This collection relates to protests, racial tension and the state and federal government response to calls for equal rights for black Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. The earliest document shows the reaction of different American newspapers to a landmark case in 1954, Brown vs Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was illegal under the constitution reversing a decision in place since 1896.
At the end of the American Civil War in 1865, slavery was abolished and the vote was extended to black as well as white men. However over the next few decades different states found ways of getting round the laws, denying black people the vote and other civil rights. The situation was worst in the Southern states, where laws known as "Jim Crow" were brought in to segregate blacks and whites. Black people had to use separate facilities for public transport, housing, hospitals, restaurants and shops. In the Northern states there was not a strict segregation policy. However, black people still experienced discrimination in jobs, education, housing and trade unions.
These documents mainly record the reaction of British diplomats based in different parts of the United States to segregation and the response to it by civil rights leaders and ordinary Americans. The struggle for civil rights divided communities but it also divided local and national government and even civil rights protesters themselves on the best way forward for the movement. UK diplomats' attempts to understand the tumultuous events in America are sometimes seen through the prism of Britain's multiracial colonial possessions, still very much in existence in this period.
The story is continued on our Heroes & Villains website which as well as taking a closer look at events at Little Rock High School and in Birmingham, Alabama, presents documents relating to Martin Luther King's 'March on Washington' and his assassination in 1968.
