Racial tension and developments in the Civil Rights campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s

Model answer

A: The Montgomery Improvement Association was set up to run the boycott, with Martin Luther King as its president. B: The Supreme Court ruled that segregation on buses was unconstitutional (Browder v Gayle, November 1956).

Model answer

One method was the boycott. In Montgomery, Alabama, after Rosa Parks was arrested in December 1955, black people refused to use the city's buses for 381 days. They walked or shared lifts in car pools organised by the Montgomery Improvement Association, led by King. Since most bus passengers were black, the bus company lost a great deal of money, and in December 1956, after a Supreme Court ruling, the buses were desegregated.

A second method was the mass march or demonstration, often combined with deliberately breaking unjust laws. In Birmingham in 1963, King's supporters marched against segregation knowing they would be arrested; King himself was jailed and wrote his 'Letter from Birmingham Jail'. In May 1963 children joined the marches and were attacked with fire hoses and police dogs on the orders of Bull Connor. The protesters did not fight back, so television pictures of the violence shocked the nation and put pressure on President Kennedy to propose a civil rights bill.

Model answer

Interpretation A is convincing about the South in the early 1960s. In Birmingham in 1963 King deliberately chose a city where the police chief, Bull Connor, was likely to react violently, and the television pictures of fire hoses and police dogs being used on children shocked the nation. About a month later, on 11 June 1963, Kennedy announced a civil rights bill, and after the March on Washington and Kennedy's assassination it became the Civil Rights Act of 1964, ending legal segregation in public places. In 1965 the attack on marchers at Selma led to the Voting Rights Act, after which black voter registration in Mississippi rose from about 7 percent to about 60 percent. However, A exaggerates King's personal role: students in the sit-ins, CORE's Freedom Riders and President Johnson's skill in Congress were also vital.

Interpretation B is convincing about the northern cities. The Civil Rights Acts did little about the poverty, unemployment and poor housing of ghettos such as those in Chicago and Oakland. When King campaigned for fair housing in Chicago in 1966 he met violent white crowds and achieved little, and the riots in Watts (1965) and Detroit (1967) showed how angry many young black people were. But B is less convincing when it says fear made the government listen: the riots produced a white backlash, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act passed only after King's assassination.

Overall, A is more convincing. B is right that peaceful protest did not solve the problems of the northern cities, but A's claim that non-violence ended legal segregation and won the vote in the South is supported by the clear link between Birmingham and the 1964 Act, and between Selma and the 1965 Act - the most important changes for black Americans in this period.

Model answer

The actions of the federal government were essential in ending segregation because only federal power could defeat the Southern state governments. The Supreme Court began the process with Brown v Board of Education in 1954, which overturned 'separate but equal' in schools, and Browder v Gayle in 1956, which ended segregation on Montgomery's buses. Presidents used force when states defied the law: Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock in 1957, and in 1962 Kennedy sent federal marshals and troops so that James Meredith could enrol at the University of Mississippi. Above all, Johnson's Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned segregation in public places such as hotels, restaurants and cinemas and allowed federal money to be withheld from segregated schools, while the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended literacy tests. However, the federal government was often slow and reluctant: Eisenhower never publicly backed Brown, and Kennedy delayed a civil rights bill until 1963.

The actions of ordinary black Americans were also vital, because they forced the federal government to act. It was ordinary people who walked to work for 381 days in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and four ordinary students who began the Greensboro sit-in in 1960, starting a movement that spread across the South and desegregated many lunch counters. In 1961 the Freedom Riders risked their lives on interstate buses, and in 1963 thousands of children marched in Birmingham and were attacked with fire hoses and dogs. In 1965 local people in Selma marched for the vote. Each time, their courage created a crisis that the federal government could not ignore: Birmingham led to Kennedy's civil rights bill, and Selma led to the Voting Rights Act.

Overall, the actions of ordinary black Americans did more to end segregation. The federal government provided the laws and the force that finally beat the Southern states, but it rarely acted until protest made inaction impossible. Without the boycotters, students, Freedom Riders and marchers, the government would probably have continued to delay, as it did for most of the 1950s.