Questions to Ask About the Civil Rights Movement
For a student, a teacher, a book group or a family member asking about the civil rights movement in the United States, in a class discussion or across the table from someone who lived through it. The questions follow the story in order: the conditions before, the campaigns and the people beyond the famous names, the tactics and the opposition, the laws that followed and what was left undone, with a last group for interviewing an elder or a movement veteran.
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The questions
Each question, and why to ask it
Background
What was the civil rights movement, and what was it trying to change?
Why ask it
The usual definition is the mass campaign of the 1950s and 1960s to end legal segregation and win the vote for Black Americans in the United States. A full answer goes further, to jobs, schools, housing and safety from violence, and credits local people organizing in their own towns. If all you get is 'equal rights', ask which right, denied by whom, and by what means.
When did the civil rights movement begin and end?
Why ask it
Textbooks tend to run it from the Brown decision in 1954 or the Montgomery boycott in 1955 to 1965 or 1968. Many historians start in the 1930s or 1940s and give it no tidy end. Make whoever answers defend their dates, because the dates decide whose work gets counted.
What was Jim Crow, and how did it work in everyday life?
Why ask it
Listen for daily detail: separate schools, waiting rooms and water fountains, customs about sidewalks and forms of address, and the threat that stood behind all of it. The rules differed from state to state and town to town, so a careful answer says which place it is describing.
What did 'separate but equal' mean, and how equal were things in practice?
Why ask it
The phrase goes back to Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court ruling that allowed separation by race so long as the facilities were equal. For the second half, have students look up what one county spent on its Black schools and its white schools in the same year, and let the two figures do the talking.
How were Black citizens kept from voting when the Constitution already said they could?
Why ask it
The Fifteenth Amendment had barred states from denying the vote by race since 1870. What got around it was machinery: poll taxes, literacy tests judged by a white registrar, primaries open to white voters only, and firing, eviction or violence for those who tried anyway. Whoever can explain this can explain why a new voting law was still needed in 1965.
Was segregation only a Southern problem?
Why ask it
No, and the difference is worth spelling out. Southern states wrote segregation into law, while Northern and Western cities produced it through housing covenants, mortgage maps, school boundaries and hiring. Someone who says the North was free of it has stopped at the map in the textbook.
Who was already fighting segregation before the 1950s?
Why ask it
Names to hope for: the NAACP lawyers who had been filing suits for decades, A. Philip Randolph and his threatened march on Washington in 1941, Black veterans home from the Second World War, and the Black press. The movement of the 1950s inherited its members, lawyers and methods from them, so a version in which everything starts on a bus in 1955 is missing thirty years.
Why did the murder of Emmett Till in 1955 move so many people to act?
Why ask it
He was fourteen, a Chicago boy visiting relatives in Mississippi. His mother insisted on an open casket, Jet magazine printed the photographs, and an all-white jury acquitted the men tried for it, which is why many who joined the movement a few years later dated their own start to his death. With younger students, tell the story and leave the photographs out.
Campaigns
What did Brown v. Board of Education decide, and why did schools stay segregated for years afterward?
Why ask it
The 1954 ruling, argued by Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP's lawyers, held that segregated public schools were unconstitutional. A second ruling a year later ordered desegregation 'with all deliberate speed', which many districts read as permission to wait. Look for an answer that separates winning in court from getting a child through a school door.
Who organized the Montgomery bus boycott besides Rosa Parks and Dr. King?
Why ask it
Jo Ann Robinson and the Women's Political Council ran off the leaflets overnight, E. D. Nixon posted bail and called the ministers, and Claudette Colvin, a teenager, had refused to give up her seat nine months earlier. Someone who knows those names understands that the boycott was planned and not a lucky accident.
What was Rosa Parks doing in the years before she kept her seat?
Why ask it
She had been secretary of the Montgomery NAACP for more than a decade, had investigated attacks on Black women, and had been to an organizing workshop at the Highlander Folk School that summer. The tired seamstress of the short version undersells her. Ask the room where they first heard that version.
What was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s part in the movement, and what went on without him?
Why ask it
He was its best-known voice, its chief fundraiser and the leader presidents had to deal with, from the Montgomery boycott in 1955 until he was killed in 1968. The sit-ins, the Freedom Rides and the Mississippi voter drives were started by other people, some of whom found him too cautious. A quick test for any group: name one campaign he did not lead.
What happened at Little Rock Central High School in 1957, and what did it ask of nine teenagers?
Why ask it
The governor of Arkansas used the National Guard to keep nine Black students out, and President Eisenhower sent federal troops to walk them in. Push past the first day: the students were harassed in the halls for a whole school year, and the year after that Little Rock's public high schools were closed altogether.
How did four college students at a lunch counter in Greensboro start something that crossed the South?
Why ask it
They sat down at a whites-only Woolworth's counter on February 1, 1960, and came back the next day with more students. Within weeks there were sit-ins in dozens of cities, and that spring the students founded their own organization, SNCC. Ask what made the tactic so easy to copy.
What were the Freedom Rides, and what were the riders testing?
Why ask it
In 1961 mixed groups of Black and white riders took interstate buses into the Deep South to find out whether Supreme Court rulings against segregated travel were being enforced. They were not: a bus was burned in Alabama, and riders were beaten and jailed. The follow-up that matters is what finally made Washington step in.
Why did organizers in Birmingham let children march in 1963?
Why ask it
Adults stood to lose their jobs if they were arrested, so that May the organizers turned to schoolchildren, and pictures of police dogs and fire hoses set on them went around the world. People inside the movement argued over the decision at the time. It makes an honest debate: would you have let your own child go?
What was the March on Washington for, and who did the organizing?
Why ask it
Its full name was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and its demands included a federal jobs program and a higher minimum wage alongside a civil rights law. A. Philip Randolph led it and Bayard Rustin ran the logistics. Notice whether the answer gets beyond the last few minutes of one speech.
What was Freedom Summer, and what did the volunteers find in Mississippi?
Why ask it
In 1964 hundreds of mostly white Northern students joined local Black organizers to register voters and teach in Freedom Schools. Three workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were murdered in the first weeks. Ask why the country paid attention that summer when Black Mississippians had been killed for the same work before.
What were the people who marched from Selma to Montgomery asking for?
Why ask it
The chance to register to vote, in a county where very few Black residents had been allowed to. State troopers attacked the marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, television showed it that night, and the Voting Rights Act was signed five months later. The name that tends to go missing is Jimmie Lee Jackson, whose killing by a trooper set the march in motion.
Which women led and organized the movement, and why are they named less often?
Why ask it
Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Septima Clark, Diane Nash and Dorothy Height are a start, and the test is being able to say one thing each of them did. Then ask who was given the microphone at the big events, and who made that choice.
Who did this work in your own town or state?
Why ask it
Nearly every place has a story: a school lawsuit, a sit-in, a boycott, a fight over a swimming pool or a housing development. It differs so much from place to place that it has to be asked locally. The public library, the historical society and old issues of a Black newspaper are where to begin.
Tactics and opposition
Why did the movement choose nonviolence, and was it a belief or a strategy?
Why ask it
Both, depending on the person. For some it was a religious conviction, and for others it was the practical choice of an outnumbered minority facing armed police. Plenty of people who marched peacefully also kept a gun at home for protection, and saw no contradiction in it.
How were people trained for a sit-in or a march?
Why ask it
In workshops such as the ones James Lawson ran in Nashville, volunteers practiced being shouted at, shoved and spat on without hitting back. In a classroom, simply ask what you would do with your hands and where you would look. It cures the idea that nonviolence meant doing nothing.
Why did boycotts work, and what did they cost the people who kept them up?
Why ask it
Money is the short answer: Black riders were most of the Montgomery bus company's customers, and they stayed off for more than a year. The half people forget is the cost to the boycotters, who walked miles, organized carpools and risked their jobs. Follow up with what the group would give up for that long.
Why did some activists refuse bail and stay in jail?
Why ask it
The slogan was 'jail, no bail'. Paying fines and bail put money into the system they were protesting, while full cells made every arrest the city's problem and expense. The reasoning deserves as much notice as the bravery.
Why were churches at the center of so much organizing?
Why ask it
A church was often the one large building a Black community owned outright, with a hall, a treasury and a minister whose salary no white employer paid. That independence made churches targets too: the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963 killed four girls. Both halves belong in the answer.
How did television and news photographs change what a protest could do?
Why ask it
Organizers picked places where the response would be seen, and footage from Birmingham and Selma reached homes that had managed to ignore the subject. The harder follow-up is what happened in the counties where no camera ever came.
What did the major civil rights organizations disagree about?
Why ask it
Roughly: the NAACP put its faith in the courts, Dr. King's SCLC in mass demonstrations led by ministers, and SNCC and CORE in direct action and slow local organizing. They argued over speed, over who should lead and over the part white volunteers should play. If someone describes one united movement, ask whom they have left out.
What did Malcolm X, and later the advocates of Black Power, say the movement was getting wrong?
Why ask it
They questioned integration as the goal and nonviolence as a rule, and argued for self-defense, pride and Black control of Black institutions. A fair answer states that case in its own terms and does not cast it as the villain of the story. Notice, too, how much the critics and the criticized agreed about what was wrong with the country.
Who opposed the movement, and what methods did they use?
Why ask it
Not only the Klan. Listen for the Citizens' Councils that got people fired and cut off from credit, the governors and senators who promised resistance, the police, and the school boards that closed schools sooner than integrate them. An answer with only men in hoods lets the respectable opposition off.
What did the federal government do for the movement, and when did it hold back or work against it?
Why ask it
Presidents sent troops to Little Rock and marshals to the University of Mississippi, and Congress in the end passed the laws. The FBI also wiretapped movement leaders, and for years Washington declined to protect civil rights workers who were being attacked. Have students weigh both records before anyone calls the government an ally.
What did taking part cost people, from a lost job to a lost life?
Why ask it
Sharecroppers who registered to vote were put off the land, and teachers lost their jobs for belonging to the NAACP. Medgar Evers, the NAACP's field secretary in Mississippi, was shot in his own driveway in 1963, and his killer was not convicted until 1994. Ask for one named person and what happened to them, because courage in general is easy to admire and one eviction or one funeral is harder to forget.
Laws
What did the Civil Rights Act of 1964 do?
Why ask it
It outlawed segregation in public places such as hotels, restaurants and theaters, banned job discrimination by race, color, religion, sex or national origin, and let federal money be withheld from programs that discriminated. Then ask who kept a filibuster going in the Senate for weeks to stop it, which tells students where the opposition sat.
What did the Voting Rights Act of 1965 change, and how quickly?
Why ask it
It suspended literacy tests, sent federal examiners to register voters, and made certain states and counties get federal approval before changing their election rules. Black registration in the Deep South rose sharply within a few years, helped by the end of the poll tax, which the Twenty-fourth Amendment had banned in federal elections in 1964. How the law works today is a separate matter: courts have changed parts of it and the rules vary by state, so look that up for where you live.
What did the Fair Housing Act of 1968 do, and why did housing come last?
Why ask it
It barred discrimination in the sale and rental of most housing, and it passed in April 1968, a week after Dr. King was killed, having stalled in Congress since 1966. Housing reached into Northern neighborhoods as well as Southern ones, which is the place to start on why it took longest. Ask how firmly it was enforced then, and look up how a housing complaint is handled where you live now.
Which Supreme Court rulings mattered besides Brown?
Why ask it
Good candidates are Loving v. Virginia in 1967, which struck down bans on interracial marriage, Heart of Atlanta Motel in 1964, which upheld the Civil Rights Act, and Swann in 1971, which allowed busing as a remedy for segregated schools. Give one case to each student to explain in two sentences.
Who enforced the new laws, and what happened where nobody did?
Why ask it
A law on paper needed federal examiners in county courthouses, Justice Department lawsuits, the threat of losing federal school money, and private citizens willing to sue or to walk into the restaurant and sit down. Southern school districts that had stalled for a decade after Brown mostly desegregated only in the late 1960s and early 1970s, once courts and funding rules forced it. Ask who brought the test case in your own state.
Would the laws have passed without the protests?
Why ask it
Nobody can settle a what-if, which is why it works as a debate. The Civil Rights Act was proposed after Birmingham and the Voting Rights Act after Selma, so make each side account for that timing, and also for the decades of lawsuits and lobbying that came first.
Unfinished
What did the new laws change quickly, and what was left undone?
Why ask it
The 'whites only' signs came down and the voter rolls grew within a few years. Jobs, wages, housing and schools, which had been on the marchers' signs in 1963 next to the vote, did not move at that pace, because a law against discrimination does not hand anyone land, savings or a seat in a well-funded school. Dr. King spent his last years on poverty for that reason.
What happened when the movement turned to Northern cities?
Why ask it
Open-housing marches in Chicago in 1966 were met with rocks and bottles, and parents in New York had already kept their children home in a huge school boycott two years earlier. Many white Northerners who had cheered for Selma cooled once the subject was their own block and their own school. It unsettles the comfortable version in which the problem lived in one region.
How segregated are the schools and neighborhoods where you live now?
Why ask it
No national figure settles this one. In the United States, school district enrollment numbers and census maps are public, and the picture changes from one town to the next. Bring the numbers for your own area and let the group say what they see before anyone explains it.
Which other movements learned from the civil rights movement?
Why ask it
Farm workers, Native American activists, the women's movement and disability rights campaigners all borrowed its tactics, its songs and sometimes its lawyers. Ask for one specific borrowing, such as a boycott or a sit-in, because a vague debt is easy to claim and proves little.
How do protest movements today compare with the civil rights movement?
Why ask it
Have the group pick one recent movement and compare particulars: how it was organized, who spoke for it, how it was covered and what it asked for. The 1960s campaigns ran on mass meetings, membership rolls and weeks of training, where a phone can now gather a crowd in a day. Remind anyone ranking them by respectability that the marchers of 1963 were widely called troublemakers at the time.
How is the movement usually taught and remembered, and what gets smoothed over?
Why ask it
The short version has two heroes, one speech and a happy ending. What it drops is how many Americans disapproved of the protests while they were going on, how long the work took and how many people it needed. Setting a textbook chapter beside a memoir by someone who was there makes a good assignment.
What does the movement show about how change happens?
Why ask it
Answers divide among great leaders, ordinary people organizing for years, the courts, and outside pressure such as the Cold War and the television news. Insist on evidence from one campaign. Most people give the explanation they were first taught, so ask what would change their mind.
Is the civil rights movement over?
Why ask it
There is no agreed answer, so use it to close a discussion: each person says what would have to be true for it to be over. People who say yes are usually thinking of the laws and people who say no of the results. Getting that difference out in the open is the purpose of asking.
Interview
Is it all right if I record this, and is there anything you would prefer not to talk about?
Why ask it
Ask before the recorder is running, and say what the interview is for and who will hear it. If it is for school, find out whether a signed release is needed there. Being offered a way out at the start makes most people more willing to talk.
Where were you living in the 1950s and 1960s, and what was it like there?
Why ask it
Someone in Birmingham, someone in Detroit and someone in a Mississippi farm county lived through different decades, so settle the place before anything else. Ask for the street, the school and the church by name. Those names are how you will find the right newspaper, yearbook or city directory afterward.
What is your earliest memory of noticing that the rules were different for different people?
Why ask it
Childhood memories of this are small and exact: a side entrance, the balcony at the movie theater, a swimming pool, a look from a parent. Let the story run without interruption, then ask how old they were and who explained it to them.
What did the adults in your family tell you about how to act and where not to go?
Why ask it
It draws out the safety rules families taught, which seldom reach a textbook. Put to a white interviewee, it shows what was said at home and what was never mentioned. In both cases, find out who did the telling.
How did you first hear about the protests, and what did the people around you say about them?
Why ask it
The source matters: a church announcement, a Black newspaper, the evening news, a neighbor. Be ready to hear that the family, Black or white, thought the marchers were asking for trouble. Record it as it is said, without arguing, because that is how it looked from a kitchen table at the time.
Did you or anyone you knew take part, and what did that involve?
Why ask it
Taking part meant more than marching: cooking for a mass meeting, driving a carpool, putting up volunteers, giving money, going down to register. If the answer is no, ask gently what held people back, and do not treat it as a confession. Fear of losing a job was a sound reason.
What was your own job in the movement from day to day?
Why ask it
For someone who was active, ask about the ordinary work before the famous days: knocking on doors, running the mimeograph, driving people to the courthouse, sitting through meetings. Then ask who trained them and how old they were. Leave it out if the last question got a no.
What were the mass meetings like, and which songs do you remember?
Why ask it
Invite them to sing or speak a line if they are willing. A song brings back the room: who led it, how hot the church was, what was decided that night. For someone who never went to one, ask instead what they heard about the meetings from outside.
Were you ever afraid, and what did you do with the fear?
Why ask it
Save it until there is some trust, and expect a long pause. The memory may involve violence or a friend who was lost, so do not press for detail that is not offered. If they pass, move on and do not come back to it.
What do you remember about the first day your school, workplace or neighborhood was integrated?
Why ask it
People who were among the first in a classroom or on a job can often give that day hour by hour. Ask about the second week as well, after the reporters and the principal had gone back inside. If nothing was integrated where they lived, write that down, because it is an answer.
Where were you when you heard that Dr. King had been killed?
Why ask it
Almost anyone old enough can place April 4, 1968, so it works on a person who insists they have no stories. Go on to what happened in their town over the next few days, which differed a great deal from city to city.
Who from those years deserves to be remembered and has been forgotten?
Why ask it
You are hoping for a name that is in no book: a teacher, a barber, a lawyer, a church secretary who ran everything. Get the spelling, and ask whether any of that person's family still lives nearby. A school project that starts from that name will be the only one of its kind.
Do you have a photograph, a flyer, a membership card or a clipping from those years that I could see?
Why ask it
A poll tax receipt, an NAACP membership card or a mass meeting flyer is a primary source your class has never handled. Photograph it only with permission, and leave the original where it is kept. If a box in a closet gets mentioned, ask whether a library or archive knows it exists.
What did you expect would be different by now?
Why ask it
It asks for a judgment from someone who has earned the right to make one, and the answer tends to hold pride and disappointment together. Follow with what surprised them most, in either direction, and quote the answer exactly in whatever you write.
What do you want people my age to understand about that time?
Why ask it
This is the closing question, and the hard part is staying quiet after it. People tend to use it for whatever they had hoped you would ask. Thank them, and ask whether you may come back with more questions once you have listened to the recording.
Using these questions in a class, a book group or an interview
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Running a discussion
Take one group at a time
The list is too long for one sitting. A class period or a book group evening holds five or six questions done properly, so choose a group that fits what people have read. Background and Campaigns suit a first session. The three groups after them, on tactics and opposition, the laws and what was left unfinished, go better once everyone knows the basic story.
Ask for a name, a place and a year
Discussion of this subject drifts into general statements about courage and justice. When an answer has no person, town or date in it, ask for one. 'People were brave' becomes something you can check and learn from when it turns into 'Fannie Lou Hamer was put off the plantation where she worked on the day she tried to register'.
Put a source on the table
One photograph, one page of a memoir, one recorded interview or one newspaper front page changes the quality of the talk. Many libraries and universities keep recorded interviews with movement veterans, and your state or city may have its own collection. Ask a librarian what is held locally.
With younger students
Stay with the questions about rules, fairness and what children their own age did, such as the Greensboro students or the Birmingham marchers. Describe violence in plain words without showing the photographs, and let parents know beforehand what will be covered if that is the practice at your school.
Interviewing someone who lived through it
Work out how old they were
Someone who marched as a teenager in the early 1960s is now around eighty, and many people you can still interview were children then. Do the arithmetic before you go, and lean on the questions about school, home and what the adults said. When a story belongs to a parent or a grandparent, mark it in your notes as passed down.
Agree on the terms first
Say what the interview is for, how long it will take and who will hear or read it, and ask permission to record. Schools, archives and publications each have their own rules about release forms, so ask your teacher or the organization how it works there before the day.
Let them tell it in their own order
Treat the Interview group as a map and not a script. If the second question sets off twenty minutes about a grandmother's church, stay with it and check off the questions it happened to answer. Silence is useful. Count to five before you fill it.
When the person was not on the side of the movement
A relative who was white and living in the South, or who simply stayed out of it, has testimony too. Ask what they saw, what was said at home and what they think of it now, and write down the answer without correcting it. You can disagree in your paper. The interview is for hearing it.
Afterward
Write up your notes the same day, while you can still hear the voice. Send a thank-you and a copy of whatever you produce. If the recording is good and the person agrees, ask a local library or historical society whether it would like one.
What goes wrong
The two-name version
If every answer comes back to Rosa Parks and Dr. King, the group is retelling the summary and has not yet reached the history. Use the questions about organizers, women and your own town to widen it, and ask who did the typing, the driving and the bail runs.
Asking one person to speak for everyone
Do not turn to the Black students in the room, or the one Black member of the book group, for the authoritative answer. Put each question to the whole group. The same goes for an interview: one person can tell you about one life in one town, and that is plenty.
Treating it as a finished story
A discussion that ends in 1965 with everything solved has skipped the Unfinished group. Leave time for at least one question from it. People can disagree about how much has changed, and the conversation is better when they are allowed to.
Memory against the record
Dates slip and stories merge after sixty years. Check what you are told against newspapers and published accounts, and where the two differ, report both and say so. A misremembered date does not make the rest worthless, and the way a person remembers an event is evidence of its own kind.
What to do with the answers
For an essay
Pick the one question on which your sources, or the people in the room, disagreed. A dispute over when the movement began, or over whether the laws would have passed without the marches, gives you a thesis to defend. A question everyone answered the same way gives you a summary.
For a family record
Label the recording with the full name, the date and the place, type up the two or three stories that matter most, and give copies to more than one relative. Add the names of the towns, schools and churches that came up, so that whoever picks it up later can go looking.
For a local project
Take the answer to the question about your own town and follow it: a street, a school, a lunch counter, a courthouse. Find out what stands there now and whether anything marks what happened. That is a presentation nobody else in the class can give.