asked whether separate schools were in fact equal.
- A state could not build an equal law school, with its faculty, library and alumni, overnight.
- Winning those cases (such as Sweatt in 1950) prepared the ground to argue that separation itself is unequal.
Answer: Graduate schools were the weakest point of "separate but equal," and each win built a precedent.
Common mistake
Many students think the movement began with Rosa Parks in 1955. Legal and political work went back decades, through the NAACP's lawsuits and wartime campaigns. Another slip: civil rights struggles were only Black and white. Mexican American families won Mendez in 1947, and in Hernandez v. Texas (1954) the Supreme Court held that excluding Mexican Americans from juries violated equal protection.