The struggle for civil rights after the Second World War

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50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education: ‘Stormy the road we trod’
Excerpts from a talk by Dorothea Peacock at a Workers World meeting in Boston on May 5, Workers World, 20 May 2004. Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan., the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in the public schools in the U.S.
On its 50th Anniversary: The Lessons of the Montgomery Bus Boycott
By Roland Sheppard, Labor-L, 10 November 2005. The fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the year long Montgomery Bus Boycott will be celebrated this December. According to the official version of the Boycott it was started by Rosa Parks on the evening of December 1, 1955, when she refused to give up her seat to a white man.
Class and civil rights
By Brian Kelly, Socialist Worker, 10 December 2005. Fifty years after the start of the Montgomery bus boycott, historian Brian Kelly examines how class politics shaped the struggle for black civil rights in the US.
Speech prepared for the March on Washington, August 1963
By John Lewis, SNCC Chairman, The Militant, 9 September 1963. A speech, which the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committe (SNCC) Chairman John Lewis was prevented from delivering at the March on Washington in August 1963. It was printed in in the September 9, 1963 issue of The Militant. John Lewis has since become a Democratic Party Congressman from Atlanta Georgia.
Warped lens distorts Mississippi Burning
By Frances M. Beal, Frontline, 27 February 1989. Unfortunately Alan Parker's film Mississippi Burning, purportedly based on the June 1964 murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, operates through the prism of a distorted lens which not only dismally fails to transmit the essence of the era, but produces a fabric of lies that perverts the 1960s struggle for democracy in the South.
Viola Liuzzo: ‘We're going to change the world’
By Minnie Bruce Pratt, Workers World, 2 March 2005. Some 25,000 protesters of all nationalities marched into Montgomery, Ala. on 25 March 1965. One of the thousands who answered Rev. King's call was Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old white woman from Detroit. On the evening of March 25, she was shot and killed by the KKK.
Remember the Orangeburg Massacre
Oread Daily, [8 February 2005]. Thirty-five years ago, on Feb. 8, 1968, three black students were killed by South Carolina policemen in protests on the campus of the predominantly black South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, S.C. This tragedy became known as the Orangeburg Massacre.
30 Years Ago Today: Jackson State Deaths Recalled
Associated Press, Sunday 14 May 2000. Time has diminished much of the anger and terror of that night 30 years ago. Two young people died in a barrage of police gunfire after white motorists clashed with black students at Jackson State University.
[Fight for jobs]
The Militant, 2 October 1970. On September 11, 1970, a group of about 150 Black workers closed down three Seattle construction sites to dramatize their struggle for jobs. By early afternoon the militant action had forced a federal judge to hand down a ruling that contractors must hire at least 90 Black workers.
The Assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X
By Roland Sheppard, September 2006. In an essay that has evolved since 2000, Sheppard argues that the lesson is that if we keep our politics independent of the Republican and Democratic Parties and the government; if we rely upon our own power in the streets; if we take up the struggle where Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. left off, we will win.