Multiple Choice
Identify the
choice that best completes the statement or answers the question.
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 | Marching to Washington
The civil rights bill
that Kennedy sent to Congress guaranteed equal access to all public accommodations and gave the U.S.
attorney general the power to file school desegregation suits. To persuade Congress to pass the bill,
two veteran organizers-labor leader A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Bustin of the SCLC summoned
Americans to join in a massive march on Washington, D.C.
THE DREAM OF EQUALITY
On August
28, 1963, more than 250,000 people including about 75,000 whites-converged on the nation’s
capital. They assembled on the grassy slopes of the Washington Monument, and the movement’s
leaders, walking arm in arm, led the crowd to the sprawling plaza near the Lincoln Monument. There,
for more than three hours, people listened to speakers demand the immediate passage of the civil
rights bill. When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., appeared, the crowd exploded in applause . King
eventually stopped reading from his prepared text and began an improvised speech in which he appealed
for peace and racial harmony, punctuating his speech with the repeated refrain “I have a
dream.”
MORE VIOLENCE
Two weeks after King’s historic speech, a car sped past
the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and a rider in the car hurled a bomb
through one of the church “windows. The resulting explosion claimed the lives of four
young girls .
Two more African Americans died in the unrest that followed. Two months
later, on November 22, 1963, an assassin shot and killed John F. Kennedy. (See Chapter 20.) His
successor, President London B. Johnson, pledged to carry on Kennedy’s work by winning passage
of the civil rights bill. “We have talked for 100 years or more,” Johnson said. “It
is time now to write the new chapter-and to write it in books of law.” On July 2, 1964,
President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination because of
race, religion, national origin, and gender. It gave all citizens the right to enter libraries,
parks, washrooms, restaurants, theaters, and other public accommodations
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1.
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The civil rights bill that
Kennedy sent to Congress
a. | guaranteed equal access to all
public accommodations | c. | gave the U.S.
attorney general the power to file school desegregation suits | b. | both of these | d. | Neither of these. Kennedy was luke- warm on civil
rights |
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2.
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Why did A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Bustin of the SCLC organize the “March on
Washington?”
a. | demand better housing for black
people | c. | pressure Congress to pass the civil
rights bill | b. | demand and end to school integration | d. | protest the war in Vietnam |
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3.
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Dr. King’s “I Have
A Dream” speech
a. | was carefully prepared to get just
the right response from the abundance | c. | was a spontaneous speech from his heart | b. | was written by Bayard Bustin and A. Philip
Randolph | d. | surprised people because it was full
of anger, frustration and some hate. |
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4.
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The March on Washington seemed
to have a calming effect on the citizens of Birmingham, Alabama
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5.
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When was John F.Kennedy
assassinated?
a. | Nov. 22,
1964 | c. | January,
1963 | b. | Nov 22, 1963 | d. | January, 1964 |
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6.
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What happened to the civil
rights bill after Kennedy was assassinated?
a. | It died in
Congress | c. | Johnson pushed it
through Congress | b. | It was defeated in the Senate | d. | Johnson let it die and did not push
it |
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7.
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What happened on July 2,
1964?
a. | President Johnson signed the Civil
Rights Bill | c. | President Kennedy
was shot | b. | President Kennedy signed the Civil Rights
Bill | d. | President Johnson forgot to sign the Civil Rights Bill
because he was working out with Mr. Schneemann |
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Fighting for Voting
Rights
Meanwhile, civil rights
workers in the South were planning a different campaign to influence the country’s laws-by
registering African-American voters who could elect legislators who supported civil rights .
Because previous voter-registration drives had met with little success, CORE and SNCC planned a much
larger effort for 1964. They hoped their campaign would receive national publicity that would in turn
influence Congress to pass a voting rights act. SNCC concentrated its efforts in Mississippi, in a
project that was popularly known as Freedom Summer.
FREEDOM SUMMER
SNCC knew that challenging the system that kept more than 90 percent of
African-American citizens from the polls would be a daunting task. Civil rights groups recruited
white students from colleges across the country and then trained them in the techniques of nonviolent
resistance . Some 1,000 volunteers-mostly white, about one-third finally-went into Mississippi to
help the mostly African-American SNCC staff members register voters .
Robert Moses, a former New
York City schoolteacher who had quit his job and joined SNCC in 1961, led the voter project in
Mississippi. By the summer of 1964, Moses had already been working for several years in Mississippi
to register blacks to vote. “Mississippi has been called ‘The Closed Society.’ It
is closed, locked,” Moses said. “We think the key is in the
vote.”
Immediately, the voter
project encountered violent opposition . In June, while some of the volunteers were still receiving
training back in Ohio, three civil rights workers, including one summer volunteer, disappeared in
Mississippi . They were Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, white activists from New York, and
James Chaney, an African American from Mississippi . Investigators later learned that Klansmen, with
the support of local police, had murdered the three and buried them in an earthen dam . By the end of
the summer, the project had suffered 4 dead, 4 critically wounded, 80 beaten, and dozens of
African-American churches and businesses bombed or burned. In spite of all the publicity the project
received, Congress still did not pass a voting rights act
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8.
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What was CORE and SNCC trying
to do in Mississippi during the Summer of 64?
a. | Get black people registered to
vote | c. | Fight Bull Conners in
Birmingham | b. | Protest against discrimination in interstate
commerce. | d. | Protect black people from the KKK in
the South. |
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9.
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What did CORE and SNCC want the
U.S. government to do
a. | protect the protestors on
busses | c. | pass an anti poverty
bill | b. | pass a voting rights act | d. | go after the KKK |
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10.
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Many people thought that
Mississippi was a closed society to black people. They could not improve their living conditions and
could not even acquire basic civil rights. What did the civil rights organizers see as the key to
open the state for black people.
a. | better
jobs | c. | total integration of the
schools | b. | a stronger NAACP | d. | voting rights for black people |
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11.
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Freedom Summer was the first
Summer in years free of violence against civil rights workers.
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12.
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Because of the hard work and
dedication of the civil rights workers during Freedom Summer, the Voting Rights Act was finally
passed in the fall.
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A NEW POLITICAL PARTY
The Democrat party had controlled
the South since the Civil War. They were in favor of segregation and created the Jim Crow laws. To be
elected to political office in the South you had to be a Democrat. To challenge Mississippi’s
white-controlled Democratic Party, SNCC organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) .
Open to anyone, regardless of race, the MFDP hoped to unseat Mississippi’s regular party
delegates at the Democratic National Convention .
Fannie Lou Homer, the daughter of Mississippi
sharecroppers, won the honor of speaking for the MFDP at the convention . Hamer had registered to
vote in 1962 at the cost of a crippling beating and her family’s eviction from their faun. In
June 1964, she spoke to the credentials committee at the Democratic convention in a prime-time
televised address . Hamer described how she had been arrested for trying to register and taken to
jail, where police forced other prisoners to beat her.
In response to Hamer’s speech, telegrams and
telephone calls poured in the convention in support of seating the MFDP delegates . But President
Johnson feared that such a move would cost him white votes throughout the South, so his
administration pressured civil rights leaders to convince the MFDP to accept a compromise. The
Democrats would give 2 of Mississippi’s 68 seats to the MFDP, with a promise to ban
discrimination at the 1968 convention. When Hamer learned of the compromise, she exclaimed, “We
didn’t come all this way for no two seats when all of us is tired.” The MFDP and many of
their young supporters in SNCC felt that the leaders of other civil rights groups had betrayed them.
This sense of betrayal was one of several factors that eventually led to conflict among various civil
rights groups
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13.
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What was the goal of the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)?
a. | gain power in the regular Democrat
party | d. | all of
these | b. | get some seats for black people in the Democrat convention in
1964 | e. | none of these | c. | gain political power in
Mississippi |
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14.
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SNCC and MFDP
believed
a. | they were betrayed at the Democrat
National Convention | c. | they were now the
most important and powerful political force in Mississippi | b. | they had won a victory at the Democrat Convention
| d. | the regular Democrat party was a friend of black
people |
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15.
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Why did SNCC believe it needed
its own political party in Mississippi?
a. | the regular Democrats in Mississippi
were controlled by people who were friendly to civil rights but they had little real political
power | c. | the regular Democrat party in
Mississippi was against racial integration and at the same time controlled the
state | b. | the Republicans controlled the South and it was the only way to defeat
them | d. | they could not raise money without the organization of
regular political party |
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THE SELMA CAMPAIGN
Voting in the
United States is a two step process. First you must register with the country to prove you are a
citizen and then you can vote on election day. In the South black people usually did not register so
they could not vote. They did not register for a variety of reasons: some states had literacy
requirements which said you needed to be able to read and write, sometimes blacks felt intimidated,
sometimes they had to pay a poll tax to register, sometimes they were not motivated because the only
candidates were pro segregationists.
At the start of 1965, the SCLC decided to conduct a
major campaign in Selma, Alabama, where SNCC had been working for two years to register voters .
African Americans accounted for more than half of Selma’s population but for only about 3
percent of the total registered voters . Martin Luther King, Jr., and the SCLC hoped that a
concentrated voter-registration drive in Selma would provoke a hostile white response-which would
help convince the Johnson administration of the need to sponsor a federal voting-rights law.
By the end of January 1965, more than 2,000 African Americans had been arrested in
demonstrations . Selma sheriff Jim Clark reacted as violently as Bull Connor in Birmingham, and his
men brutally attacked civil rights demonstrators Then, in February, law officers shot and killed a
demonstrator named Jimmie Lee Jackson. Dr.King responded by announcing a 50-mile protest march from
Selma to the state capital, Montgomery. On Sunday, March 7, 1965, a group of about 600 protesters set
out for Montgomery.That night, news bulletins interrupted regular television programs to show what
looked like a war. Clouds of tear gas swirled around fallen marchers, while police wearing gas masks
and riding horses swung whips and clubs. The scene sent shock waves across the country. Demonstrators
from all over the United States poured into Selma to join the march. President Johnson responded by
asking Congress for the swift passage of a new voting rights act. In his speech, Johnson openly
embraced the rhetoric of the civil rights movement. Said the president, “Their cause must be
our cause, too. It is not just Negroes, but all of us, Who must overcome the crippling legacy of
bigotry and injustice . And we shall overcome .” On Sunday, March 21, 3,000 marchers again set
out for Montgomery~; this time with federal protection. Two Nobel Peace Prize winners-Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr., and UN diplomat Ralph Bunche-led the procession . Under court order, only 250
marchers were supposed to enter the city limits, but nothing could stop the groundswell of support.
An army of some 25,000 demonstrators joined the marchers as they walked into
Montgomery
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16.
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Why did Dr. King try to provoke
violence against the civil rights workers and marchers?
a. | Gain the sympathy of the General
Public | c. | Motivate his
workers | b. | Frighten President Johnson into supporting a new voting rights
law | d. | All of these are
reasons |
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17.
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Before you can vote in the
United States you must
a. | pay all traffic tickets and
fines | c. | have a high school
education | b. | register | d. | prove you could read and write |
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18.
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In what southern city did SCLC
and SNCC focus their attention because only about 3% of the voters were African American while their
percentage of the total population was more than half.
a. | Montgomery,
Alabama | c. | Selma,
Alabama | b. | Little Rock, Arkansas | d. | Selma, Mississippi |
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19.
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The march to Selma started with
about 600 marchers. How did sheriff Jim Clark react to the
marchers?
a. | violently with tear gas and
clubs | c. | called out the National
Guard | b. | He protected the marchers from the mobs of people who came to break up the
march | d. | resigned rather than follow the mayor’s orders to
break up the march |
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20.
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The reaction of sheriff Jim
Clark to the Selma civil rights marchers
a. | horrified the leaders of SNCC and
SCLC | c. | was just the response that Dr. King,
SNCC and SCLC wanted | b. | angered Dr. King | d. | did not get shown to the rest of the country on
television |
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21.
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Who was the black United
Nations diplomat from the U.S. who marched with Dr. King in Selma?
a. | Dr. Bull
Conners | c. | Dr. Ralph
Bunche | b. | Dr. Ralph Clark | d. | Dr. Jim Crow |
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VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1965
Ten weeks after the
Selma-to-Montgomery march, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 . The act eliminated the
literacy test that had disqualified so many voters . The act also stated that federal examiners could
enroll voters denied suffrage by local officials. In Selma, the proportion of eligible African
Americans who were registered to vote rose from 10 percent in 1964 to 60 percent in 1968. Overall the
percentage of registered African-American voters in the South tripled. Although the Voting
Rights Act marked a major civil rights victory, some African Americans felt that the law did not go
far enough. Centuries of segregation and discrimination had produced deep-rooted social and economic
inequalities. In the mid-1960s, anger over these inequalities led to a series of violent disturbances
in the cities of the North. | |
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22.
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The Voting Rights Act on 1965
said that the U.S. government could register voters if they were denied voting rights by local
communities and also said that a person did not have to know how to read and write to register to
vote.
a. | true | c. | partly true and partly
false | b. | false |
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23.
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The Voting Rights Act of 1965
_____ the number of African American voters eligible to vote.
a. | decreased to
60% | c. | increased to
60% | b. | increased to 100% | d. | did not effect |
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24.
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Black people were satisfied
that they had full political power now that they had the Voting Rights Act of
1965
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25.
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What does suffrage
mean?
a. | The right to protest and not have to
suffer | c. | The persecution of African Americans
in the South | b. | The right to march and not have to suffer | d. | The right to vote |
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