Good question. We often think that African American protest and the Civil Rights Movement began with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. This is usually the beginning marker because it was the first successful legal battle for de-segregation. However, do we define successful opposition to Jim Crow as only legal battles?

The current scholarship is leaning more and more to the answer "no". Opposition can take many forms, individual, silent protest, labor agitation, organizing community councils, boycotts, etc. This type of African American protest has existed as long as there have been African Americans (this is not my specialty, but slave narratives are a good example of the small and large ways blacks protested oppression). In terms of the 20th century, African American protest began to organize more and solidify into a coherent argument during the labor agitation of the 1930s, and there you can see many instances of successful challenges of Jim Crow.

Interlude: Jim Crow didn't exist only in the South. My current research is on Depression-era blacks in the Midwest, and often the conditions and social treatment of African Americans outside of the South was comparable. For more, see Thomas Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty:: The Forgotten Struggle of Civil Rights in the North and Kimberley Phillips' AlabamaNorth African American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland.

Ok, back to the South. So how do we define "successful opposition"? Robin D. G. Kelley argues that opposition to racism is not always obvious. In "'We Are Not What We Seem:' Re-thinking Black Working Clark Opposition in Jim Crow South", Kelley talks about how workers would sing hymn and spirituals while they worked in dismal factories. While employers thought this was a simple show of religion, in fact it held deeper meaning for the black workers. It was a recall to the days of slavery when slaves used hidden meanings in spirituals to give hope (as well as clues) for escape. Kelley also talks about silent protest, like slow-downs, where workers would intentionally work slower to delay production. Outside of work, African Americans in the South would also participate on small, unorganized levels of protest. Kelley tells of the story of a particularly racist bus driver would drew his gun several times on black women riders, and how he would intentionally miss blacks' stops. The riders responded by ringing the bell for stops and not get off. Is this a successful protest?

One last example of protest was the "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" movement, which had several iterations across the country, both northern and southern cities. There were many businesses, large and small, that would not employ blacks. African Americans in cities like Chicago would organize and decide to boycott businesses that would practice this, until the businesses would hire black employees. This also promoted black businesses in the community. Is this a successful protest?

I know answering a question with more questions is such a typical historian move, but I do think it's important to challenge what we mean by protest. I definitely recommend you read Kelley's article (and really anything by Kelley- he's superb). But in short, I would argue yes- there were many ways African Americans successfully protested Jim Crow, in the South and North, prior to Brown v. Board. They might not be forms of protest we are familiar with, but it was brave all the same.