A. Philip Randolph's call for a March on Washington in 1941 reclaimed an older tradition of leveraging better conditions for African Americans in a time of national crisis. A year later, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized sit-ins at Chicago lunch counters and other facilities. In 1947, CORE and the Fellowship of Reconciliation sponsored a Journey of Reconciliation to test segregation of interstate public transportation. Between World War II and the Korean War, the armed forces of the United States were desegregated and, in a series of executive orders, President Harry Truman established a President's Commission on Civil Rights and a Fair Employment Practice Commission to encourage equal employment opportunity in the civil service. As Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union increased, tensions between the rhetoric of equality and the reality of segregation in the United States took center stage.
By 1950, NAACP legal appeals to the United States Supreme Court, masterminded by the attorney Thurgood Marshall, were chipping away at disfranchisement and racial segregation in residential zoning, interstate transportation, and public graduate and professional schools. These successes encouraged the NAACP to challenge segregated elementary and secondary education as well. In 1954, the Court found the old "separate but equal" doctrine unconstitutional in Brown v.
This is a free page. This page contains 197 words. This
article contains 1,701 words (approx. 6 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our Civil Rights Movement Access Pass.
