and pacific on c-span. today american history tv features henry clay on the contenders. it's the first of 14 programs on key political figures who ran for president and lost but who never the less changed political history. "the contenders" airs every sunday at 8:30 a.m., 7:30 p.m., and 10:30 p.m. through labor day weekend. each week, american history tv sits in on a lecture with one of the nation's college profe professo professors. and sundays at 1:00 p.m. this week, american history professor quintard taylor. professor taylor focuses on the 1954 u.s. supreme court decision on brown v. board of education and the 1957 integration of central high school in little rock, arkansas.

this two-hour class took place at the university of washington in seattle. folks, welcome to this class in african-american history. for those of you in this room know who i am. for others i'm quintard taylor and i'm a professor of history, american history at the university of washington. okay, we'll get started. last time -- last week we talked about world war ii and one of the things that i tried to emphasize was the fact that ordinary people were becoming much more militant and aggressive in defending their civil rights. i'm going to continue that theme tonight and, indeed, i think it's even more so the case in the 1950s and 1960s that ordinary people became the

engines of the civil rights movement. we tend to think about the civil rights movement as martin luther king, jr., fanny hammer and larger-than-life figures. the civil rights movement was made up by ordinary people including and you'll find out tonight a lot of college students. a lot of college students. in fact, in some ways the driving force of the civil rights movement came from people who were probably no older than you in this room. i want you to remember that. college students were the main force in terms of the civil rights movement. okay. i want us to keep that in mind when we talk of the evolution of this movement. i'll begin the lecture by discussing the decade of the 1950s because the 1950s really provide, i think, the impetus for what will be the -- what most historians call the grand civil rights movement of the 1960s. there are three episodes.

episode number one is brown. the brown decision in 1964. brown v board of education. we'll say a little more about that later on. episode number two is the montgomery bus boycott. of course that boycott was important for a variety of reasons not only the fact that it catapulted martin luther king, jr. to fame but also because it was the first successful movement in the deep south that actually challenged racial segregation. then, of course, there was the central high school desegregation incident at little rock. everyone heard of little rock. you're generally familiar with what went on. what i'll talk about tonight is the fact that all three of these episode, especially little rock were going to, in effect, lay the foundation for what would

become the more active civil rights movement of the 1960s. each of these episodes indicated profound changes in race relations and black progress. and as i've argued all throughout this class, when we talk about black progress and race relations we're not talking about black people gaining new reits, we're talking about african-americans seeing thing rights that they lost in the 1870s finally restored. in other words when we talk about vote rights, blacks were essentially trying to get back thing rights that were supposed to be guaranteed by the 15th amendment that was ratified finally in 1870. let me show a couple of slides that reflect on what i call this rising militancy and trying to change the narrative of the civil rights struggle. first of all, militancy is the

watch word. african-americans throughout the country either inside the naacp or beyond the naacp were much less tolerant of the racial order after 1946. in other words, the war itself had made people impatient with racial segregation and racial discrimination. no longer would african-americans simply wait for the laws to change, now they would force that change. secondly, the 1940s, especially in the 1950s indicated that the federal government would increasingly use its authority and its power even in the form of troops if necessary to defend black rights. i love this photograph. it's e vok it's provocative in so many ways. first of all, technically it's u.s. forces, u.s. army forces defending the freedom riders bus near the mississippi/alabama border in 1961 and some of you

know about the freedom riders and we'll at least mention them in passing. but i think what's more interesting about this and the subtext that people don't know virtually all of these young men and they were young men, probably between the ages of 18 and 22, almost all of these young men were southern boys but they were also members of the u.s. army and they were sworn to defend the constitution and in this instance they were sworn to defend black people who were protesting for their civil rights. there are a couple of other images that i want to show because they are showing the role of the federal government and the way in which that role became, if you will, popular at least in the north in the 1950s and 1960s. you probably don't remember this episode but this is ruby baits. a norman rockwell painting of ruby baits. she was a young african-american

girl whose parents sudden to have her integrated to a school, ironically in the ninth ward of new orleans, the ward that's now overly black. at the time it was white. ruby baits, her struggle was captured by norman rockwell in this very famous painting. but i want to pull this up. this is the actual photograph of ruby baits. why is this important? this is the federal government defending the rights of blacks. in this instance defending the rights of a little girl. this is powerful. this is evocative. this is reflecting the changes taking place in american society and particularly the attitudes. of the three episodes that i mentioned earlier, the brown decision is by far the most important. the brown decision reflects on two very important changes that have and the place in the 1940s and the 1950s. first, i want to pull this image

up. there's a change in the courts. now i'm showing here the u.s. supreme court. interestingly this is the supreme court in 1954, it was all white and all male. and that was, you know, that was pretty well the norm at that time. but what's more interesting is that that supreme court will rule in 1954 unanimously in favor of racial, the end of racial segregation in the public schools in the south. what does that mean? it means that the supreme court is moving in a particular direction but it also means at least i argue that it also reflects that a whole host of other courts were going to follow suit and they were going to issue orders or they were going to make decisions that would help to break town the wall of segregation. oil take this a little bit farther. i argue that it's the courts that were the one arm of government at that particular time that were most committed to making sure that the rights of

african-americans were well-respected. and i'll let you in on a little secret, you may already know this. there is absolutely no way the congress of the united states would have taken a similar state like this in 1954. and there's no way, in fact, that the president of the united states, president dwight eisenhower would have taken that step without the prompting by the courts. now, part of this is almost obvious. the supreme court is appointed the appointments are for life. as a result they are in some ways insulated from public opinion. in ways that the congress and the president are not. but congress and the president certainly were not embracing of civil rights at that particular moment as the supreme court was and as other courts. and i make this argument. had it not been for those courts, had it not been for the courts, i doubt if we have much to say about the civil rights

movement. in other words, they played a crucial role in terms of laying the foundation for what would come in the 1960s. but i suggested there are other changes taking place as well. one of those changes was in the naacp itself. the national association for the advancement of colored people as we talked about in this class, the national association for the advancement of colored people in some ways lost its energy, lost its drive, lost determination in the 1930s, partially because it was attacked by the communists and the left. we talk about scottsboro. you know the significance of the case. even though the communists didn't get those young men off, even though the fact the communists were more assertive and aggressive in terms of challenging for their freedom put the naacp in the shadow, out of which it found itself very difficult to emerge. by 1940 certainly by 1942, 1943,

the naacp was re-emerging as the major civil rights organization in the country. it was beginning to, if you will, regain the militancy it had in its first two decades. part of that is because of the war itself. part of it is because world war ii, of course, brought large numbers of african-americans out of the south and as they went to these various other cities they often joined the naacp. i'll give you and example here, a local example. this is the naacp dinner at the mount zion baptist church in seattle in 1945. what's important is not that these people were celebrating and having a great time at the dinner. in 1940 there are only 140 members of the naacp in seattle. by 1945 there were over 3,000. over 3,000. this kind of growth is pretty

well typical, reflective of the evolution of naacp chapters in a number of cities across the country. this was happening in the north. what was happening in the south was even more dramatic. in the south essentially the naacp for the first time became a major organization to contend with. our best estimate is that between roughly 1940 and 1946, naacp membership in the south increased from about 25,000 to over 400,000. 25,000 to over 400,000. now this is not just about numbers. it's not just about the growing ranks of the naacp. it's also about what's happening within the organization itself and in the 1940s, there's going to be an increase, a dramatic increase in the number of lawsuits filed by naacp local

chapters, local branches. in other words what's happening here is that the national leadership of the naacp is in many ways being pushed by the people at the bottom. the national movement is increasingly becoming a movement that's driven by ordinary people in various naacp chapters across the country and as you're going to see this will have profound implications in the 1950s and 1960s. during the 1940s and we talked about some of this before, during the 1940s the naacp local chapters, local chapters were going to engage in a whole host of lawsuits. they were going to file a whole host of lawsuits against racial discrimination. let me give you one example here. well we'll start with this one. the restrictive covenants. we talked about restrictive

covenants before in this class and i'm not going because the cameras are rolling i won't ask you to describe them but essentially you know the problem with restrictive covenants. you know that they were a major force in terms of keeping african-americans in the ghettos in the various ghettos in the urban north and in some places in the south as well. and i would say in the 1930s there was a small movement of naacp types in los angeles to challenge restrictive covenants. that small movement became a larger movement it eventually spread beyond los angeles and by the 1940s the supreme court by 1948, the supreme court would finally rule against restrictive covenants. this is not the naacp leadership from the top down saying we have to deal with restrictive covenants. these are local people, people in local branches beginning with l.a. who are saying that we have to challenge restrictive covenants and eventually the

naacp national leadership got on board. now they got on board in a big way. they provided significant lawyers, they provided financial support. but the impetus for this came from the bottom up. came from the naacp branches in los angeles and elsewhere. there's something else that's going on by the 1940s as well -- i'm sorry i got this out of order. these are the boilermakers. i don't know if you remember our discussion of boeing, but in portland the big struggle, the big political struggle was among the boilermakers, the black boilermakers who were discriminated again. the naacp in portland led the campaign to get racial justice for the boilermakers. let me repeat that. the naacp led, the local naacp led the campaign to get racial justice for the boilermakers. in fact, there were going to be at least three lawsuits that

would eventually end discrimination by the boilermakers in portland and elsewhere. but let me suggest that the naacp's composition is changing, it's growing as an organization, and it's growing much more militant in terms of its willingness to challenge the status quo and particularly the people at the bottom are much more militant. but there's also a huge change at the top that's going to be crucial in the long run. between roughly 1938 and 1942 the naacp will secure a number of new attorneys. and these attorneys will be critical in terms of winning cases for the organization. i'm going focus on three of them. the three that are on the screen here. and in some ways these attorneys were the people who were going to help to create the style of the naacp, the legal style of the naacp, not just in the 1940s, but well beyond that. let me talk about each of them briefly.

charles houston. i don't know how many of you are familiar with charles houston, but in a variety of ways he is the architect of the modern civil rights movement or at least the legal phase of the modern civil rights movement. he's the man who actually planned the legal strategy that would eventually result in brown v board of education. charles houston was the dean of the howard university law school at the time. he was also a harvard graduate, harvard law school graduate. he was the first african-american to edit the harvard law review. i know in the last campaign with barack obama there was a great deal of emphasis on barack obama being the first person to run the harvard law review. technically barack obama, the president, was elected to head the harvard law review, but the person who was selected first,

the african-american who was selected first was charles houston. charles houston was a brilliant legal strategist. and he set the direction and tone for the naacp throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s. his cousin, william hasley in the middle was the second to edit the harvard law via. we went to work for the naacp in the 1940s. the third person here is one i'm sure you're most familiar with. that's thurgood marshall. how many of you have heard of thurgood marshall before. okay. you're already familiar with thurgood marshall as a legal figure. marshall's case is interesting. he wanted to go to the university of maryland law

school. he could not because he was african-american. and so eventually he settled on going to the howard university law school and it's there that he met charles houston, he came under the tutelage of charles houston and the rest as they say is history. because of houston marshall would devote the rest of his life, the rest of his career to the civil rights litigation. in fact, houston, hasley and marshall, these three attorneys would win almost as many cases for the naacp as most of the leading lawyers of the naacp had done in the previous 15 years. in other words, they were remarkably successful, especially marshall, especially thurgood marshall and of course, partly that success would lead to his being on the supreme court eventually. one of the things that i think has to be said about this, though, the irony of all this is that houston, hasley and

marshall would be successful with the naacp at least in part because there was nowhere else for them to go. the best black lawyers today would do what? they go into corporate law or other laws. in 1948 best black lawyers did civil rights law. they did it in part because that's what they wanted to do but they did civil rights law in part because other areas were closed to them. in a sense, ironic sense the discrimination against them by many of the law firms would lead them to be involved in the kinds of activities that would help to change american life and particularly african-american life. let me come back to charles houston. as i said before, he's the one who would chart the legal strategy that would lead to brown.

that strategy was very simple. at least i'm going to simplify it. essentially it was this. the culprit is segregation. racial segregation. but one cannot confront segregation directly in 1940. one has to confront the edges of segregation and essentially what these lawyers were trying to do was to look for, if you will, the weak spots, the weak places, the edges as i said before, the edges of segregation. what's the edge of segregation? well, the schools in the border states. so they would go after -- they would attempt to desegregate schools in places that were on the border of the u.s. south or on the border of the u.s. south and u.s. north. what's another edge of segregation?

they would go after graduate schools because they tended to have older students. and older students theoretically are more acceptable of desegregation. so there were a series of lawsuits against various institutions in the 1940s and the early 1950s. i'll give you three examples. i won't talk about all of them. 1948, the naacp initiated a lawsuit against the university of delaware, against its graduate program and as a result of the lawsuit that program accepted black students for the first time. 1949, the university of kentucky integrated for the first time and essentially its graduate program integrated for the first time as a result of the naacp. in 1950 louisiana state university and this is significant because this is

actually a deep south institution. louisiana state university integrated its graduate programs for the first time as a result of the naacp. and then, of course, there's the university of oklahoma. i don't know how much time i want to spend on this, but this is a -- this is a photograph that's evocative of the struggle that was going on in the 1940s and early 1950s and how that struggle had ebbs and flows. the naacp brought a lawsuit against the law school at the university of oklahoma. eventually or at least they thought they prevailed the naacp thought it prevailed because the federal judge said the city of oklahoma law school should integrate the student body. at that point the university decided to quote technically integrate by providing a separate area for the one black student that was enrolled at the university. before they got to this, they

actually put the single black student, g.w. mclauren, essentially in the capitol rotunda and had one law school faculty member teach him. this was a farce. this was clearly not an integration of the university of oklahoma law school and to be honest, this is not true integration of the university of oklahoma law school, but it reflects on the fact that there is this tension going on throughout the south against african-american entry into various schools. this was considered a victory and eventually the university of oklahoma law school integrated. but not without some difficulty. not without considerable difficulty. nonetheless, it was argued that the integration of these law schools, the professional schools, the graduate programs was fairly easy compared to, if you will, the 800 pound elephant

in the room and that's public school segregation. public school segregation. i want you to look at this photograph for a minute. this is a typical black school not only in arkansas, but throughout the south. racial segregation was the law of the land and a number of states across america but nowhere was it more pronounced than in the deep south. you probably see a number -- at least i hope you see a number of things going on. you can see there's a whole host of kids here. these schools were supposedly separate and equal. that was the idea that came from ferguson. in point of fact there was nothing equal about these schools at all. the black schools were clearly, they were patently inferior, and if anybody wanted to really investigate for five minutes they would find out that this

was the case. this was the situation that the naacp was going to have to take on. and, indeed, it took it on partly because or i would say mainly because there were a whole host of parents of african-american students who were upset at these kinds of conditions. there's a lot of discussion about why blacks chose to try to desegregate the public schools in the south. we can get into all kinds of theories, but my idea is fairly simple and it's an idea that came from my parents. because my parents went through this along with a whole host of others. i won't get into my own integration experience but let me suggest to you that you're looking at someone who went to segregated schools up until 1965. so this is not just some story, this is not just ancient history, this is something that would affect the lives of a whole host of people.

for my parents and a whole host of other black parents in the south, there was a very interesting situation. throughout the whole period of segregation, throughout the whole period of disenfranchisement that's when black people didn't have the right to vote, there was never a time when african-americans were relieved from paying taxes. let me repeat that. during the entire of segregation, during the entire period of disenfranchisement, there was never a time when black people were relieved from paying taxes. folks, i'm doing this on camera on national tv but i'm going to do it anyway. i'll never be asked to do this again. but i can tell you, i can remember my own parents going down to the courthouse and literally going to the courthouse back door to pay their property taxes every year. and they did so at a time when they couldn't vote, they did so at a time when they didn't have the rights and the safe guards

of quote normal citizens of the united states. as i said before, this is the paradox. black people continued to pay taxes, including take taxes to support the schools in the south. and much of that money was going to be diverted to pay for the schools of others in the south at that time. i also think, again, we need to remember that most black parents weren't thinking in terms of school integration as essentially putting their kids in proximity with white kids. they were thinking of school integration as the only way, the only way to make sure that their kids had a quality education. the only way to ensure that the education that their kids received would prepare them for the future. i mean we can argue that parents may have put too much stock in

education. we can argue that they may have spent too much time focusing on education. but i think i understand at least, my own parents and i know that for them that was the biggest civil rights battle of all and indeed even when you talk about getting the right to vote, getting the right to vote was at least in part to make sure that one had access to the best education. that one had access to education. now let me talk about the inequality. let me pull up a couple of images that reflect on this. arkansas children receiving polio shots 1957. you guys don't know this. polio was a major debilitating crippling disease at the time and only in the 1950s was there a vaccine that was available to counter polio. so what we have is modern technology, at least modern technology for 1957 and modern medicine being made available but being a