The Civil Rights Movement in the United States was a long, primarily nonviolent struggle to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to all Americans. The movement has had a lasting impact on United States society, in its tactics, the increased social and legal acceptance of civil rights, and in its exposure of the prevalence and cost of racism.

The American Civil Rights movement has been made up of many movements. The term usually refers to the political struggles and reform movements between 1945 and 1970 to end discrimination against African Americans and other disadvantaged groups and to end legal racial segregation, especially in the U.S. South.

This article focuses on an earlier phase of the struggle. Two United States Supreme Court decisions—Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), which upheld "separate but equal" racial segregation as constitutional doctrine, and Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) which overturned Plessy — serve as milestones. This was an era of stops and starts, in which some movements, such as Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, were very successful but left little lasting legacy, while others, such as the NAACP's painstaking legal assault on state-sponsored segregation, achieved modest results in its early years but made steady progress on voter rights and gradually built to a key victory in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

After the Civil War, the U. S. expanded the legal rights of African Americans. Congress passed, and enough states ratified, an amendment ending slavery in 1865—the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution. This amendment only outlawed slavery; it provided neither citizenship nor equal rights. In 1868, the 14th Amendment was ratified by the states, granting African Americans citizenship. All persons born in the U. S. were extended equal protection under the laws of the Constitution. The 15th Amendment (ratified in 1870) stated that race could not be used as a condition to deprive men of the ability to vote. During Reconstruction (1865–1877), Northern troops occupied the South. Together with the Freedmen's Bureau, they tried to administer and enforce the new constitutional amendments. Many black leaders were elected to local and state offices, and many others organized community groups, especially to support education.

Reconstruction ended following the Compromise of 1877 between Northern and Southern white elites.^[1] In exchange for deciding the contentious Presidential election in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes, supported by Northern states, over his opponent, Samuel J. Tilden, the compromise called for the withdrawal of Northern troops from the South. This followed violence and fraud in southern elections from 1868–1876, which had reduced black voter turnout and enabled Southern white Democrats to regain power in state legislatures across the South. The compromise and withdrawal of Federal troops meant that white Democrats had more freedom to impose and enforce discriminatory practices. Many African Americans responded to the withdrawal of federal troops by leaving the South in what is known as the Kansas Exodus of 1879.

The Radical Republicans, who spearheaded Reconstruction, had attempted to eliminate both governmental and private discrimination by legislation. That effort was largely ended by the Supreme Court's decision in the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883), in which the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment did not give Congress power to outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals or businesses.

Key events[link]

Segregation[link]

The Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) upheld state-mandated discrimination in public transportation under the "separate but equal" doctrine. As Justice Harlan, the only member of the Court to dissent from the decision, predicted:

If a state can prescribe, as a rule of civil conduct, that whites and blacks shall not travel as passengers in the same railroad coach, why may it not so regulate the use of the streets of its cities and towns as to compel white citizens to keep on one side of a street, and black citizens to keep on the other? Why may it not, upon like grounds, punish whites and blacks who ride together in street cars or in open vehicles on a public road or street? . . . .

The Plessy decision did not address an earlier Supreme Court case, Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 (1886),^[2] involving discrimination against Chinese immigrants, that held that a law that is race-neutral on its face, but is administered in a prejudicial manner, is an infringement of the Equal Protection Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. While in the 20th century, the Supreme Court began to overturn state statutes that disfranchised African Americans, as in Guinn v. United States (1915), with Plessy, it upheld segregation that Southern states enforced in nearly every other sphere of public and private life. The Court soon extended Plessy to uphold segregated schools. In Berea College v. Kentucky, 211 U.S. 45 (1908), the Court upheld a Kentucky statute that barred Berea College, a private institution, from teaching both black and white students in an integrated setting. Many states, particularly in the South, took Plessy and Berea as blanket approval for restrictive laws, generally known as Jim Crow laws, that created second-class status for African Americans.

In many cities and towns, African Americans were not allowed to share a taxi with whites or enter a building through the same entrance. They had to drink from separate water fountains, use separate restrooms, attend separate schools, be buried in separate cemeteries and swear on separate Bibles. They were excluded from restaurants and public libraries. Many parks barred them with signs that read "Negroes and dogs not allowed." One municipal zoo listed separate visiting hours.

The etiquette of racial segregation was harsher, particularly in the South. African Americans were expected to step aside to let a white person pass, and black men dared not look any white woman in the eye. Black men and women were addressed as "Tom" or "Jane", but rarely as "Mr." or "Miss" or "Mrs," titles then widely in use for adults. Whites referred to black men of any age as "boy" and a black woman as "girl"; both often were called by labels such as "nigger" or "colored."

Less formal social segregation in the North began to yield to change. In 1941, however, the United States Naval Academy, based in segregated Maryland, refused to play a lacrosse game against Harvard University because Harvard's team included a black player.

Paul Robeson addresses segregation in Major League Baseball, 1943[link]

In December 1943, the singer and activist Paul Robeson became the first black man to address baseball team owners on the subject of integration. At the owners' annual winter meeting, Robeson argued that baseball, as a national game, had an obligation to ensure segregation did not become a national pattern. The owners gave Robeson a round of applause.^[3] Although Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis remarked after the meeting that there was no rule on the books denying blacks entry into the league, he had stood in way of integration for more than 20 years. His death in 1944 removed a significant obstacle to integrating Major League Baseball.^[4] Still, Robeson is credited with helping to pave the way for Jackie Robinson's entry into major league baseball four years later.^[5]

Jackie Robinson’s Major League Baseball debut, 1947[link]

Jackie Robinson was a sports pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement, best known for becoming the first African American to play professional sports in the major leagues. Robinson debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers of Major League Baseball on April 15, 1947. His first major league game came one year before the U.S. Army was integrated, seven years before Brown v. Board of Education, eight years before Rosa Parks, and before Martin Luther King Jr. was leading the Civil Rights Movement.

Political opposition[link]

Lily-White Movement[link]

Following the Civil War black leaders made substantial progress in establishing representation in the Republican Party. Among the most stunning was the rise of Norris Wright Cuney to the chairmanship of the Texas Republican Party. These gains led to substantial discomfort among many white voters, some of whom left the party to join the Democrats.

During the 1888 Texas Republican Convention, Cuney coined the term Lily-White Movement to describe efforts by white conservatives to oust blacks from positions of party leadership and incite riots to divide the party.^[6] Increasingly organized efforts by this movement gradually eliminated black leaders from the party. The writer Michael Fauntroy contends that the effort was coordinated with Democrats as part of a larger movement toward disfranchisement of blacks in the South,^[7] but by the late 19th century, the Democratic Party had retaken most state legislatures in the South and accomplished disfranchisement of blacks without Republican assistance.

Nationally, the Republican Party responded to black demands. For instance, opposition to lynching was part of the Republican platform at the 1920 Republican National Convention. Lynchings, primarily of black men in the South, had increased in the decades around the turn of the 19th to 20th century. Leonidas C. Dyer, a white Republican Representative from St. Louis, Missouri, worked with the NAACP to introduce an anti-lynching bill into the House, where he gained strong passage in 1922. His effort was defeated by the Southern Democratic block in the Senate, which filibustered the bill that year, and in 1923 and 1924.

Disfranchisement[link]

Opponents of black civil rights used economic reprisals and sometimes violence in the 1870s and 1880s to discourage blacks from registering to vote. By the turn of the 19th to 20th century, white Democratic-dominated Southern legislatures disfranchised nearly all age-eligible African-American voters through a combination of statute and constitutional provisions. While requirements applied to all citizens, in practice, they were targeted at blacks and poor whites (and Mexican Americans in Texas), and subjectively administered. The feature "Turnout in Presidential and Midterm Elections" at this University of Texas website devoted to politics, shows the drastic drop in voting as these provisions took effect in Southern states compared to the rest of the US, and the longevity of the measures.^[8]

Mississippi was the first state to have such constitutional provisions, such as poll taxes, literacy tests (which depended on the arbitrary decisions of white registrars), and complicated record keeping to establish residency, litigated before the Supreme Court. In 1898, in Williams v. Mississippi, the Court upheld the state. Other Southern states quickly adopted the "Mississippi plan", and from 1890–1908, ten states adopted new constitutions with provisions to disfranchise most blacks and many poor whites. States continued to disfranchise these groups for decades, until mid-1960s federal legislation provided for oversight and enforcement of voting rights. Blacks were most adversely affected, and in many states black voter turnout dropped to zero.

Poor whites were also disfranchised. In Alabama, for instance, by 1941, 600,000 poor whites had been disfranchised, as well as 520,000 blacks.^[9]

It was not until the 20th century that litigation by African Americans on such provisions began to meet some success before the Supreme Court. In 1915 in Guinn v. United States, the Court declared Oklahoma’s ‘grandfather clause’ to be unconstitutional. Although the decision affected all states that used the grandfather clause, state legislatures quickly employed new devices to continue disfranchisement. Each provision or statute had to be litigated separately. The NAACP litigated against many such provisions.

One device which the Democratic Party began to use more widely in Southern states in the early 20th century was the white primary, which served for decades to disfranchise the few blacks who managed to get past barriers of voter registration. Barring blacks from voting in the Democratic Party primaries meant they had no chance to vote in the only competitive contests. White primaries were not struck down by the Supreme Court until Smith v. Allwright in 1944.

Criminal law and lynching[link]

Juvenile African-American convicts working in the fields in a chain gang, photo taken c. 1903

In 1880, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303 (1880) that African Americans could not be excluded from juries. But, beginning in 1890 with new state constitutions and electoral laws, the South effectively disfranchised blacks in the South, which routinely disqualified them for jury duty which was limited to voters. This left them at the mercy of a white justice system arrayed against them. In some states, particularly Alabama, the state used the criminal justice system to reestablish a form of peonage, through the convict-lease system. The state sentenced black males to years of imprisonment, which they spent working without pay. The state leased prisoners to private employers, such as Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, a subsidiary of United States Steel Corporation, which paid the state for their labor. Because the state made money, the system created incentives for the jailing of more men, who were disproportionately black. It also created a system in which treatment of prisoners received little oversight.

Extrajudicial punishment was more brutal. During the last decade of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, white vigilante mobs lynched thousands of black males, sometimes with the overt assistance of state officials, mostly within the South. No whites were charged with crimes in any of those murders. Whites were so confident of their immunity from prosecution for lynching that they not only photographed the victims, but made postcards out of the pictures.

The Ku Klux Klan, which had largely disappeared after a brief violent career in the early years of Reconstruction, reappeared in 1915. It grew mostly in industrializing cities of the South and Midwest that underwent the most rapid growth from 1910 to 1930. Social instability contributed to racial tensions from severe competition for jobs and housing. People joined KKK groups who were anxious about their place in American society, as cities were rapidly changed by a combination of industrialization, migration of blacks and whites from the rural South, and waves of increased immigration from mostly rural southern and eastern Europe.^[10]

Initially the KKK presented itself as another fraternal organization devoted to betterment of its members. The KKK's revival was inspired in part by the movie Birth of a Nation, which glorified the earlier Klan and dramatized the racist stereotypes concerning blacks of that era. The Klan focused on political mobilization, which allowed it to gain power in states such as Indiana, on a platform that combined racism with anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic and anti-union rhetoric, but also supported lynching. It reached its peak of membership and influence about 1925, declining rapidly afterward as opponents mobilized.^[11]

Republicans repeatedly introduced bills in the House to make lynching a federal crime, but they were defeated by the Southern block. In 1920 the Republicans made an anti-lynching bill part of their platform and achieved passage in the House by a wide margin. Southern Democrats in the Senate repeatedly filibustered the bill to prevent a vote, and defeated it in the 1922, 1923 and 1924 sessions as they held the rest of the legislative program hostage.

Segregated economic life and education[link]

Besides excluding blacks from equal participation in many areas of public life, white society also kept blacks in a position of economic subservience or marginality. After widespread losses from crops from disease and land from financial failures in the late 19th c., black farmers in the South by the early 20th century worked in virtual economic bondage as sharecroppers or tenant farmers. In Mississippi particularly, many blacks had become landowners before the financial failures of the late 19th century. Employers and labor unions generally restricted African Americans to the worst paid and least desirable jobs. Because of the lack of steady, well-paid jobs, relatively undistinguished positions, such as those with the Pullman Porter or as hotel doorman, became prestigious positions in black communities in the North. The expansion of railroads meant that they recruited in the South for laborers, and tens of thousands of blacks moved North to work with the Pennsylvania Railroad, for example, during the period of the Great Migration.

The Jim Crow system that excluded African Americans from many areas of economic life led to creation of a vigorous, but stunted economic life within the segregated sphere. Black newspapers sprang up throughout the North, while black owners of insurance and funeral establishments, and other services for blacks, acquired disproportionate influence as both economic and political leaders.

This period saw the maturing of independent black churches, whose leaders were usually also strong community leaders. Blacks had left white churches and the Southern Baptist Convention to set up their own churches free of white supervision immediately during and after the American Civil War. With the help of northern associations, they quickly began to set up state conventions and, by 1895, joined several associations into the black National Baptist Convention, the first of that denomination among blacks. In addition, independent black denominations, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church and AME Zion Church, had made hundreds of thousands of converts in the South, founding AME churches across the region. The churches were centers of community activity, especially organizing for education.

Continuing to see education as the primary route of advancement and critical for the race, many talented blacks went into teaching, which had high respect as a profession. Segregated schools for blacks were underfunded in the South and ran on shortened schedules in rural areas. Despite segregation, in Washington, DC by contrast, as Federal employees, black and white teachers were paid on the same scale. Outstanding black teachers in the North received advanced degrees and taught in highly regarded schools, which trained the next generation of leaders in cities such as Chicago, Washington, and New York, whose black populations had increased in the 20th century due to the Great Migration.

Education was one of the major achievements of the black community in the 19th century. Blacks in Reconstruction governments had supported the establishment of public education in every Southern state. Despite the difficulties, with the enormous eagerness of freedmen for education, by 1900 the African-American community had trained and put to work 30,000 African-American teachers in the South. In addition, a majority of the black population had achieved literacy.^[12] Not all the teachers had a full 4-year college degree in those years, but the shorter terms of normal schools were part of the system of teacher training in both the North and the South to serve the many new communities across the frontier. African-American teachers got many children and adults started on education.

Northern alliances had helped fund normal schools and colleges to teach African-American teachers, as well as create other professional classes. The American Missionary Association, supported largely by the Congregational and Presbyterian churches, had helped fund and staff numerous private schools and colleges in the South, who collaborated with black communities to train generations of teachers and other leaders. Major 20th-century industrialists, such as George Eastman of Rochester, New York, acted as philanthropists and made substantial donations to black educational institutions such as Tuskegee Institute.

In 1862, the US Congress passed the Morrill Act, which established federal funding of a land grant college in each state, but 17 states refused to admit black students to their land grant colleges. In response, Congress enacted the second Morrill Act of 1890, which required states that excluded blacks from their existing land grant colleges to open separate institutions and to equitably divide the funds between the schools. The colleges founded in response to the second Morill Act became today's public historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and, together with the private HBCUs and the unsegregated colleges in the North and West, provided higher educational opportunities to African Americans. Federally funded extension agents from the land grant colleges spread knowledge about scientific agriculture and home economics to rural communities with agents from the HBCUs focusing on black farmers and families.

In the 19th century, blacks formed fraternal organizations across the South and the North, including an increasing number of women's clubs. They created and supported institutions that increased education, health and welfare for black communities. After the turn of the 19th to 20th century, black men and women also began to found their own college fraternities and sororities to create additional networks for lifelong service and collaboration.^[13] These were part of the new organizations that strengthened independent community life under segregation.

The Black church[link]

As the center of community life, Black churches were integral leaders and organizers in the Civil Rights Movement. Their history as a focal point for the Black community and as a link between the Black and White worlds made them natural for this purpose. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was but one of many notable Black ministers involved in the movement. Ralph David Abernathy, Bernard Lee, Fred Shuttlesworth, and C.T. Vivian are among the many notable minister-activists.^[14] They were especially important during the later years of the movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Niagara Movement and the founding of the NAACP[link]

At the turn of the 19th to 20th century, Booker T. Washington was regarded, particularly by the white community, as the foremost spokesman for African Americans in the U. S. Washington, who led the Tuskegee Institute, preached a message of self-reliance. He urged blacks to concentrate on improving their economic position rather than demanding social equality until they had proved that they "deserved" it. Publicly, he accepted the continuation of Jim Crow and segregation in the short term, but privately helped to fund national court cases that challenged the laws.

W. E. B. Du Bois and others in the black community rejected Washington's apology for segregation. One of his close associates, Monroe Trotter, was arrested after challenging Washington when he came to deliver a speech in Boston in 1905. Later that year Du Bois and Trotter convened a meeting of black activists on the Canadian side of the river at Niagara Falls. They issued a manifesto calling for universal manhood suffrage, elimination of all forms of racial segregation and extension of education—not limited to the vocational education that Washington emphasized—on a nondiscriminatory basis.

Du Bois joined with other black leaders and white activists, such as Mary White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villard, William English Walling, Henry Moskowitz, Julius Rosenthal, Lillian Wald, Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch, and Stephen Wise to create the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. W. E. B. Du Bois also became editor of its magazine The Crisis. In its early years, the NAACP concentrated on using the courts to attack Jim Crow laws and disfranchising constitutional provisions. It successfully challenged the Louisville, Kentucky ordinance that required residential segregation in Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60 (1917). It also gained a Supreme Court ruling striking down Oklahoma's ‘grandfather clause’ that exempted most illiterate white voters from a law that disfranchised African-American citizens in Guinn v. United States (1915).

The NAACP lobbied against President Woodrow Wilson's introduction of racial segregation into Federal government employment and offices in 1913. They lobbied for commissioning of African Americans as officers in World War I. In 1915 the NAACP organized public education and protests in cities across the nation against D.W. Griffith's silent film Birth of a Nation, a film that glamorized the Ku Klux Klan. Some cities refused to allow the film to open.

The American Jewish community and the civil rights movement[link]

Many from the American Jewish community tacitly or actively supported the civil rights movement. Several of the co-founders of the NAACP were Jewish. Many of its white members and leading activists came from within the Jewish community. The great majority of American Jews who were active in promoting civil rights were secular Jews, Reform Jews and Conservative Jews, especially during the later years.^{[citation needed]}

Jewish philanthropists actively supported the NAACP and various civil rights group, and schools for African Americans. The Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald funded the creation of dozens of primary schools, secondary schools and colleges for segregated black youth. In partnership with Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee University, Rosenwald created a fund which provided seed money for building 5,000 schools for black Americans, mostly in the rural South. Tuskegee architects created model school plans. What is most remarkable is that black communities essentially taxed themselves twice to pay for such schools, which required community matching funds. Often most of the residents in rural areas were blacks. Public funds were committed for the schools, and blacks raised additional funds by community events, and sometimes by members' getting second mortgages on their homes. At one time some forty percent of rural southern blacks were learning at Rosenwald elementary schools.^[15]

Rosenwald also contributed to HBCUs such as Howard, Dillard and Fisk universities.

The PBS television show From Swastika to Jim Crow discussed Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement. It recounted that Jewish scholars fleeing from or surviving the Holocaust of World War II came to teach at many Southern schools, where they reached out to black students:

Thus, in the 1930s and 1940s when Jewish refugee professors arrived at Southern Black Colleges, there was a history of overt empathy between Blacks and Jews, and the possibility of truly effective collaboration. Professor Ernst Borinski organized dinners at which Blacks and Whites would have to sit next to each other — a simple yet revolutionary act. Black students empathized with the cruelty these scholars had endured in Europe and trusted them more than other Whites. In fact, often Black students — as well as members of the Southern White community — saw these refugees as "some kind of colored folk."^[16]

The American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, and Anti-Defamation League became active in promoting civil rights.

"The New Negro"[link]

The experience of fighting as part of World War I, along with exposure to the different racial mores of Europe, influenced the black veterans; they created a widespread demand for the freedoms and equality they had fought for abroad. Those veterans found conditions at home as bad as ever; some were assaulted for having the impertinence of wearing their uniforms. This generation responded with a far more militant spirit than the generation before, urging blacks to fight back when whites attacked them. A. Philip Randolph introduced the term the "New Negro" in 1917; it became the catchphrase to describe the new spirit of militancy and impatience of the post-war era.

A group known as the African Blood Brotherhood, a socialist group with a large number of Caribbean émigrés in its leadership, organized around 1920 to demand the same sort of self-determination for black Americans that the Wilson administration was promising to Eastern European peoples at the Versailles conference in the aftermath of World War I. The leaders of the Brotherhood, many of whom joined the Communist Party in the years to come, were also inspired by the anti-imperialist program of the new Soviet Union.

In addition, during the Great Migration, hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved to northern industrial cities starting before World War I and through 1940. Another wave of migration during and after World War II led many to West Coast cities, as well as more in the North and Midwest. They were both fleeing violence and segregation and seeking jobs, as manpower shortages in war industries promised steady work. Continued depressed conditions in the farm economy of the South in the 1920s made the north look more appealing. Those expanding northern communities confronted familiar problems—racism, poverty, police abuse and official hostility— but these were in a new setting, where the men could vote (and women, too, after 1920), and possibilities for political action were far broader than in the South.

Marcus Garvey and the UNIA[link]

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Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association made great strides in organizing in these new communities in the North, and among the internationalist-minded "New Negro" movement in the early 1920s. Garvey's program pointed in the opposite direction from mainstream civil rights organizations such as the NAACP; instead of striving for integration into white-dominated society, Garvey's program of Pan Africanism has become known as Garveyism. It encourages economic independence within the system of racial segregation in the United States, an African Orthodox Church with a black Jesus and black Virgin Mother that offered an alternative to the white Jesus of the black church, and a campaign that urged African Americans to "return to Africa", if not physically, at least in spirit. Garvey attracted thousands of supporters, both in the United States and in the African diaspora in the Caribbean, and claimed eleven million members for the UNIA, which was broadly popular in Northern black communities.

Garvey's movement was a contradictory mix of defeatism, accommodation and separatism: he married themes of self-reliance that Booker T. Washington could have endorsed and the "gospel of success" so popular in white America in the 1920s with a rejection of white colonialism abroad and any hope of reform of white society at home. The movement at first attracted many of the foreign-born radicals also associated with the Socialist and Communist parties, but drove many of them away when Garvey began to suspect them of challenging his control.

The movement collapsed nearly as quickly as it blossomed, as the federal government convicted Garvey for mail fraud in 1922 in connection with the movement's financially troubled "Black Star Line". The government commuted Garvey's sentence and deported Garvey to his native Jamaica in 1927. While the movement floundered without him, it inspired other self-help and separatist movements that followed, including Father Divine and the Nation of Islam.

The Labor movement and civil rights[link]

The labor movement, with some exceptions, had historically excluded African Americans. While the radical labor organizers who led organizing drives among packinghouse workers in Chicago and Kansas City during World War I and the steel industry in 1919 made determined efforts to appeal to black workers, they were not able to overcome the widespread distrust of the labor movement among black workers in the North. With the ultimate defeat of both of those organizing drives, the black community and the labor movement largely returned to their traditional mutual mistrust.

Left-wing political activists in the labor movement made some progress in the 1920s and 1930s, however, in bridging that gap. A. Phillip Randolph, a long-time member of the Socialist Party of America, took the leadership of the fledgling Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters at its founding in 1925. Randolph and the union faced opposition not only from the Pullman Company, but from the press and churches within the black community, many of whom were the beneficiaries of financial support from the company. The union eventually won over many of its critics in the black community by wedding its organizing program with the larger goal of black empowerment. The union won recognition from the Pullman Company in 1935 after a ten-year campaign, and a union contract in 1937.

The BSCP became the only black-led union within the American Federation of Labor in 1935. Randolph chose to remain within the AFL when the Congress of Industrial Organizations split from it. The CIO was much more committed to organizing African-American workers and made strenuous efforts to persuade the BSCP to join it, but Randolph believed more could be done to advance black workers' rights, particularly in the railway industry, by remaining in the AFL, to which the other railway brotherhoods belonged. Randolph remained the voice for black workers within the labor movement, raising demands for elimination of Jim Crow unions within the AFL at every opportunity. BSCP members such as Edgar Nixon played a significant role in the civil rights struggles of the following decades.

Many of the CIO unions, in particular the Packinghouse Workers, the United Auto Workers and the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers made advocacy of civil rights part of their organizing strategy and bargaining priorities: they gained improvements for workers in meatpacking in Chicago and Omaha, and in the steel and related industries throughout the Midwest. The Transport Workers Union of America, which had strong ties with the Communist Party at the time, entered into coalitions with Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the NAACP and the National Negro Congress to attack employment discrimination in public transit in New York City in the early 1940s.

The CIO was particularly vocal in calling for elimination of racial discrimination by defense industries during World War II; they were also forced to combat racism within their own membership, putting down strikes by white workers who refused to work with black co-workers. While many of these "hate strikes" were short-lived: a wildcat strike launched in Philadelphia in 1944 when the federal government ordered the private transit company to desegregate its workforce lasted two weeks and was ended only when the Roosevelt administration sent troops to guard the system and arrested the strike's ringleaders.

Randolph and the BSCP took the battle against employment discrimination even further, threatening a March on Washington in 1942 if the government did not take steps to outlaw racial discrimination by defense contractors. Randolph limited the March on Washington Movement to black organizations to maintain black leadership; he endured harsh criticism from others on the left for his insistence on black workers' rights in the middle of a war. Randolph only dropped the plan to march after winning substantial concessions from the Roosevelt administration.

The Left and civil rights[link]

See The Communist Party and African-Americans.

The Scottsboro Boys[link]

In 1931, the NAACP and the Communist Party USA also organized support for the "Scottsboro Boys", nine black men arrested after a fight with some white men also riding the rails, then convicted and sentenced to death for allegedly raping two white women dressed in men's clothes later found on the same train. The NAACP and the CP fought over the control of those cases and the strategy to be pursued; the CP and its arm the International Labor Defense largely prevailed. The ILD's legal campaign produced two significant Supreme Court decisions (Powell v. Alabama and Norris v. Alabama) extending the rights of defendants; its political campaign saved all the defendants from the death sentence and ultimately led to freedom for most of them.

The Scottsboro defense was only one of the ILD's many cases in the South; for a period in the early and mid-1930s, the ILD was the most active defender of blacks' civil rights, and the Communist Party attracted many members among activist African Americans. Its campaigns for black defendants' rights did much to focus national attention on the extreme conditions which black defendants faced in the criminal justice system throughout the South.

The NAACP[link]

The NAACP devoted much of its energy between the first and second world wars to fighting the lynching of blacks and investigating the serious race riots in numerous cities throughout the United States in what was called the "Red Summer" of 1919, resulting from postwar economic and social tensions. The organization sent Walter F. White, who later became its general secretary, to Phillips County, Arkansas in October 1919 to investigate the Elaine Race Riot. In that year, it was unusual for being a rural riot: more than 200 black tenant farmers were killed by roving white vigilantes and federal troops after a deputy sheriff's attack on a union meeting of sharecroppers left one white man dead. The NAACP organized the appeals for twelve men sentenced to death a month later, based on their testimony having been obtained by beating and electric shocks. They obtained a groundbreaking Supreme Court decision in Moore v. Dempsey, 261 U.S. 86 (1923) that significantly expanded the Federal courts' oversight of the states' criminal justice systems in the years to come.

The NAACP also spent more than a decade seeking federal legislation barring lynching. It regularly displayed a black flag stating "A Man Was Lynched Yesterday" from the window of its offices in New York to mark each outrage. Efforts to pass an ant-lynching law foundered on Southern Democratic power in Congress. For instance, while Republicans achieved passage in the House of an anti-lynching law in 1922, Southern Democratic senators filibustered the bill in the Senate and defeated it in the 1922, 1923 and 1924 legislative sessions. The Southern Democratic block controlled important chairmanships in both houses of Congress and defeated all lynching legislative proposals.

The NAACP led the successful fight, in alliance with the American Federation of Labor, to prevent the nomination of John Johnston Parker to the Supreme Court. They opposed him because of his opposition to black suffrage and his anti-labor rulings. This alliance and lobbying campaign were important for the NAACP, both in demonstrating the NAACP's ability to mobilize widespread opposition to racism and as a first step toward building political alliances with the labor movement.

After World War II, returning African-American veterans were spurred by their sacrifices and experiences to renew demands for the protection and exercise of their constitutional rights as citizens in US society. One serviceman reportedly said,t "I spent four years in the Army to free a bunch of Dutchmen and Frenchmen, and I'm hanged if I'm going to let the Alabama version of the Germans kick me around when I get home. No sirree-bob! I went into the Army a nigger; I'm comin' out a man."^[17] From 1940 to 1946, the NAACP's membership grew from 50,000 to 450,000.^[17]

The NAACP's legal department, headed by Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, undertook a campaign spanning several decades to bring about the reversal of the "separate but equal" doctrine announced by the Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. Instead of appealing to the legislative or executive branches of government, they focused on the judiciary, reasoning that Congress was dominated by Southern segregationists, while the Presidency could not afford to lose the Southern vote.^[17] The NAACP's first cases did not challenge the principle directly, but sought instead to show that the state's segregated facilities were not equal.

Even those more modest goals helped lay the foundation for the ultimate reversal of the doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson by showing the irrational nature of the distinctions that the states drew to preserve segregation and the humiliating impact it had on the black subjects of "separate but equal" treatment. The Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), holding that state-sponsored segregation of elementary schools was unconstitutional, was a first step in dismantling segregation in the South. It was a historic milestone in reframing the national debate over segregation by putting state-sponsored discrimination beyond constitutional defense.

Marshall eventually decided to go beyond the initial aims of the NAACP, thinking that the time had come to do away with "separate but equal". The NAACP issued a directive stating that their goal was now "obtaining education on a nonsegregated basis and that no relief other than that will be acceptable." The first case Marshall argued on this basis was Briggs v. Elliott, but cases were also filed in other states. In Topeka, Kansas, the local NAACP branch determined that Oliver Brown would be a good candidate for filing a lawsuit; as an assistant pastor and the father of three girls, he was an ideal candidate. The NAACP instructed him to apply to enroll his daughters at a local white school; after the expected rejection, Brown v. Board of Education was filed. Later, this and several other cases made their way to the Supreme Court, where they were all consolidated under the title of Brown. The decision to name the case was apparently made "so that the whole question would not smack of being a purely southern one."^[17]

Some in the NAACP thought Marshall was being too enthusiastic, fearing that the Southern judge, Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, who would almost certainly oppose overruling Plessy, could destroy their case. One historian stated: "There was a sense that if you do this and you lose, you're going to enshrine Plessy for a generation." A government lawyer involved in the case agreed that it was "a mistake to push for the overruling of segregation per se so long as Vinson was chief justice — it was too early." In December 1952, the Supreme Court heard the case, but could not come to a decision. Unusually, the case was pushed back by a year to allow the lawyers involved to research the intention of the framers who drafted the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. In September 1953, Vinson died due to a heart attack, leading Justice Felix Frankfurter to proclaim: "This is the first indication I have ever had that there is a God." Vinson was replaced by Earl Warren, who was known for his moderate views on civil rights.^[18]

After the case was reheard in December, Warren set about persuading his colleagues to reach a unanimous decision overruling Plessy. Five of the other eight judges were firmly on his side, while another two were persuaded by Warren's promise that the decision would not touch greatly on the question of Plessy's legality, focusing instead on the principle of equality. The remaining holdout, Justice Stanley Reed, was swayed after it was suggested that a Southerner's lone dissent could be more dangerous and incendiary than a unanimous decision. In May 1954, Warren announced the Court's decision, authored by him, which declared that "segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race" deprived "the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities".

The decision was strongly resisted by a number of Southerners; the Governor of Virginia, Thomas B. Stanley, insisted he would "use every legal means at my command to continue segregated schools in Virginia." One survey suggested that only 13% of Florida policemen were willing to enforce the decision in Brown; while 19 Senators and 77 members of the House of Representatives, including the entire congressional delegations of the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia, signed "The Southern Manifesto", all but two of the signatories were Southern Democrats: Republicans Joel Broyhill and Richard Poff of Virginia also promised to resist the decision by "lawful means". By the fall of 1955, Cheryl Brown started first grade at an integrated school — the first step on the long road to eventual equality for African Americans.^[19]

The Regional Council of Negro Leadership: Laying a Civil Rights Foundation[link]

On December 28, 1951, T.R.M. Howard, an entrepreneur, surgeon, fraternal leader and planter in Mississippi, founded the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL) along with other key blacks in the state. At first the RCNL, which was based in the all-black town of Mound Bayou, did not directly challenge "separate but equal" (much like the initial stance of the Montgomery Improvement Association), but worked to guarantee the "equal." It often identified inadequate schools as the primary factor responsible for the black exodus to the North. Instead of demanding immediate integration, however, it called for equal school terms for both races. From the beginning, the RCNL also pledged an "all-out fight for unrestricted voting rights."^[20]

The Board of RCNL represented some of the key black business, fraternal, agricultural, educational, and governmental leaders in the state. Sixteen relatively autonomous committees, each headed by a respected leader in business, education, the church, or the professions, formed the backbone of the RCNL. The committees, in turn, reported to an executive board and board of directors headed by Howard.^[20]

The RCNL's most famous member was Medgar Evers. Fresh from graduation at Alcorn State University in 1952, he had moved to Mound Bayou to sell insurance for Howard. Evers soon became the RCNL's program director and helped to organize a boycott of service stations that failed to provide restrooms for blacks. As part of this campaign, the RCNL distributed an estimated 20,000 bumper stickers with the slogan “Don’t Buy Gas Where You Can’t Use the Rest Room." Beginning in 1953, it directly challenged "separate but equal" and demanded integration of schools.^[20]

The RCNL’s annual meetings in Mound Bayou between 1952 and 1955 attracted crowds of ten thousand or more. They featured speeches by Rep. William L. Dawson of Chicago, Rep. Charles Diggs of Michigan, Alderman Archibald J. Carey Jr. of Chicago, and NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall. Each of these events, in the words of Myrlie Evers, later Myrlie Evers-Williams, the wife of Medgar, constituted "a huge all-day camp meeting: a combination of pep rally, old-time revival, and Sunday church picnic." The conferences also included panels and workshops on voting rights, business ownership, and other issues. Attendance was a life-transforming experience for many future civil black leaders who became prominent in the 1960s, such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Amzie Moore, Aaron Henry and George W. Lee.

The RCNL also played a key role in the search for witnesses and evidence in the Emmett Till murder case in late 1955, and Howard spoke at many rallies throughout the country in the aftermath of the trial.

On November 27, 1955, Rosa Parks attended one of these speeches at Dexter Avenue Church in Montgomery. The host for this event was a then relatively unknown Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Parks later said that she was thinking of Till when she refused to give up her seat four days later.^[20]

See also[link]

	African American portal
	Social movements portal

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: History of civil rights in the United States

• African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955–1968)
• List of 19th-century African-American civil rights activists
• Nadir of American race relations
• African-American history
• Timeline of the African American Civil Rights Movement
• Timeline of racial tension in Omaha, Nebraska

References[link]

This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (April 2009)

Further reading[link]

• Bates, Beth Tompkins, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1929–1945, 2001 ISBN 0-8078-2614-6.
• Carson, Clayborne; Garrow, David J.; Kovach, Bill; Polsgrove, Carol, eds. Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1941–1963 and Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1963–1973. New York: Library of America, 2003. ISBN 1-931082-28-6 and ISBN 1-931082-29-4.
• Danenhower Wilson, Ruth, “Jim Crow Joins Up: A study of Negroes in the Armed Forces of the United States," (W.J. Clark, revised edition, 1945).
• Dagbovie, Pero Gaglo, “Exploring a Century of Historical Scholarship on Booker T. Washington,” Journal of African American History, 92 (Spring 2007), 239–64.
• Egerton, John, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994). ISBN 0-679-40808-8.
• Kluger, Richard, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality (1975; New York, Vintage Books, 1976). ISBN 0-394-72255-8.
• Nahal, Anita, and Lopez D. Matthews Jr., “African American Women and the Niagara Movement, 1905–1909,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, 32 (July 2008), 65–85.
• Parker, Christopher S., “When Politics Becomes Protest: Black Veterans and Political Activism in the Postwar South,” Journal of Politics, 71 (January 2009), 113–31.
• Sitkoff, Harvard. "Harry Truman and the Election of 1948: The Coming of Age of Civil Rights in American Politics," Journal of Southern History Vol. 37, No. 4 (Nov., 1971), pp. 597–616 in JSTOR

External links[link]

• Civil Rights Resource Guide, from the Library of Congress
• What Was Jim Crow? (The racial caste system that precipitated the Civil Rights Movement)
• Civil Rights – Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism
• Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project
• Texas Politics – Historical Barriers to Voting, University of Texas
• Integrating with All Deliberate Speed--contains video history interviews with African American Civil Rights pioneers, a timeline of the Civil Rights Movement and primary source materials (photographs, speeches, historical documents).
• African-American History: The Modern Freedom Struggle – course lecture videos from Stanford University

Mitt Romney
70th Governor of Massachusetts
In office January 2, 2003 – January 4, 2007
Lieutenant	Kerry Healey
Preceded by	Jane Swift (Acting)
Succeeded by	Deval Patrick
Personal details
Born	Willard Mitt Romney (1947-03-12) March 12, 1947 (age 65) Detroit, Michigan, U.S.
Political party	Republican
Spouse(s)	Ann Romney (m. 1969) «start: (1969)»"Marriage: Ann Romney to Mitt Romney" Location: (linkback:http://en-wiki.pop.wn.com/index.php/Mitt_Romney)
Children	Taggart (b. 1970) Matthew (b. 1971) Joshua (b. 1975) Benjamin (b. 1978) Craig (b. 1981)
Residence	Belmont, Massachusetts Wolfeboro, New Hampshire San Diego, California
Alma mater	Brigham Young University (BA) Harvard University (MBA, JD)
Religion	The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon)
Positions	Co-founder, Bain Capital (1984–1999) CEO, Bain & Company (1991–1992) CEO, 2002 Winter Olympics Organizing Committee (1999–2002)
Signature
Website	MittRomney.com

	This article is part of a series about Mitt Romney	Mitt Romney
2012 Presidential campaign 2008 Presidential campaign Governor of Massachusetts, 2003–2007 1994 U.S. Senate election Political positions · Electoral history Public image

Willard Mitt Romney (born March 12, 1947) is an American businessman and the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party for President of the United States in the 2012 election. He was the 70th Governor of Massachusetts (2003–07).

The son of Lenore and George W. Romney (Governor of Michigan, 1963–69), he was raised in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. In 1966, after one year at Stanford University, he left the United States to spend thirty months in France as a Mormon missionary. In 1969, he married Ann Davies, and the couple had five children together. In 1971, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Brigham Young University and, in 1975, a joint Juris Doctor and Master of Business Administration from Harvard University as a Baker Scholar. He entered the management consulting industry, which in 1977, led to a position at Bain & Company. Later serving as Chief Executive Officer, he helped bring the company out of financial crisis. In 1984, he co-founded the spin-off Bain Capital, a private equity investment firm that became highly profitable and one of the largest such firms in the nation. His net worth is estimated at $190–250 million, wealth that has helped fund his political campaigns. Active in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he served as Ward Bishop and later Stake President in his area near Boston. He ran as the Republican candidate in the 1994 U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts, losing to long-time incumbent Ted Kennedy. In 1999, he was hired as President and CEO of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics and Paralympics; and he helped turn the fiscally troubled games into a success.

He was elected Governor of Massachusetts in 2002 but did not seek re-election in 2006. During his term he presided over a series of spending cuts and increases in fees that eliminated a projected $1.5 billion deficit. He also signed into law the Massachusetts health care reform legislation, the first of its kind in the nation, which provided near-universal health insurance access via state-level subsidies and individual mandates.

Romney ran for the Republican nomination in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, winning several primaries and caucuses but losing the nomination to John McCain. In the following years, he gave speeches and raised campaign funds on behalf of his fellow Republicans. In June 2011, he announced that he would seek the 2012 Republican presidential nomination; as of May 2012, he has won enough caucuses and primaries to become the party's presumptive nominee.

Early life and education[link]

Heritage and youth[link]

Willard Mitt Romney^[1] was born at Harper Hospital in Detroit, Michigan,^[2] the youngest child of George W. Romney, a self-made man who by 1948 had become an automobile executive, and Lenore Romney (née LaFount), an aspiring actress turned homemaker.^[3][4][5] His mother was a native of Logan, Utah, and his father was born in a Mormon colony in Chihuahua, Mexico, to American parents.^[6][7] He is of primarily English descent, and also has more distant Scottish and German ancestry.^[8][9][10] He is a fifth-generation member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church).^[11][12] A great-great-grandfather, Miles Romney, converted to the faith in its first decade, and another great-great-grandfather, Parley P. Pratt, was an early leader in the church during the same time.^[13]

He was preceded in birth by three siblings: Margo Lynn, Jane LaFount, and G. Scott. Mitt followed after a gap of nearly six years. He was named after family friend, hotel magnate J. Willard Marriott, and his father's cousin Milton "Mitt" Romney, a former quarterback for the Chicago Bears.^{[14][nb 1]} In 1953, the family moved from Detroit to the affluent suburb of Bloomfield Hills.^[16] In 1954, his father became the chairmen and CEO of American Motors, a company he helped avoid bankruptcy, and return to profitability.^[16] By the time Mitt was twelve, his father had become a nationally known figure in print and on television,^[17] and Mitt idolized him.^[18]

Mitt Romney began attending Cranbrook School in the seventh grade.

He attended public elementary schools^[15] until the seventh grade, when he began commuting to Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, a traditional private boys' preparatory school where he was one of only a few Mormons and where many students came from backgrounds even more privileged than he.^[19][20] He was not particularly athletic and at first did not excel academically.^[18] During his sophomore year he participated in the 1962 campaign in which his father was elected Governor of Michigan.^{[nb 2]} When his parents moved to the state capitol as part of George Romney taking office, Mitt took up residence at Cranbrook's Stevens Hall.^[19] George Romney was re-elected twice; Mitt worked for him as an intern in the governor's office, and was present at the 1964 Republican National Convention when his moderate father battled conservative party nominee Barry Goldwater over issues of civil rights and ideological extremism.^[18][22] During these years, Romney had a steady set of chores and summer jobs, including working as a security guard at a Chrysler plant.^[23]

At Cranbrook he was a manager for the ice hockey team and a member of the pep squad,^[19] and during his final year joined the cross country running team.^[15] He belonged to eleven school organizations and school clubs, and started the Blue Key Club boosters group.^[19] During his final year at Cranbook, Romney improved academically, but was still not a star pupil.^[18][20] He won an award for those "whose contributions to school life are often not fully recognized through already existing channels".^[20] Romney was involved in many pranks.^{[nb 3]}

In March of his senior year, he began dating Ann Davies, two years his younger, whom he had first met in elementary school; she attended the private Kingswood School, the sister school to Cranbrook.^[27][20] The two informally agreed to marriage around the time of his June 1965 graduation.^[18]

University, France mission, marriage and children: 1965–1975[link]

Romney attended Stanford University for a year,^{[18][nb 4]} where he worked as a night security guard in order to pay for trips home to see Ann.^[28] Although the campus was becoming radicalized with the beginnings of 1960s social and political movements, he kept a well-groomed appearance and participated in pre-Big Game actions designed to protect the Stanford Axe.^[18] In May 1966, he was part of a counter-protest against a group staging a sit-in in the university administration building in opposition to draft status tests.^[18][29]

In July 1966, he left for a thirty-month stay in France as a Mormon missionary,^[18][31] a traditional rite of passage that his father and many other relatives had volunteered for.^{[nb 5]} He arrived in Le Havre with ideas about how to change and promote the French Mission, while facing physical and economic deprivation in their cramped quarters.^[33][13] Rules against drinking, smoking, and dating were strictly enforced.^[13] Most individual Mormon missionaries do not gain many converts,^[35] and Romney was no exception:^[33] he later estimated ten to twenty for his entire mission.^[36] The nominally Catholic but secular, wine-loving French people were especially resistant to a religion that prohibits alcohol.^[18][13][30] He became demoralized, and later recalled it as the only time when "most of what I was trying to do was rejected."^[33] In Nantes, he suffered a bruised jaw while defending two female missionaries who were being bothered by a group of local rugby players.^[13] He continued to work hard; having grown up in Michigan rather than the more insular Utah world, Romney was better able to interact with the French than other missionaries.^[37][13] He was promoted to zone leader in Bordeaux in early 1968, then in the spring of that year became assistant to the mission president in Paris, the highest position for a missionary.^[33][13][38] In the Mission Home in Paris he enjoyed palace-like accommodations.^[38] Romney's support for the U.S. role in the Vietnam War was only reinforced when the French greeted him with hostility over the matter and he debated them in return.^[13][33] He witnessed the May 1968 general strike and student uprisings and was upset by the breakdown in social order.^[39]

In June 1968, an automobile he was driving in southern France was hit by another vehicle, seriously injuring him and killing one of his passengers, the wife of the mission president.^{[nb 6]} Romney, who was not at fault in the accident,^{[nb 6]} became co-acting president of a mission demoralized and disorganized by the May civil disturbances and by the car accident.^[37] He rallied and motivated the others and they met an ambitious goal of 200 baptisms for the year, the most for the mission in a decade.^[37] By the end of his stint in December 1968, he was overseeing the work of 175 fellow members.^[33][40] Romney developed a lifelong affection for France and its people, and speaks French.^[42] The experience in the country instilled in him a belief that life is fragile and that he needed seriousness of purpose.^[18][37][13] It also represented a crucible, after having been an indifferent Mormon growing up: "On a mission, your faith in Jesus Christ either evaporates or it becomes much deeper ... For me it became much deeper."^[33]

While he was away, Ann Davies had converted to the Mormon faith, guided by George Romney, and had begun attending Brigham Young University (BYU).^[18] Mitt was nervous that she had been wooed by others while he was away, and she had indeed started dating popular campus figure Kim S. Cameron and had sent Romney in France a "Dear John letter", greatly upsetting him; he wrote to her to in an attempt to win her back.^[43][15] At their first meeting following Romney's return they reconnected, and decided to get married immediately but agreed to wait three months to appease their parents.^[44] At Ann's request, Romney began attending Brigham Young too, in February 1969.^{[43][nb 4]} The couple were married on March 21, 1969, in a civil ceremony at Ann's family's home in Bloomfield Hills that was presided over by a church elder.^[46][47][48] The following day, the couple flew to Utah for a wedding ceremony at the Salt Lake Temple.^[46][47]

While Mitt attended Harvard, his father George W. Romney (pictured here with Richard M. Nixon) served as United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Romney had missed much of the tumultuous American anti-Vietnam War movement while away, and was surprised to learn that his father had turned against the effort during his unsuccessful 1968 presidential campaign.^[33] Regarding the military draft, Romney had initially received a student deferment, then, like most Mormon missionaries, a ministerial deferment while in France, and then a student deferment.^[33][49] When those ran out, his high number in the December 1969 draft lottery (300) ensured he would not be selected.^[33][49][50]

At culturally conservative BYU, he remained isolated from much of the upheaval of the era, and did not join in protests against the war, or the LDS Church's policy at the time of denying full membership to blacks.^[24][33][43] He became president of, and an innovative fundraiser for, the all-male Cougar Club booster organization and showed a new-found discipline in his studies.^[33][43] In his senior year, he took leave to work as driver and advance man for his mother Lenore Romney's eventually unsuccessful 1970 campaign for U.S. Senator from Michigan.^[24][46] He earned a Bachelor of Arts in English with highest honors in 1971,^[43] and gave commencement addresses to both the College of Humanities and to the whole of BYU.^{[nb 7]}

The Romneys' first son, Taggart, was born in 1970^[46] while they were undergraduates at Brigham Young^[52] and living in a basement apartment.^[33][43] Ann subsequently gave birth to Matt (1971), Josh (1975), Ben (1978), and Craig (1981).^[46] Her work as a homemaker would enable her husband to pursue his career.^[53]

Romney still wanted to pursue a business path, but his father, by now serving in President Richard Nixon's cabinet as U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, advised him that a law degree would be valuable to his career.^[54][55] Thus he became one of only fifteen students to enroll at the recently created joint Juris Doctor/Master of Business Administration four-year program coordinated between Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School.^[56] Fellow students considered him guilelessly optimistic, noting his solid work ethic and buttoned-down demeanor and appearance.^[56][57] He readily adapted to the business school's pragmatic, data-driven case study method of teaching, participated in class well, and led a study group whom he pushed to get all A's.^[55] He had a different social experience from most of his classmates, since he lived in a Belmont, Massachusetts, house with Ann and two children.^[46][55] He was non-ideological and did not involve himself in the political or social issues of the day.^[46][55] He graduated in 1975 cum laude from the law school, in the top third of that class, and was named a Baker Scholar for graduating in the top five percent of his business school class.^[51][56]

Business career[link]

Management consulting[link]

Romney was recruited by several firms and chose to remain in Massachusetts to work for Boston Consulting Group (BCG), reasoning that working as a management consultant to a variety of companies would better prepare him for a future position as a chief executive.^{[54][58][nb 8]} He was part of a 1970s wave of top graduates who chose to go into consulting rather than join a major company directly.^[60] His legal and business education proved useful in his job^[54] while he applied BCG principles such as the growth-share matrix.^[61] He was viewed as having a bright future there.^[54][62]

In 1977, he was hired away by Bain & Company, a management consulting firm in Boston that had been formed a few years earlier by Bill Bain and other former BCG employees.^[61][54][63] Bain would later say of the thirty-year-old Romney, "He had the appearance of confidence of a guy who was maybe ten years older."^[64] With Bain & Company, Romney learned what writers and business analysts have dubbed the "Bain way",^[54][63][65] which consisted of immersing the firm in each client's business,^[54][64] and not just issuing recommendations but staying with the company until changes were put into place.^[61][63][66] Romney became a vice president of the firm in 1978,^[15] and worked with clients such as the Monsanto Company, Outboard Marine Corporation, Burlington Industries, and Corning Incorporated.^[58] Within a few years, he was one of Bain & Company's best consultants and was sought after by clients over more senior partners.^[54][67]

Private equity[link]

Romney was restless for a company of his own to run, and in 1983, Bill Bain offered him the chance to head a new venture that would buy into companies, have them benefit from Bain techniques, and then reap higher rewards than consulting fees.^[54][61] He initially refrained from accepting the offer, and Bain re-arranged the terms in a complicated partnership structure so that there was no financial or professional risk to Romney.^[54][64][68] Thus, in 1984, Romney left Bain & Company to co-found the spin-off private equity investment firm, Bain Capital.^[66] In the face of skepticism from potential investors, Bain and Romney spent a year raising the $37 million in funds needed to start the new operation, which had fewer than ten employees.^[58][64][69] As general partner of the new firm, Romney spent little money on costs such as office appearance, and saw weak spots in so many potential deals that by 1986, few had been done.^[54] At first, Bain Capital focused on venture capital opportunities.^[54] Their first big success was a 1986 investment to help start Staples Inc., after founder Thomas G. Stemberg convinced Romney of the market size for office supplies and Romney convinced others; Bain Capital eventually reaped a nearly sevenfold return on its investment, and Romney sat on the Staples board of directors for over a decade.^[54][69][70]

Romney soon switched Bain Capital's focus from startups to the relatively new business of leveraged buyouts: buying existing firms with money mostly borrowed against their assets, partnering with existing management to apply the "Bain way" to their operations (rather than the hostile takeovers practiced in other leverage buyout scenarios), and selling them off in a few years.^[54][64] Existing CEOs were offered large equity stakes in the process, owing to Bain Capital's belief in the emerging agency theory that CEOs should be bound to maximizing shareholder value rather than other goals.^[70] Bain Capital lost most of its money in many of its early leveraged buyouts, but then started finding deals that made large returns.^[54] The firm invested in or acquired Accuride, Brookstone, Domino's Pizza, Sealy Corporation, Sports Authority, and Artisan Entertainment, as well as lesser-known companies in the industrial and medical sectors.^[54][64][71] He ran Bain Capital for fourteen years, during which time the firm's average annual internal rate of return on realized investments was 113 percent.^[58] Much of this profit was earned from a relatively small number of deals; Bain Capital's overall success–to–failure ratio was about even.^{[nb 9]}

Less an entrepreneur than an executive running an investment operation,^[67][72] Romney was skilled at presenting and selling the deals the company made.^[68] The firm initially gave a cut of its profits to Bain & Company, but Romney persuaded Bain to give that up.^[68] Within Bain Capital, Romney spread profits from deals widely within the firm to keep people motivated, often keeping less than ten percent for himself.^[73] Viewed as a fair manager, he received considerable loyalty from the firm's members.^[70] Romney's wary instincts were still in force at times, and he was generally data-driven and averse to risk.^[54][70] He wanted to drop a Bain Capital hedge fund that initially lost money, but other partners prevailed and it eventually gained billions.^[54] He also personally opted out of the Artisan Entertainment deal, not wanting to profit from a studio that produced R-rated films.^[54] Romney was on the board of directors of Damon Corporation, a medical testing company later found guilty of defrauding the government; Bain Capital tripled its investment before selling off the company, and the fraud was discovered by the new owners (Romney was never implicated).^[54] In some cases, Romney had little involvement with a company once acquired.^[69]

Bain Capital's leveraged buyouts sometimes led to layoffs, either soon after acquisition or later after the firm had left.^[61][68][69] How jobs added compared to those lost due to these investments and buyouts is unknown, due to a lack of records and Bain Capital's penchant for privacy on behalf of itself and its investors.^[74][75][76] In any case, maximizing the value of acquired companies and the return to Bain's investors, not job creation, was the firm's fundamental goal, as it was for most private equity operations.^[69][77] Bain Capital's acquisition of Ampad exemplified a deal where it profited handsomely from early payments and management fees, even though the subject company itself ended up going into bankruptcy.^[54][70][77] Dade Behring was another case where Bain Capital received an eightfold return on its investment, but the company itself was saddled with debt and laid off over a thousand employees before Bain Capital exited (the company subsequently went into bankruptcy, with more layoffs, before recovering and prospering).^[74] Bain was among the private equity firms that took the most fees in such cases.^[64][70]

In 1990, Romney was asked to return to Bain & Company, which was facing financial collapse.^[66] He was announced as its new CEO in January 1991^[78][79] but drew only a symbolic salary of one dollar.^[66] He managed an effort to restructure the firm's employee stock-ownership plan, real-estate deals and bank loans, while rallying the firm's thousand employees, imposing a new governing structure that included Bain and the other founding partners giving up control, and increasing fiscal transparency.^[54][58][66] Within about a year, he had led Bain & Company through a turnaround and returned the firm to profitability without further layoffs or partner defections.^[58] He turned Bain & Company over to new leadership and returned to Bain Capital in December 1992.^[54][79][80]

Romney took a leave of absence from Bain Capital in February 1999 to serve as the President and CEO of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Games Organizing Committee.^[54][81] By that time, Bain Capital was on its way to being one of the top private equity firms in the nation,^[68] having increased its number of partners from 5 to 18, with 115 employees overall, and $4 billion under its management.^[64][69] Bain Capital's approach of applying consulting expertise to the companies it invested in became widely copied within the private equity industry.^[25][69] Economist Steven Kaplan would later say, "[Romney] came up with a model that was very successful and very innovative and that now everybody uses."^[70]

Personal wealth[link]

In August 2001, Romney announced that he would not return to Bain Capital.^[81] He transferred his ownership to other partners and negotiated an agreement that allowed him to receive a passive profit share as a retired partner in some Bain Capital entities, including buyout and investment funds.^[73][82] Because the private equity business continued to thrive, this deal brought him millions of dollars in annual income.^[73] As a result of his business career, by 2007, Romney and his wife had a net worth of between $190 and $250 million, most of it held in blind trusts since 2003.^[82] In 2012, it was estimated that he had amassed twice the net worth of the last eight presidents combined,^[83] and would rank among the four richest in American history if elected.^[83][84]

An additional blind trust existed in the name of the Romneys' children and grandchildren that was valued at between $70 and $100 million as of 2007.^[85] The couple's net worth remained in the same range as of 2011, and was still held in blind trusts.^[86] In 2010, Romney and his wife received $21.7 million in income, almost all of it from investments, of which about $3 million went to federal income taxes (a rate of 13.9 percent, based upon the beneficial rate accorded investment income by the U.S. tax code) and almost $3 million to charity, including $1.5 million to the LDS Church.^[87] Romney has always tithed to the church, including stock from Bain Capital holdings.^[13][88][89] In 2010, the Romney family's Tyler Charitable Foundation gave out about $650,000, with some of it going to organizations that fight specific diseases such as cystic fibrosis and multiple sclerosis.^[90]

Local LDS Church leadership[link]

During his years in business, Romney also served in the local lay clergy (consisting of all Mormon men over the age of 12).^[13] Around 1977, he became a counselor to the president of the Boston Stake.^[91] He later served as bishop of the ward (leader of the congregation) at Belmont, Massachusetts, from 1981 to 1986, acting as the ecclesiastical and administrative head of his congregation.^[92][93] As such, in addition to home teaching, he also formulated Sunday services and classes using LDS scriptures to guide the congregation.^[94] He forged bonds with other religious institutions in the area when the Belmont meetinghouse was destroyed by a fire of suspicious origins in 1984; the congregation rotated its meetings to other houses of worship while it was rebuilt.^[88][93]

From 1986 to 1994, he presided over the Boston Stake, which included more than a dozen wards in eastern Massachusetts with about 4,000 church members altogether.^[67][94][95] He organized a team to handle financial and management issues, sought to counter anti-Mormon sentiments, and tried to solve social problems among poor Southeast Asian converts.^[88][93] An unpaid position, his local church leadership often took 30 or more hours a week of his time,^[94] and he became known for his tireless energy in the role.^[67] He generally refrained from overnight business travel owing to his church responsibilities.^[94]

He took a hands-on role in general matters, helping in maintenance efforts in- and outside homes, visiting the sick, and counseling troubled or burdened church members.^[92][93][94] A number of local church members later credited him with turning their lives around or helping them through difficult times.^[88][93][94] Some others were rankled by his leadership style and desired a more consensus-based approach.^[93] Romney tried to balance the conservative dogma insisted upon by the church leadership in Utah with the desire of some Massachusetts members to have a more flexible application of doctrine.^[67] He agreed with some modest requests from the liberal women's group Exponent II for changes in the way the church dealt with women, but clashed with women whom he felt were departing too much from doctrine.^[67] In particular, he counseled women not to have abortions except in the rare cases allowed by LDS doctrine, and also in accordance with doctrine, encouraged prospective mothers who were not in successful marriages to give up children for adoption.^[67] Romney later said that the years spent as an LDS minister gave him direct exposure to people struggling in economically difficult circumstances, and empathy for those going through problematic family situations.^[96]

1994 U.S. senatorial campaign[link]

By 1993, Romney had been thinking about entering politics, partly based upon Ann's urging and partly to follow in his father's footsteps.^[46] He decided to challenge incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy, who was seeking re-election for the sixth time. Kennedy was potentially vulnerable that year – in part because of the unpopularity of the Democratic Congress as a whole, and in part because this was Kennedy's first election since the William Kennedy Smith trial in Florida, in which Kennedy had suffered some negative public relations regarding his character.^[97][98][99] Romney changed his affiliation from Independent to Republican in October 1993 and formally announced his candidacy in February 1994.^[46] He took a leave of absence from Bain Capital in November 1993, and stepped down from his church leadership role during 1994, due to the campaign.^[100][94]

Radio personality Janet Jeghelian took an early lead in polls among candidates for the Republican nomination for the Senate seat, but Romney proved the most effective fundraiser.^[101][102] He won 68 percent of the vote at the May 1994 Massachusetts Republican Party convention; businessman John Lakian finished a distant second and Jeghelian was eliminated.^[103] Romney defeated Lakian in the September 1994 primary with over 80 percent of the vote.^[15][104]

In the general election, Kennedy faced the first serious re-election challenger of his career in the young, telegenic, and well-funded Romney.^[97] Romney ran as a fresh face, as a businessperson who stated he had created ten thousand jobs, and as a Washington outsider with a solid family image and moderate stances on social issues.^[97][105] When Kennedy tried to tie Romney's policies to those of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, Romney responded, "Look, I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush. I'm not trying to take us back to Reagan-Bush."^[106] Romney stated: "Ultimately, this is a campaign about change."^[107] After two decades out of public view, his father George re-emerged during the campaign.^[108][109]

Romney's campaign was effective in portraying Kennedy as soft on crime, but had trouble establishing its own positions in a consistent manner.^[110] By mid-September 1994, polls showed the race to be approximately even.^{[97][111][112]} Kennedy responded with a series of attack ads, which focused on Romney's seemingly shifting political views on issues such as abortion and on the treatment of workers at the Ampad plant owned by Romney's Bain Capital.^{[97][113][114]} The latter was effective in blunting Romney's momentum.^[70] Kennedy and Romney held a widely watched late October debate without a clear winner, but by then, Kennedy had pulled ahead in polls and stayed ahead afterward.^[115] Romney spent $3 million of his own money in the race and more than $7 million overall.^{[116][nb 10]} In the November general election, despite a disastrous showing for Democrats overall, Kennedy won the election with 58 percent of the vote to Romney's 41 percent,^[54] the smallest margin in Kennedy's eight re-election campaigns for the Senate.^[119]

2002 Winter Olympics[link]

Romney, president and CEO of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics, speaking before a curling match

Romney returned to Bain Capital the day after the election, but the loss had a lasting effect; he told his brother, "I never want to run for something again unless I can win."^[46][120] When his father died in 1995, Mitt donated his inheritance to BYU's George W. Romney Institute of Public Management and joined the board and was vice-chair of the Points of Light Foundation (which had incorporated his father's National Volunteer Center).^[45][81] His mother died in 1998. Romney felt restless as the decade neared a close; the goal of simply making more money was losing its appeal to him.^[46][120] He no longer had a church leadership position, although he still taught Sunday School.^[92] During the long and controversial approval and construction process for the $30 million Mormon temple in Belmont, he feared that as a political figure who had opposed Kennedy, he would become a focal point for opposition to the structure.^[93] He thus kept to a limited, behind-the-scenes role in attempts to ease tensions between the church and local residents, but locals nonetheless sometimes referred to it as "Mitt's Temple".^[88][92][93]

Ann Romney was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1998; Mitt described watching her fail a series of neurological tests as the worst day of his life.^[46] After two years of severe difficulties with the disease, she found while living in Park City, Utah (where the couple had built a vacation home) a mixture of mainstream, alternative, and equestrian therapies that gave her a lifestyle mostly without limitations.^[53] When the offer came for him to take over the troubled 2002 Winter Olympics and Paralympics, to be held in Salt Lake City in Utah, she urged him to take it, and eager for a new challenge, he did.^[120][121] On February 11, 1999, Romney was hired as the president and CEO of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games of 2002.^[122]

Before Romney came on, the event was running $379 million short of its revenue benchmarks.^[122] Plans were being made to scale back the Games to compensate for the fiscal crisis, and there were fears the Games might be moved away entirely.^[123] The Games had also been damaged by allegations of bribery involving top officials, including prior Salt Lake Olympic Committee president and CEO Frank Joklik. Joklik and committee vice president Dave Johnson were forced to resign.^[124] Romney was chosen by Utah figures looking for someone with expertise in business and law and with connections to the state and the LDS Church.^[125] The appointment faced some initial criticism from non-Mormons, and fears from Mormons, that it represented cronyism or gave the Games too Mormon an image.^[30]

Romney ran the planning for the Games like a business.^[126] He revamped the organization's leadership and policies, reduced budgets, and boosted fundraising, alleviated the concerns corporate sponsors and recruited many new ones.^[120][125] He appealed to Utah's citizenry with a message of optimism that helped restore confidence in the effort.^[120][126] He worked to ensure the safety of the Games following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by coordinating a $300 million security budget.^[121] Overall, he oversaw a $1.32 billion budget, 700 employees, and 26,000 volunteers.^[122] The federal government provided between approximately $400 million^{[125][127][128]} and $600 million^[126][129] of that budget, much of it a result of Romney's having aggressively lobbied Congress and federal agencies.^{[129][130][131]} It would prove to be a record level of federal funding for the staging of a U.S. Olympics, a fact Romney would cite as a selling point during his campaign for the Massachusetts governorship.^[128][130] An additional federal $1.1 billion was spent on indirect support in the form of highway and transit projects.^[132]

Romney emerged as the public face of the Olympic effort, appearing in photographs, news stories and Olympics pins.^[120] Robert H. Garff, the chair of the organizing committee, later said that "It was obvious that he had an agenda larger than just the Olympics,"^[120] and that Romney wanted to use the Olympics to propel himself into the national spotlight and a political career.^[125][133] Garff believed the initial budget shortfall was not as bad as Romney portrayed, given there were still three years to reorganize.^[125] Utah Senator Bob Bennett said that much of the needed federal money was already in place and an analysis by The Boston Globe stated that the committee already had nearly $1 billion in committed revenues.^[125] Olympics critic Steve Pace, who led Utahns for Responsible Public Spending, thought Romney exaggerated the initial fiscal state in order to lay the groundwork for a well-publicized rescue.^[133] Kenneth Bullock, another board member of the organizing committee and also head of the Utah League of Cities and Towns, often clashed with Romney at the time, and later said that Romney deserved some credit for the turnaround but not as much as he claimed:^[120] Bullock said: "He tried very hard to build an image of himself as a savior, the great white hope. He was very good at characterizing and castigating people and putting himself on a pedestal."^[125]

Despite the initial fiscal shortfall, the Games ended up clearing a profit of $100 million.^[134] His performance as Olympics head was rated positively by 87 percent of Utahns.^[135] Romney and his wife contributed $1 million to the Olympics, and he donated to charity the $1.4 million in salary and severance payments he received for his three years as president and CEO.^[136]

Romney was widely praised for his efforts with the 2002 Winter Olympics^[121] including by President George W. Bush,^[25] and it solidified his reputation as a turnaround artist.^[125] Harvard Business School taught a case study based around his actions.^[61] He wrote a book about his experience titled Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership, and the Olympic Games, published in 2004. The role gave Romney experience in dealing with federal, state, and local entities, a public persona he had previously lacked, and the chance to re-launch his political aspirations.^[120] He was mentioned as a possible candidate for statewide office in both Massachusetts and Utah, and also as possibly joining the Bush administration.^{[121][137][138]}

Governor of Massachusetts[link]

2002 gubernatorial campaign[link]

In 2002, Republican Acting Governor Jane Swift's administration was plagued by political missteps and personal scandals.^[135] Many Republicans viewed her as a liability and considered her unable to win a general election.^[139] Prominent party figures – as well as the White House – wanted Romney to run for governor,^[137][140] and the opportunity appealed to him for its national visibility.^[141] One poll taken at that time showed Republicans favoring Romney over Swift by more than 50 percentage points.^[142] On March 19, 2002, Swift announced she would not seek her party's nomination, and hours later Romney declared his candidacy,^[142] for which would face no opposition in the primary.^[143] In June 2002, Massachusetts Democratic Party officials contested Romney's eligibility to run for governor, citing residency issues involving his time in Utah for the Olympics.^[144] That same month, the bipartisan Massachusetts State Ballot Law Commission unanimously ruled that he was an eligible candidate.^[145]