NAACP Mississippi Field Secretary Medgar Evers (1925-1963) was assassinated at his home in Jackson, Mississippi, hours after President Kennedy delivered a nationally televised address announcing that he would soon ask Congress to pass civil rights laws. Part of an Evers speech during a direct action campaign to de-band Jackson was featured in this excerpt from NBC`s The American Revolution of `63, which aired on September 2, 1963, and also includes footage of sit-ins, beatings, and arrests of protesters in Jackson. Several factors prevented the few African-Americans in Congress from passing the major civil rights laws of 1957, 1964, and 1965. First and foremost, black members of Congress were too few to form an electoral bloc powerful enough to change the way the institution works. Until the fall of 1964 elections, there were only five African Americans in Congress: Dawson, Powell, Diggs, Nix and Hawkins. John Conyers entered the House of Representatives in 1965 and Brooke entered the Senate in 1967. These new members had limited influence. However, Hawkins enjoyed great success as a newcomer when, as a member of Powell`s Education and Labour Committee, he helped shape the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. And Brooke helped secure the anti-discrimination provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 during her first term in the Senate. But while they were determined, energetic and passionate, there were too few African Americans in Congress to advance a political agenda. After President Kennedy`s assassination that same year, his successor, Lyndon B.

Johnson, continued to push Congress to pass sweeping civil rights laws. 76La littérature sur le mouvement des droits civiques est abondante, accessible et bien documentée. Zu den Standardbehandlungen gehören Taylor Branchs dreibändige Geschichte, die Martin Luther King Jr. als Linse verwendet, um die Bewegung zu betrachten: Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988); Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998); At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006). Siehe auch David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986); William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), ein Bericht über einen der wegweisenden Momente der Protestbewegung. Für einen Überblick über die Bewegung und ihre Auswirkungen auf das schwarze Amerika des späten 20. Jahrhunderts siehe Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945–2006, 3. Auflage (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007). Zur Entwicklung der Bürgerrechtsgesetzgebung im Kongress siehe Robert Mann, When Freedom Would Triumph: The Civil Rights Struggle in Congress, 1954–1968 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007) – eine gekürzte Version von Manns The Walls of Jericho: Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Russell and the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996); Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy, 1960–1972 (New York: Oxford, 1990): insbesondere Seiten 125–176; und James L.

Sundquist, Politics and Policy: The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Years (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1968): 221-286. Ein nützlicher Überblick über den Kongress und die Bürgerrechte ist Timothy N. Thurber, «Second Reconstruction,» in The American Congress: The Building of Democracy, ed. by Julian E. Zelizer (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 2004): 529–547. Another useful secondary work that addresses aspects of legislative efforts to reform electoral law is Steven F. Lawson`s Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976). In 1941, Hedgeman (1899-1990) joined A. Philip Randolph`s March on Washington movement and became executive secretary of its National Council for a permanent FEPC in 1944.

Two years later, she became dean for women at Howard University and, in 1949, assistant administrator of the Federal Security Agency. From 1954 to 1958, Hedgeman served as an assistant to Mayor Robert F. Wagner, the first black woman to serve in a New York City mayor`s cabinet. In the 1960s, Hedgeman advised the President`s Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW) appointed by John F. Kennedy. The PCSW also benefited from the leadership and guidance of Pauli Murray, Dorothy Height, Dollie L. Robinson and other civil rights activists. These same women lobbied for sex discrimination to be included in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and helped found the National Organization for Women. Hedgeman was the only woman on the organizing committee for the 1963 March on Washington.

On December 1, 1955, forty-three-year-old Rosa Parks was arrested for misconduct for refusing to yield her bus seat to a white passenger. Their arrest and a fourteen-dollar fine for violating a municipal ordinance prompted African-American bus drivers and others to boycott city buses in Montgomery, Alabama.