Terror and Triumph (1940 - 1954)

Episode 4 of The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow

Episode Four examines the surge of Black activism that took place after World War II.

Black veterans returned from the war determined to achieve the same rights at home that they had fought for in Europe in a Jim Crow army. One vet, Medgar Evers, became an organizer for the Mississippi NAACP; he was assassinated for his work in 1963. In Georgia, John Wesley Dobbs, head of the Black Masons, organized the first voter-registration drives. Predictably, whites again answered Black demands for equality with violence. But this time, President Truman responded with a civil rights initiative and integrated the Army. Southern Democrats split from the Democratic Party forming the States Rights Party.

But slowly the national mood was changing. Barriers fell in sports and entertainment. Here, for the first time on film, those who had been high school students in Farmville, VA reconstruct their historic walk-out and protest against segregated and inadequate education. They galvanized the community to join in an NAACP lawsuit that was combined with four other NAACP suits across the country to become Brown v. Board of Education. The landmark Brown decision irreparably breached the legal basis for Jim Crow, and through that opening soon poured the legions of the Civil Rights Movement.