March: Books 2 & 3

Historians generally identify the civil rights movement as beginning in 1954 with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and ending in 1968 with the passing of the Fair Housing Act, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. This era is best understood as a high point after nearly a century of activism. After the Civil War, the federal government initiated a project known as Reconstruction, which sought to rebuild the South and ensure the rights of so-called “freedmen,” or enslaved people who were recently emancipated. For several years, this effort showed promise, as Black men held political office (including two Senate seats) and President Ulysses S. Grant signed the first Civil Rights Act in 1871 to defend freedmen against the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist groups. By 1877, Reconstruction mostly fell apart as Rutherford Hayes promised to withdraw federal troops from the South in exchange for their support in the contested 1876 election. In the ensuing decades, many Southern states passed “Jim Crow laws” that separated the races in the public sphere and relegated Black Americans to second-class citizenship. There were challenges to Jim Crow legislation from the beginning, most notably Homer Plessy’s deliberate travel on a “whites-only” train in New Orleans, but the Supreme Court upheld segregation on the principle of “separate but equal.