episode 39: consensus and protest: civil rightslocked hi, i’m john green, this is crash courseu.s. history and today we’re going to look at one of the most important periods of americansocial history, the 1950s. why is it so important? well, first becauseit saw the advent of the greatest invention in human history: television.mr. green, mr. green! i like tv! by the way,
Brown V.S Board Of Education Summary, you’re from the future. how does the x-filesend? are there aliens or no aliens? no spoilers, me from the past, you’re goingto have to go to college and watch the x-files get terrible just like i did.no it’s mostly important because of the civil rights movement we’re going to talkabout some of the heroic figures like martin
luther king and rosa parks, but much of thereal story is about the thousands of people you’ve never heard of who fought to makeamerica more inclusive. but before we look at the various changesthat the civil rights movement was pushing for, we should spend a little time lookingat the society that they were trying to change. the 1950s has been called a period of consensus,and i suppose it was, at least for the white males who wrote about it and who all agreedthat the 1950s were fantastic for white males. consensus culture was caused first, by thecold war – people were hesitant to criticize the united states for fear of being brandeda communist, and, second, by affluence – increasing prosperity meant that more people didn’thave as much to be critical of.
and this widespread affluence was somethingnew in the united states. between 1946 and 1960 americans experienced a period of economicexpansion that saw standards of living rise and gross national product more than double.and unlike many previous american economic expansions, much of the growing prosperityin the fifties was shared by ordinary working people who saw their wages rise.to quote our old friend eric foner, “by 1960, an estimated 60 percent of americansenjoyed what the government defined as a middle-class standard of living.â€[1]and this meant that increasing numbers of americans had access things like television,and air conditioning, and dishwashers and air travel. that doesn’t really seem likea bonus.
anyway, despite the fact that they were beingstuffed into tiny metal cylinders and hurdled through the air, most americans were happybecause they had, like, indoor plumbing and electricity.intro the 1950s was the era of suburbanization.the number of homes in the united states doubled during the decade, which had the pleasantside effect of creating lots of construction jobs.the classic example of suburbanization was levittown in new york, where 10,000 almostidentical homes were built and became home to 40,000 people almost overnight.and living further from the city meant that more americans needed cars, which was goodnews for detroit where cars were being churned
out with the expectation that americans wouldreplace them every two years. by 1960, 80% of americans owned at least onecar and 14% had two or more. and car culture changed the way that americanslived and shopped. i mean it gave us shopping malls, and drive thru restaurants, and thebackseat makeout session. i mean, high school me didn’t get the backseat makeout session.but, other people did! i did get the burger king drive thru though.and lots of it. our whole picture of the american standardof living, with its abundance of consumer goods and plentiful services was establishedin the 1950s. and so, for so for many people this era wassomething of a “golden age†especially
when we look back on it today with nostalgia.but there were critics, even at the time. so when we say the 1950s were an era of consensus,one of the things we’re saying is there wasn’t much room for debate about what itmeant to be an american. most people agreed on the american values:individualism, respect for private property, and belief in equal opportunity.the key problem was that we believed in equal opportunity, but didn’t actually provideit. but some people were concerned that the cookiecutter vision of the good life and the celebration of the middle class lifestyle was displacingother conceptions of citizenship. like the sociologist c. wright mills describeda combination of military, corporate, and
political leaders as a power elite whose controlover government and the economy was such as to make democracy an afterthought.in the lonely crowd sociologist david riesman criticized americans for being conformistand lacking the rich inner life necessary to be truly independent.and john kenneth galbraith questioned an affluent society that would pay for new cars and newmissiles but not for new schools. and we can’t mention the 1950s without discussingteenagers since this was the decade that gave us rock and roll, and rock stars like billhaley and the comets, buddy holly and the crickets, and elvis presley and his hips.another gift of the 1950s was literature, much of which appeals especially to teenagers.like, the beats presented a rather drug-fueled
and not always coherent criticism of the bourgeois1950’s morals. they rejected materialism, and suburban ennui and things like regularjobs while celebrating impulsivity, and recklessness, experimentation and freedom.and also heroin. so you might have noticed something aboutall those critics of the 1950s that i just mentioned: they were all white dudes. now,we’re gonna be talking about women in the 1950s and 1960s next week because their liberationmovement began a bit later, but what most people call the civil rights movement reallydid begin in the 1950s. while the 1950s were something of a goldenage for many blue and white collar workers, it was hardly a period of expanding opportunitiesfor african americans.
rigid segregation was the rule throughoutthe country, especially in housing, but also in jobs and in employment. in the south, publicaccommodations were segregated by law, while in the north it was usually happening by customor de facto segregation. to give just one example, the new suburbanneighborhoods that sprang up in the 1950s were almost completely white and this remainedtrue for decades. according eric foner, “as late as the 1990s,nearly 90 percent of suburban whites lived in communities with non-white populationsless than 1 percent.†and it wasn’t just housing. in the 1950shalf of black families lived in poverty. when they were able to get union jobs, black workershad less seniority than their white counterparts
so their employment was less stable.and their educational opportunities were severely limited by sub-standard segregated schools.now you might think the civil rights movement began with rosa parks and the montgomery busboycott or else brown v. board of education, but it really started during ww2 with effortslike those of a. philip randolph and the soldiers taking part in the double-v crusade.but even before that, black americans had been fighting for civil rights. it’s justthat in the 1950s, they started to win. so, desegregating schools was a key goal ofthe civil rights movement. and it started in california in 1946.in the case of mendez v. westminster the california supreme court ruled that orange county, ofall places, had to desegregate their schools.
they’d been discriminating against latinos.and then, california’s governor, earl warren, signed an order that repealed all school segregationin the state. that same earl warren, by the way, was chief justice when the landmark casebrown v. board of education came before the supreme court in 1954.the naacp legal defense fund under the leadership of thurgood marshall had been pursuing a legalstrategy of trying to make states live up to the ruling in plessy v. ferguson that requiredall public facilities to be separate but equal. they started by bringing lawsuits againstprofessional schools like law schools, because it was really obvious that the three classroomsand no library that texas set up for its african american law students were not equal to theactual university of texas’s law school.
but the brown case was about public schoolsfor children. it was actually a combination of 5 cases from 4 states, of which brown happenedto be alphabetically the first. the board of education in question incidentallywas in topeka kansas, not one of the states of the old confederacy, but nonetheless acity that did restricted schooling by race. oh, it’s time for the mystery document?the rules here are simple. i read the mystery document. if i’m wrong,i get shocked. "segregation of white and colored childrenin public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. the impact is greaterwhen it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usuallyinterpreted as denoting the inferiority of
the negro group. a sense of inferiority affectsthe motivation of a child to learn. segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has atendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprivethem of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system.[footnote 10]"[2] stan, the last two weeks you have given metwo extraordinary gifts and i am thankful. it is earl warren from brown v. board of education.huzzah! justice warren is actually quoting from sociologicalresearch there that shows that segregation itself is psychologically damaging to blackchildren because they recognize that being separated out is a badge of inferiority.alright, let’s go to the thought bubble.
the brown decision was a watershed but itdidn’t lead to massive immediate desegregation of the nation’s public schools. in fact,it spawned what came to be known as “massive resistance†in the south. the resistancegot so massive, in fact, that a number of counties, rather than integrate their schools,closed them. prince edward county in virginia, for instance,closed its schools in 1959 and didn’t re-open them again until 1964. except they didn’treally close them because many states appropriated funds to pay for white students to attend“private†academies. some states got so into the resistance that they began to flythe confederate battle flag over their state capitol buildings. yes, i’m looking at youalabama and south carolina.
on december 1, 1955, rosa parks refused tomove to the back of a bus in montgomery, alabama and got arrested, kicking off the montgomerybus boycott that lasted almost a year. a lot of people think that parks was simply an averageafrican american working woman who was tired and fed up with segregation, but the truthis more complicated. parks had been active in politics since the1930s and had protested the notorious scottsboro boys case. she had served as secretary forthe naacp and she had begun her quest to register to vote in alabama in 1943. she failed a literacytest three times before becoming one of the very few black people registered to vote inthe state. and in 1954 she attended a training session for political activists and met othercivil rights radicals. so rosa parks was an
active participant in the fight for blackcivil rights long before she sat on that bus. the bus boycott also thrust into prominencea young pastor from atlanta, the 26 year old martin luther king jr. he helped to organizethe boycott from his baptist church, which reminds us that black churches played a pivotalrole in the civil rights movement. that boycott would go on to last for 381 days and in theend, the city of montgomery relented. thanks, thought bubble. so that was, of course,only the beginning for martin luther king, who achieved his greatest triumphs in the1960s. after montgomery, he was instrumental in formingthe southern christian leadership conference, a coalition of black civil rights and churchleaders who pushed for integration. and they
needed to fight hard, especially in the faceof massive resistance and an eisenhower administration that was lukewarm at best about civil rights.but i suppose eisenhower did stick up for civil rights when forced to, as when arkansasgovernor orval faubus used the national guard to prevent the integration of little rock’scentral high school by 9 black students in 1957.eisenhower was like, “you know, as the guy who invaded normandy, i don’t think that’sthe best use for the national guard.†so, eisenhower sent the 101st airborne division(not the entirety of it, but some of it) to little rock, arkansas, to walk kids to school.which they did for a year. after that, faubus closed the schools, but at least the federalgovernment showed that it wouldn’t allow
states to ignore court orders about the constitution.in your face, john c. calhoun. despite the court decision and the dispatchingof federal troops, by the end of the 1950s fewer than two percent of black students attendedintegrated schools in the south. so, the modern movement for civil rights hadbegun, but it was clear that there was still a lot of work to do.but the emergence of the civil rights movement shows us that the picture of consensus inthe 1950s is not quite as clear-cut as its proponents would have us believe.yes, there was widespread affluence, particularly among white people, and criticism of the governmentand america generally was stifled by the fear of appearing to sympathize with communism.but there was also widespread systemic inequality
and poverty in the decade that shows justhow far away we were from living the ideal of equal opportunity.that we have made real progress, and we have, is a credit to the voices of protest.next week we’ll see how women, latinos, and gay people added their voices to the protestsand look at what they were and were not able to change in the 1960s. thanks for watching.i’ll see you then. crash course is made with the help of allof these nice people and it’s possible because of your support through subbable.com.subbable is a voluntary subscription service that allows you to subscribe to crash courseat the price of your choosing, including zero dollars a month.but hopefully more than that. there are also
great perks you can get, like signed posters.so if you like and value crash course, help us keep it free for everyone for ever by subscribingnow at subbable. you can click on my face. now, my face moved, but you can still clickon it. thanks again for watching crash course and as we say in my hometown, don’t forgetto be awesome. ________________[1] foner give me liberty ebook version p. 992[2] http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/347/483/case.html
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