s had been consigned to legal and social inferiority, forgotten by the courts, the Congress, and by Presidents." Weisbrot said that "between 1865 and 1869 Congress adopted three amendments to the Constitution [the 13th, 14th and 15th] that for the first time guaranteed blacks freedom, citizenship, and suffrage." Nevertheless, through poll taxes, literacy tests, Jim Crow segregation laws, and by lynching and other forms of intimidation, blacks in the South were effectively denied all the foregoing rights.
According to Morris, three major factors caused civil rights concerns to rise to the fore of American politics in the 1960s:
1. "The millions of blacks achieving relative prosperity in the North and communicating back to the South that there was an alternative to feudal submission." The great migration of blacks to northern industrial cities had begun before World War I and continued unabated, except for the Depression years.
2. The experience of World War II. The armed services remained segregated until President Harry Truman desegregated them by executive order in 1950, but hundreds of thousands of blacks had been exposed to nonsegregated societies and felt they had earned the right to be accorded better treatment at home.
3. "The feedback effect upon blacks' own accelerating expectations from each small victory at the racial barriers." The struggle for racial equality had been led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) whose Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which was led in the late 1940s and early 1950s by Thurgood Marshall, won the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954. Marshall was subsequently appointed to the Supreme Court by Johnson. The Court held unanimously that segregated public schools violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. It reversed its previous decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) which had held that separate but equal public accomm...