Study Questions

(28-1) Origins of the Movement

The migration of African Americans to northern cities led to increased economic and political opportunities. Voting power and legal action by the NAACP led to increased civil rights. In the South, segregation prevailed. After World War II, the NAACP legal strategy culminated in the victory in Brown v. Board of Education that ended segregation in the schools. A crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas forced President Eisenhower to use National Guard troops to integrate the schools there.

1. During the 1940s, the African American population in the U.S.
   
   1. lost most of the employment gains made during wartime.
      
   2. largely returned to farming in the South.
      
   3. doubled in northern cities due to reduced racial discrimination in housing and employment.
      
   4. stopped pressing for civil rights.
      
2. African Americans found they had as little political power in the North as in the South, once they migrated to cities and factory towns during World War II
   
   1. False
      
   2. True
      
3. All of the following were steps President Truman took that shifted most black voters into the Democratic Party except:
   
   1. He desegregated the armed forces by executive order
      
   2. He met with Thurgood Marshall and praised the NAACP
      
   3. Truman publicly endorsed the report To Secure These Rights
      
   4. Appointment of a Presidential Committee on Civil Rights that made ambitious recommendations.
      
4. By the end of World War II, the South was home to fewer than half of all African Americans.
   
   1. True
      
   2. False
      
5. A combination of legal and violent acts kept all but the most determined blacks from voting in the late 1940s, who represented this proportion of the eligible African American adults:
   
   1. ten percent.
      
   2. five percent.
      
   3. fifteen percent.
      
   4. one percent.
      
6. During the 1930s NAACP attorneys launched a frontal assault on the "separate but equal" doctrine enshrined in the Plessy Supreme Court decision.
   
   1. True
      
   2. False
      
7. The strategy civil rights attorneys used in the 1939 case Missouri v. ex.rel. Gaines to reduce official segregation was
   
   1. demanding separate but equal facilities that would be too expensive to maintain.
      
   2. claiming that segregation infringed on the educational rights of white students.
      
   3. making a frontal assault on the Plessy separate-but-equal rule.
      
   4. attacking segregation as a violation of religious freedom.
      
8. The lead attorney who argued for integrated schools in the Brown v. Board of Education case was
   
   1. Thurgood Marshall.
      
   2. Clarence Darrow.
      
   3. Earl Warren.
      
   4. Kenneth B. Clark.
      
9. The victory in Brown v. Board of Education was limited by a second Supreme Court ruling
   
   1. accepting the idea of "interposition" as a legal argument.
      
   2. schools would have ten years to implement an integration plan.
      
   3. giving responsibility for implementation to local school boards.
      
   4. that monitoring would be decided by the local community.
      
10. In 1957, President Eisenhower sent troops to integrate a high school in
    
    1. Little Rock, Arkansas.
       
    2. Oxford, Mississippi.
       
    3. Selma, Alabama.
       
    4. Atlanta, Georgia.
       

Answers: C, B, B, B, A, B, A, A, C, A