Long Road of Civil Rights
Orginizations like the NAACP and men like A. Phillip Randolph were fighting for the rights of African Americans long before WWII and post war saw a renewed vigor in the long fight for their rights. In 1948 under pressure from activists President Harry S. Truman enacted several recommendations made by the commision on civil rights he had formed a year earlier. The most important was perhaps the abolishment of segragation in the military with Executive Order 9981. Truman's even mild support of civil rights threatened his bid to be elected to his own term as President of the United States as he lost significant support from Southern Democrats. Facing a third party insurgency by so called Dixiecrats and trailing in nearly every poll to Republican Thomas Dewey, Truman stunned the nation when he won and was famously pictured with a Chicago Tribune paper with the erroneous headline of his demise.
The struggle for Civil rights continued through the 1950s with such landmark moments such as Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka and reached a fever pitch in the 1960s. The movement began in the South and quickly spread throughout the country including Chicago with the Chicago Freedom Movement. Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in 1964 and 1965 respectively, Martin Luther King Jr. organized a march to protest discriminatory housing policies in Chicago. He was met with resistance King described as bad or worse than what he had seen in the South. Despite continued resistance civil rights leaders continued to fight well beyond the 1960s as the battle against discriminantion continues into the present.