Students will analyze how the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s was both part of the long history of the Black freedom struggle and a particular movement that arose in response to specific circumstances during the World War II period in the 1940s.
Essential Knowledge
3.A. During World War II, over 1 million African Americans enlisted in the military, leading to pressure for legal equality for enlisted service members and veterans.
3.B. World War II also brought millions of Black workers into factories, where they pushed back against workplace discrimination and pressed for fair employment practices, especially from the federal government.
3.C. Outside of the South, racially discriminatory housing policies and practices governing everything from home loans to apartment rentals perpetuated residential and economic segregation. Housing desegregation became a major issue across the United States.
3.D. The racist mortgage policies put into place by the federal government following World War II played a significant role in creating the wealth gap that exists between white and Black Americans today.
Related Resources
- [3.A.] To learn about African American soldiers during World War II, review archival photographs available through the National Archives, particularly their webpage “Pictures of African Americans During World War II.”
- [3.A.] As the editorials “Should I Sacrifice To Live Half-American?” and “The Negro Veteran Comes Home” show, Black veterans questioned whether their sacrifices for democracy would be acknowledged and repaid by their fellow Americans.
- [3.A.] To further explore these ideas, students can contrast the editorials with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 “Four Freedoms” speech, which explained his ideals of what American freedom really meant.
- [3.A.] African American soldiers also faced bureaucratic opposition within government institutions. To learn how Black soldiers and veterans were deprived of their benefits from the GI Bill, read the 1945 article from the Pittsburgh Courier “Veteran Benefits Denied Holders.”
- [3.A.] Systemic racism was also rampant within the military. For example, some Black soldiers routinely dealt with outdated equipment, such as the airplanes flown by the Tuskegee Airmen. For a first-person account, students can watch a 2002 interview with Tuskegee Airman Lee Archer, available through the Library of Congress.
- [3.A.] To better understand the impact of experiences like Archer’s, read the text of Executive Order 9981, in which Truman established the President’s Committee of Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Forces.
- [3.B.] To see how World War II provided African American women an increased range of professional opportunities, paving the way for later civil rights advocacy, review the 1945 article in Opportunity “Negro Women in the WAC.”
- [3.B.] Students should also learn how Black labor organizers like A. Philip Randolph exerted influence on federal policymaking, leading to President Roosevelt’s 1941 Executive Order 8802 banning discrimination in the defense industry.
- [3.B.] For further primary sources that help contextualize the World War II era and Randolph’s work for racial justice in labor relations, visit the World War II and Post-War section of the Library of Congress exhibit The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom.
- [3.B.] The National World War II Museum’s exhibit Fighting for the Right To Fight includes a wealth of primary resources to better understand the tactics Randolph used and details some contemporary arguments about the relationship between the Black freedom struggle and World War II.
- [3.C.] To better understand discrimination and protest beyond the South, educators can listen to LFJ’s Teaching Hard History podcast episode “The Jim Crow North,” which looks at the work of the movement in cities like Milwaukee, Omaha, Cleveland and New York.
- [3.C.] LFJ’s lessons on Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law can help in teaching about housing discrimination and its impacts. “The Color of Law: Developing the White Middle Class” includes excerpts detailing some of the ways anti-integrationists across the country worked to preserve housing segregation.
- [3.C.] For more recommendations for teaching about housing segregation, educators can review the resources that accompanied “Segregated by Design,” LFJ’s interview with Richard Rothstein. “Toolkit for ‘Segregation by Design’” suggests ways to use primary sources to trace the long history of housing segregation in the U.S.
- [3.D.] To discuss how these policies affect people today, students can watch the 2021 CBS News report “Confronting the History of Housing Discrimination.” In it, a white reporter tracks the ways his own family benefitted from racist policies, accruing wealth in the form of home equity.
- [3.D.] Students can also look at the ways these racist policies continue to affect home values by delving into some of the data in the 2018 Brookings Institution report The Devaluation of Assets in Black Neighborhoods, which found that, when all other factors were equal, homes in neighborhoods where the majority of homeowners were Black were regularly valued below those in neighborhoods where homeowners were mostly white.
