After serving in the army in Europe in World War II, Medgar Evers returned home to the South, where he faced a different kind of enemy: discrimination. When he and some other African American veterans tried to register to vote, a mob of armed whites blocked their way. “All we wanted to be was ordinary citizens,” Evers later said, frustrated to find his life at risk in his own country. “We fought during the war for America, Mississippi included.” Evers retreated that day, but he did not give up on his goal. He became an active member of the NAACP and a leader in the fight for civil rights.
Reading Skill: Summarize Copy the timeline below and fill it in with events of the early civil rights movement. When you finish, write two sentences that summarize the information in your timeline.
Why It Matters The postwar period brought prosperity to many, but most African Americans were still treated as second-class citizens. The civil rights movement, a broad and diverse effort to attain racial equality, compelled the nation to live up to its ideal that all are created equal. The movement also demonstrated that ordinary men and women could perform extraordinary acts of courage and sacrifice to achieve social justice, a lesson that continues to inspire people around the world today. Section Focus Question: How did African Americans challenge segregation after World War II?
African Americans had a long history of fighting for their rights. After World War II, the struggle intensified, as African Americans grew increasingly dissatisfied with their second-class status.
In the South, Jim Crow laws enforced strict separation of the races. Segregation that is imposed by law is known as de jure segregation. In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court had ruled that such segregation was constitutional as long as the facilities for blacks and whites were “separate but equal.” But this was seldom the case. The facilities for African Americans were rarely, if ever, equal.
In the South and elsewhere, segregation extended to most areas of public life. Officials enforced segregation of schools, hospitals, transportation, restaurants, cemeteries, and beaches. One city even forbade blacks and whites from playing checkers together.
In the North, too, African Americans faced segregation and discrimination. Even where there were no explicit laws, de facto segregation, or segregation by