Brown V. Board Of Education (1950)

In the postwar years, the NAACP's legal strategy for civil rights continued to succeed. Led by Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund challenged and overturned many forms of discrimination, but their main thrust was equal educational opportunities. For example, in Sweat v. Painter (1950), the Supreme

Court decided that the University of Texas had to integrate its law school.

Marshall and the Defense Fund worked with Southern plaintiffs to challenge the

Plessy doctrine directly, arguing in effect that separate was inherently unequal.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on five cases that challenged elementary- and secondary-school segregation, and in May 1954 issued its landmark ruling in

Brown v. Board of Education that stated

To overcome this problem, some school districts in the 1970s tried busing students to schools outside of their neighborhoods. As desegregation progressed, the membership of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) grew.

The KKK used violence or threats against anyone who was suspected of favoring desegregation or black civil rights. Klan terror, including intimidation and murder, was widespread in the South in the 1950s and 1960s, though Klan activities were not always reported in the media. One terrorist act that did receive national attention was the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy slain in Mississippi by whites who believed he had flirted with a white woman. The trial and acquittal of the men accused of Till's murder were covered in the national media, demonstrating the continuing racial bigotry of

Southern whites.

Despite the threats and violence, the struggle quickly moved beyond school desegregation to challenge segregation in other areas. On December 1, 1955, Rosa

Parks, a member of the Montgomery, Alabama, branch of the NAACP, was told

The community had previously considered a boycott of the buses, and almost overnight one was organized. The Montgomery bus boycott was an immediate success, with virtually unanimous support from the 50,000 blacks in Montgomery. It lasted for more than a year and dramatized to the American public the determination of blacks in the

South to end segregation. A federal court ordered Montgomery's buses desegregated in November 1956, and the boycott ended in triumph. A young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., was president of the Montgomery

Improvement Association, the organization that directed the boycott. The protest made King a national figure. His eloquent appeals to Christian brotherhood and

American idealism created a positive impression on people both inside and outside the South.

On February 1, 1960, four black college students at North Carolina A&T

University began protesting racial segregation in restaurants by sitting at

"white-only" lunch counters and waiting to be served. This was not a new form of protest, but the response to the sit-ins in North Carolina was unique.