African American Movements

In 1940s, economically marginal African American population, inhabited in the South, occupying the bottom stairs of the ladder. They were in high rates of poverty, compared to the whites. Furthermore, they were politically discriminated, being disenfranchised. Although African Americans who migrated north enjoyed better political, social, and economic prospects, residential segregation reigned. Blacks were confined to poor neighbourhoods. African Americans, who tried to lift this informal apartheid by seeking housing in white-dominated sites, were physically crooked and faced violence. The killings of African-Americans by the whites were widespread in the 1950s and without punishment in the South. The two killers of Emmett Till, a boy killed in Mississippi in 1955, were arrested the day after the murder. They were released a month later by a jury comprised of whites. The killing and the release of murderers electrified public opinion in the North.

Upon protests by the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) about this violence, President Harry Truman was poked to form a special Committee on Civil Rights. Meanwhile the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), in 1947 planned a Journey of Reconciliation, which aimed at desegregating public facilities and raising public awareness of the racial problem in America. The Committee on Civil Rights published a report, entitled To Secure These Rights, in support of civil rights in the same year. The report called for a need to address the right to vote, to serve in non-segregated military and to be treated in education and employment equally. However, the reforms desired by the committee were not adopted by Congress. The federal government could not succeed in enacting major civil rights legislation until 1964.

Enacting civil rights reforms was moreover almost impossible due to the fear of communism after the end of World War II. The single considerable racial reform ratified by the federal government in the decade after the end of World War II was the desegregation of the armed forces in 1948.