Rhetoric is of paramount importance when facing an issue that requires a reformation of public sentiment. Such an issue is the struggle for the protection of the civil rights of black Americans. This section consists of six speeches that address this issue. The speakers include Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, and Malcom X.

Du Bois edited and wrote the introductory chapter to the NAACP document An Appeal to the World: A Statement of Denial of Rights to Minorities, submitted to the United Nations in October 1947. In his introduction, he argued that the “color caste system” had been disastrous for American democracy. After the North’s victory in the Civil War, Northern capitalism’s financial stake in cheap slave labor led it to participate in enforcing a racial caste system keeping African Americans in economic and political subjugation. The domination of the American economy by big business and monopolies on land and natural resources explain why democracy has been crippled throughout the country, with mass disenfranchisement of African Americans and many whites, especially in the South. The denial of African Americans’ right to vote means a failure of democracy in the world’s leading democracy and in the world. The disproportionate power granted the most anti-democratic elements in American society perverted American foreign policy in favor of imperialism, against the League of Nations, and against weaker nations. With the UN based in New York, American racial discrimination infringes the rights of all peoples and has become a matter of international concern.

The NAACP offered strategic litigation as an alternative to labor defense. It pursued that course in supporting challenges to primary elections from which African Americans were barred, and in attacking segregated education, the latter of which reached the Supreme Court in a case dealing with Missouri’s failure to offer a law school to its African American citizens.

Progressive ambivalence about rights in general, and their indifference to issues of racial justice, might have led to inattention to issues of race at the Supreme Court. It did not, because of the complicated relation between liberalism in politics, conservative libertarian impulses, and the depth of outrage at gross injustices in the cases that reached the Court. Most notable were the Scottsboro cases, where the Communist Party outmaneuvered the NAACP to gain control, and then used the cases as part of a strategy of “labor defense,” mobilizing large numbers of people to place pressure on the courts, as the theory had it. The theory, though, was at war with itself: According to it, courts were tools of capitalist oppression but could be brought to heel by a mobilize public even if capitalism remained in place.

As the Republican Party narrowed and weakened in the late 20t century, it became home to a succession of conservative movements which largely defeated the party’s moderate wing, lent it a more ideological coloration, and initiated the sharp polarization in American politics that lasted into the early 21st century.

This chapter examines the transitions in Black intellectual thought at the turn of the century. It charts the shifts in W. E. B. Du Bois’s thinking, not in isolation, but as a member of a Black intellectual elite who were grappling with the same questions and challenges regarding the role of the Black intellectual. The chapter shows that Du Bois, Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, and others saw their academic training as intimately connected with efforts to advance racial understanding and challenge the ideological bases of white supremacy. Rereading Du Bois’s pre-1900 work and the transition in his thinking that Du Bois himself attributed to the horrific lynching of Sam Hose in 1899, the chapter reveals how Du Bois’s thinking shifted over the course of the decade from a commitment to historical method and fact-finding to a more activist and militant approach that would take roots through his work on his John Brown biography, published in 1909, and eventually finding expression in the founding of the NAACP that same year.

In the 19th century, also black writers joined the increasing criticism against slavery. Most prominent was former slave Frederick Douglas and his writings, describing the terrible abuses of the slaver masters. After the abolition of slavery in the USA in 1985, racist discrimination of African Americans did not stop. After Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, lynchings and many forms of discrimination were prevalent, especially in the South. Important black writers were W.E.B. Dubois, and his contributions to the NAACP, also during international travels. Black sociologist Ida Wells was influential in her critical accounts of lynchings, as was feminist Anna Julia Hayward Cooper.

Born at the beginning of the Civil War in Norfolk County, Virginia, Laura E. Davis Titus was a member of freedom’s first generation in the United States. Titus was among hundreds of African America women who redefined their place in society through education, civic endeavors, professions, and community advocacy. A teacher and a strong advocate for African American access to education, Titus took her work beyond the walls of the public schools to her home community, participating in the National Association of Colored Women, organizing community institutions, and founding settlement homes that provided young girls coming through Norfolk with much needed safe spaces, guidance, and employable skills such as cooking and sewing.This effort emerged from her participation in the black women’s club movement that was partially inspired by the activism of the Progressive Era. Titus embraced teaching and social service as a means for racial uplift.

Two generations away from slavery in her own family, Carrie Williams Clifford was born in the free state of Ohio in 1862. She came of age during Reconstruction and watched conditions for African Americans erode in the Jim Crow era. Cognizant of the way white Americans were crafting historical narratives to elide black presence and freedoms, she resisted by highlighting the richness of black history, including women’s history, in her poetry, journalism, activism, and theatrical performances. Like her white colleagues in the suffrage movement and male colleagues in race work, Clifford used history to claim self-representation in a world in which African Americans confronted powerful forces attempting to define their place in the nation.

Since 1945, the United States has played a significant role in the development and promotion of international human rights law while simultaneously distancing itself from the instruments and institutions that implement this body of law. The US often claims that it does not need to bind itself to international human rights treaties because its legal system is superior to that of other nations and provides its population more protection than international law – an attitude known as ‘American exceptionalism’. Out of the nine core human rights treaties negotiated in the last several decades under the auspices of the United Nations, the United States is a party to only three: the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (‘CERD’); the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (‘ICCPR’); and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (‘CAT’).

This chapter tells the story of the long struggle to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson and desegregate American schools - culminating with the Supreme Court’s unanimous opinion Brown v. Board of Education. The chapter then examines the application of Brown, detailing how subsequent rulings purporting to stem from Brown have, in fact, failed to carry out its central command to desegregate all American schools. Much of this checkered legal history arose due to the Court’s insistence on delineating between de jure (legally mandated) and de facto (arising incidentally as a result of non-legally mandated conduct) segregation This distinction led to the 2007 PICS ruling, which dramatically circumscribes the use of race to achieve a desegregated educational environment for districts which experience de facto rather than de jure discrimination. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the growing “resegregation” of American schools, tracing its deleterious effects on all students.

This chapter examines the Roosevelt administration’s record on civil rights in the context of the Second World War. Relying on internal executive branch documents, as well as attempts by black newspapers to get the administration to comment on the Double-V campaign, the chapter demonstrates the White House’s familiarity with the Double-V rhetoric of civil rights activists, and frames this as part of a larger debate within the Roosevelt administration about whether to maintain a New Deal focus on social policy or focus almost entirely on the military aspects of World War II. The chapter then examines how wartime activism compelled Roosevelt to issue an executive order to combat defense industry discrimination, while similar efforts to integrate the armed forces proved unsuccessful.

This chapter examines the effects of World War II and its aftermath on the Truman administration’s civil rights actions. In conjunction with broader political pressures and electoral incentives, the chapter points to Truman’s belief in the republican virtues of military service as a variable that can mediate between his personal racism and relatively more extensive civil rights program. It then shows how civil rights advocates—particularly by highlighting incidences of violence against returning black veterans in the immediate postwar period— convinced Truman to issue an executive order establishing the President’s Committee on Civil Rights. The chapter then discusses his executive order calling for equality of opportunity and treatment in the armed forces, issued after congressional inaction on his civil rights committee’s proposals, which eventually led to the desegregation of the U.S. military. This was not without its challenges, however, particularly from the Army, which frequently pushed back against the committee tasked with implementing the order.