That had to bounce back in all kinds of ways,
in the way Americans then viewed the
heritage of racial prejudice inside their own country.
And you can see at the edges, the erosion
of the old established American positions on race.
The integration of the United States Armed Forces, for the first time, in 1948.
Key court decisions.
Black Americans keep pushing for their freedom.
Increasingly, they are seeing some of the
major power sources in the country are going
to make another try at helping them break through and gain a new era of freedom.
In that story, I do think the decision of the U.S.
Supreme Court in the Brown case is a kind of landmark.
You can see the top headline here in the New
York Times announcing the decision, a nine to nothing decision.
One thing I also like in this story though,
if you look down here at the very bottom,
this story right here is saying that the American
Broadcasting Network, the Voice of America, that provides news in
34 languages all over the world, is flashing
this court ruling within the hour of its delivery.
Court decisions like these, of course didn't end the process,
they reopened it, and the struggle would go on for decades afterwards.
For instance, one of the immediate events that followed, in 1955,
was a boycott of the segregated bus system in Alabama, in Montgomery,
Alabama, by black Americans who simply refused to ride the city buses
and provide financial support for a bus
system that treated them as second class citizens.
The boycott was triggered when this young women, named Rosa Parks, simply refused to
give up her bus seat to whites as the bus driver insisted that she do.
She becomes then, a leader in that bus boycott.
In this photograph,
she's joined by an active local reverend in Montgomery,
a man who is becoming increasingly known for his oratorical skills:
his name is Martin Luther King, Jr.
As we reflect on the role of the United
States in world history in the second half of the
20th century, what I don't want you to do is
to think of this as an inexorable and inevitable rise,
something that
was bound to happen.
When you delve into the details of each of these individual
stories, the national security story, the economic story, the civil rights story,