Postwar suburbia was an expression of the long-held American dream: a house of one’s own, a little plot of land, a clean and decent place to, live. But if suburban lawns were green, the suburbs themselves were white. As usual, African-Americans had been excluded from the dream—or, at least, relegated to the very back of it.

Executive Order 9981

On July 26, 1948, President Harry S Truman (1884-1972) issued Executive Order 9981, which mandated “equality of treatment and opportunity to all persons in the Armed Services without regard to race.” African-Americans had regularly served in the armed forces since the Civil War, but always in separate—segregated—units, though usually Linder white officers. Truman’s order did not use the word integration, but when he was asked point-blank if that is what the order meant, the president replied with his characteristic directness: “Yes.”

Executive Order 9981 did much more than integrate the armed forces. It began a gradual revolution in American society. For many soldiers, sailors, and airmen, the army or navy or air force (itself newly created as a service branch independent from the army in 1947), became their first experience of integration. In even more immediate terms, Executive Order 9981 meant that the mom and pop owners of the tavern just beyond the post gate had to open their businesses to all personnel, white and black. If a local lunch counter refused to serve a black soldier, for example, it could be declared “off-limits” by the post commander—and there would be no one to serve.

The Dream Deferred

Of course, the integration of the armed forces did not completely transform American society, let alone transform it overnight. Racial prejudice was deeply ingrained in American life, and in some places, particularly the South, prejudice was even protected by law. In most Southern states, the “Jim Crow” legislation that had been passed during the bitter years following Reconstruction remained on the books in one form or another. Theoretically, Southern society was segregated such that publicly funded facilities (like schools) provided “separate but equal” service. In practice, services and facilities were certainly separate, but hardly equal. In the South, African-Americans were treated as an underclass. This was true in subtler ways up North as well, where segregation was often de facto rather than de jure.

Following both world wars, African-Americans migrated in large numbers from the rural South to the industrial cities of the North. Industry welcomed their cheap labor, but many whites, fearing they would lose their jobs to the newcomers, met them with hostility. Up North, blacks typically found themselves restricted to menial labor and compelled to live in slum districts that became known as ghettoes. In effect, the entire American nation was both separate and unequal.

Rosa Parks Boards a Bus

On December 1, 1955, Montgomery, Alabama, was a typical Southern city, its social fabric shot through with the threads of major injustice and trivial humiliation carefully (if no longer quite consciously) interwoven to keep blacks “in their place.” Rosa Parks (b. 1913) boarded a city bus to return home from her job. Like any other commuter, she was tired after a hard day’s work. She settled into a seat in the forward section of the bus.

In most parts of the world, this mundane action would have gone entirely unnoticed. But in Montgomery in 1955, it was a crime for a black person to sit in the front of a city bus. Told to yield her place to a white person, Parks refused, was arrested, and jailed.

The arrest sparked a boycott of Montgomery city buses. If the town’s African-Americans could not ride in the front of the bus, they would not ride at all. Although most of Montgomery’s African-American population depended on the buses, they maintained the boycott for more than a year, focusing national attention on Montgomery and, more importantly, on the issues of civil rights for African-Americans.

Emergence of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, emerged during the Montgomery boycott as moral and spiritual leader of the developing civil rights movement. Born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of it prominent local minister, King was educated at Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary, and Boston University, from which he received a doctorate in 1955. Along with the Reverend Ralph Abernathy and Edward Nixon, King entered the national spotlight during the boycott. He used his sudden prominence to infuse the national civil rights movement with what he had learned from the example of India’s great leader, Mahatma Gandhi, who taught the principle of satyagraha—”holding to the truth” by nonviolent civil disobedience. Rosa Parks’s protest was a classic example.

After Montgomery, King lectured nationally and became president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He conducted major voter registration drives, demonstrations, marches, and campaigns in Albany, Georgia (December 1961-August 1962), Birmingham, Alabama (April-May 1963), and Danville, Virginia (July 1963). In August 1963, King organized a massive March on Washington, where he delivered one of the great speeches in American history, declaring “I Have a Dream.”

In 1964, King was internationally recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize, then went on to conduct desegregation efforts in St. Augustine, Florida. King organized a voter-registration drive in Selma, Alabama, leading a march from Selma to Montgomery in March 1965, which was met by angry white mobs. King expanded the civil rights movement into the North and began to attack not just legal and social injustice, but economic inequality.

While King was planning a multiracial “poor people’s march” on Washington in 1968, aimed at securing federal funding for a $12-billion “Economic Bill of Rights,” he flew to Memphis, Tennessee, to support striking sanitation workers. In that city, on April 4, Martin Luther King, Jr., fell to a sniper’s bullet.

Or Does It Explode?

The assassination of Dr. King, brilliant apostle of nonviolent social change, sparked urban riots across a number of the nation’s black ghettoes. These riots were not the first of the decade. Despite the nonviolent message of Dr. King, racial unrest had often turned violent. NAACP leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1963; Birmingham, Alabama, was the site of the bombing of a black church, in which four girls were killed; three civil rights activists—including two whites—were killed in Mississippi while working to register black voters. On August 11, 1965, a six-day riot ripped apart the Watts section of Los Angeles after a police patrolman attempted to arrest a man for drunk driving. Riots broke out the following summer in New York and Chicago, and in 196 7 in Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit. Following the King assassination in 1968, more than 100 cities erupted into violence.