A Fast Walk Through a Long History: A Summary of the American Civil Rights Struggle from 1619 in Jamestown to 1965 in Selma

A

lthough focusing most closely after World War II on events in Alabama, this brief summary of the American civil rights movement traces the roots of the struggle back to the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. These first African Americans may have had status somewhat similar to European indentured servants already in the colonies, but soon the Africans' skin color and the hunger for cheap labor would consign them and their descendants to chattel slavery until the end of the Civil War (indisputably caused by slavery). Post-war Reconstruction brought a brief moment of hope for equality, but these hopes were dashed by white supremacist terrorism abetted by politics and economics. Then followed a century of Jim Crow segregation, which was finally overcome--legally at least--in the 1950s and 1960s. The victories of civil rights and voting rights were the result of decades of black-led organizing, resistance, legal actions, and activism in communities across the nation but especially in the Deep South states below the Mason-Dixon line. Alabama was at the center of this movement from 1955 to 1975.

A version of this essay first appeared in History Refused to Die: The Enduring Legacy of African American Art in Alabama (Tinwood Books, 2015). It was also the basis of a 2015 lecture by the author at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts coinciding with an exhibit of works by fourteen African American artists from Alabama.