How did activism by Black students challenge Jim Crow segregation during the Civil Rights Movement, and what unique role did music play as an organizing tool?
In this lesson, students explore student-led efforts to end Jim Crow segregation during the Civil Rights Movement by examining significant events and identifying the unique role of music in calling people to action.
During the 1960s, Shelley “The Playboy” Stewart played new hit records by current artists on Birmingham, Alabama’s WENN radio station. So when he played Big Joe Turner’s 1954 hit song “Shake, Rattle and Roll” one day in May 1963, it sounded out of place. Stewart intended it that way.
Stewart wasn’t simply playing an “oldie” for his listeners. He was using music as an organizing tool to call people to action, particularly young people. On May 2, 1963, hundreds of Black students in Birmingham boycotted school and marched downtown to protest the city’s pervasive Jim Crow laws, laws that included racially segregating the public schools that those same students attended. Earlier that day, Sterns played “Shake, Rattle and Roll” to send a covert message to his organized student listeners: it’s time to rally.
Nearly ten years earlier in 1954, the same year “Shake, Rattle and Roll“ was a No. 1 hit, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. In the ruling, the Court instructed all public schools to desegregate but did not specify a deadline. This historic ruling reversed the long-standing legal doctrine of “separate but equal,” which had determined that racially segregating public schools was constitutional.
Under “separate but equal,” as long as a segregated school attended by Black students was equal in quality to a segregated school attended by white students, racial segregation was not violating the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. In reality, while segregation had led to an American society that was racially separated, inequality was widespread and disenfranchised Black communities. The inferior quality of the public schools attended by Black students was a glaring example, and the Brown ruling in 1954 acknowledged it. Unfortunately, segregation in public schools endured even after the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional due to local and state resistance, which was why in 1963 students in Birmingham were marching in protest. But this was not the first time students had protested the inequality of segregated public schools.
In the early 1950s, years before the Brown ruling, Black students in segregated schools organized and led walkouts and strikes to protest substandard school facilities and education resources. The purpose of their activism was not necessarily to desegregate schools but rather to attend schools that were as equally equipped as those of their white counterparts – the equality in “separate but equal.” Their actions produced results: improved school facilities, recognition of their efforts by the media, and support from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Black student activism directly informed the NAACP’s legal strategy in challenging “separate but equal” in court during the early 1950s. The NAACP included a 1951 student walkout and strike in Virginia as one of the cases in their class-action lawsuit that eventually became the historic Brown case. Working with the NAACP, future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall was the lead attorney that successfully argued Brown before the Court. However, even as local and state resistance allowed school segregation to endure, student activism continued to challenge it into the 1960s.
Student activism during the Civil Rights Movement also confronted racial segregation in other public spaces. In early 1960, Black college students began “sit-in” demonstrations to protest segregation in restaurants. Out of that action, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded. The SNCC (more-commonly pronounced, S nick ) was formed under the mentoring of Civil Rights Movement leader, Ella Baker. A decades-long veteran of the movement, Baker encouraged young people to recognize their own leadership capabilities and assemble their own independent organizations.
With singing being so important to the Civil Rights Movement, SNCC members formed the Freedom Singers music group. The group traveled around the U.S., performing concerts to raise funds for the SNCC and to inform their audiences about Civil Rights organizing happening around the country. The Freedom Singers activism and performances demonstrated another example of music as an organizing tool during the Civil Rights Movement. The group sang at, and the SNCC helped organize, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, DC on August 28, 1963. Notably, at the March, current SNCC National Chairman, and future congressman, John Lewis delivered remarks before the enormous crowd and later in the day Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
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