User:Kaldari/Nashville sit-ins

Historical context
Although the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution granted full rights and citizenship to African Americans after the Civil War, the actual status of blacks and whites within the US remained far from equal.

In 1896, the US Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the doctrine of "separate but equal". This decision led to the proliferation of Jim Crow laws throughout the United States. These laws mandated segregation in virtually all spheres of public life and allowed racial discrimination to flourish across the country, especially in the Southern United States.

In Nashville, like most Southern cities, African Americans were severely disadvantaged under the system of Jim Crow segregation. In addition to being relegated to underfunded schools and barred from numerous public accommodations, African Americans had few prospects for skilled employment and were subject to discrimination from the white majority at every turn.

Although serious efforts were made to oppose Jim Crow laws in Nashville as early as 1905, it was not until 1958, with the formation of the Nashville Cristian Leadership Council, that Nashville's African American community would lay the foundation for dismantling racial segregation.