Early NAACP Victories
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded in 1909, and almost immediately became the United States' leading civil rights activist organization. Early victories in Guinn v. United States (1915), an Oklahoma voting rights case, and Buchanan v. Warley (1917), a Kentucky neighborhood segregation case, chipped away at Jim Crow. But it was the appointment of Thurgood Marshall as head of the NAACP legal team, and the decision to focus primarily on school desegregation cases, that would give the NAACP its greatest victories.
The Senate Blocks Anti-Lynching Legislation
Between 1920 and 1940, the U.S. House of Representatives passed three pieces of legislation to fight lynching. Each time the legislation went to the Senate, it fell victim to a 40-vote filibuster, led by white supremacist Southern senators. In 2005, 80 members of the Senate sponsored and easily passed a resolution apologizing for its role in blocking anti-lynching laws--though some senators, most notably Mississippi senators Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, refused to support the resolution.
The Scottsboro Trials
In 1931, nine black teenagers had an altercation with a group of white teenagers on an Alabama train. The State of Alabama pressured two teenage girls into fabricating rape charges, and the inevitable death penalty convictions, which featured every dirty trick from judicial bias to jury roll forgery, resulted in more retrials and reversals than any case in U.S. history. The Scottsboro convictions also hold the distinction of being the only convictions in history to have been overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court twice.
- Read more: The Scottsboro Boys Trials
The Truman Civil Rights Agenda
When President Harry Truman ran for reelection in 1948, he courageously ran on an openly pro-civil rights platform. A segregationist senator named Strom Thurmond (R-SC) mounted a third-party candidacy, pulling away Southern Democrats who were perceived as essential to Truman's success. The success of Republican challenger Thomas Dewey was regarded as a foregone conclusion by most observers (prompting the infamous "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline), but Truman ultimately prevailed in a surprising landslide victory.
- Read more: Desegregation of the U.S. Armed Services