Roy Wilkins: “The Clock Will Not Be Turned Back”

Questions for Further Study

• 1.: The Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education was and still is regarded as a major victory in the quest for equal rights. However, at the time, the consequences of Brown were disappointing. What subsequent events dramatically illustrated that Brown did not resolve the issue of civil rights?
• 2.: In 2002, the majority leader in the U.S. Senate, Republican Trent Lott from Mississippi, was essentially driven out of office by remarks he made that were regarded as racially insensitive about events that had taken place over a half century earlier. Yet Democratic senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia remained in office as the longest-serving member of Congress in history after having been a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and after leading the Senate filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Do you see any inconsistency in the public reaction to these figures?
• 3.: What impact did the events in Little Rock, Arkansas, have on the civil rights movement? How is this impact reflected in Wilkins’s speech?
• 4.: What role did the cold war between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its satellite states have on the civil rights movement of the 1950s?
• 5.: The focus of the civil rights movement from the mid-1930s through the 1950s was education. Using this document in conjunction with Charles Houston’s “Educational Inequalities Must Go!,” Sweatt v. Painter, and Brown v. Board of Education, prepare a time line of important cases in the effort to integrate education.