During the late 1960s
and 1970s, civil rights activists began to concentrate on eliminating the
remaining barriers to black freedom and opportunity. Although segregation by
law (de jure segregation) in the South had been defeated, segregation by custom
(de facto segregation) still remained. In the South, legal segregation had been
supplemented by customary racial segregation, but even in the North where there
generally were no segregation laws, custom enforced racial segregation.
African Americans had
been barred from many restaurants, movie theaters, nightclubs, and other public
accommodations by customary practice. Generally, landlords in white
neighborhoods would not rent to black tenants, forcing them to pay higher rents
in the only housing available to them in black neighborhoods. Banks denied
financing, and real estate agents refused to show houses in traditionally white
areas to blacks even if they could afford them.
Discriminatory hiring
practices confined most black workers to the least secure, lowest paying jobs
regardless of their qualifications. Those few opportunities open to black
professionals like doctors, lawyers, and teachers were in positions and
institutions serving the black community. As a result of limited opportunities,
by the beginning of the 1960s, more than half of African Americans had incomes
below the poverty line.
A
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The Poor People’s Campaign
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SCLC leaders focused on
the issues of poverty and discrimination, continuing the Poor People's Campaign
that Martin Luther King, Jr., had begun. The Poor People’s Campaign sought the
passage of federal legislation that would provide full employment, establish a
guaranteed income, and promote the construction of low-income housing.
In May 1968 Ralph Abernathy,
who had been King’s lieutenant, established an encampment called Resurrection
City on the Mall in Washington, D.C. It drew 2,500 mostly black and Native
American temporary residents, nearly twice the number that organizers had
planned on. Within a month, mud and unsanitary conditions produced by heavy
rains reduced the encampment to fewer than 300 people. In June 1968 an
interracial group of 50,000 marched in Washington, D.C., to demonstrate their
support for the Poor People’s Campaign. They were ultimately unable to gain the
sympathetic attention of Congress and the country. At the end of the month, the
demonstrators were ordered to evacuate, and on June 24th the police evicted the
100 who refused to leave amid clouds of teargas.
B
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Busing
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As civil rights leaders
turned their attention to de facto segregation in the North, they devised a
different strategy for improving educational opportunities for black students.
Since schools were supported by property taxes, there were great differences in
resources available for education between poorer inner cities and wealthier
white suburbs.
Integrationists in some
metropolitan areas devised temporary plans to bus children to schools outside
of their neighborhoods as a way to integrate urban schools. Busing had been
used for many years to maintain segregated school systems in the South, but
whites opposed this new form of busing vehemently. They challenged the legality
of busing in the courts, but these challenges were unsuccessful. The Supreme
Court declared busing for educational integration constitutional, and many
state and local courts ordered cities to develop busing plans.
These plans had their
greatest effect on working class ethnic neighborhoods near inner cities. The
newest, best-equipped schools, which were predominately in affluent white
suburbs, were less likely to be affected. Busing raised parents’ concerns about
having their children attend school far from home. Although they welcomed the
opportunities better schools provided, black parents, whose children were most
often bused, worried about the students’ adjustment to a strange and often
hostile school environment. These concerns and continued opposition from many
whites ensured that busing remained controversial through the 1990s.
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