In short: it wasn’t the main reason. I’m not even sure I would call it a growing demand for Civil Rights, because they’d been demanding the same things for a long time already. However, the movement definitely gained traction and got both visibility and victories, first with Brown v. Board, and later with the Civil Rights Act. But I’ll go into that in depth below.

The post WWII period was marked by a few factors that made everything much more visible to the American public. Firstly, was the service of African Americans in the US armed forces during the war. Secondly, the Cold War painting America as a bastion of freedom, while African Americans were able to see that wasn’t the case. Lastly, the ideological climate of the period was perfect for this. The NAACP increased its membership ninefold over the war period, gaining mass support as America fought injustice abroad. This was also only a decade away from the Sixties – the forerunners of the New Left were now active in politics.

In 1939, Billie Holliday recorded her song Strange Fruit, which I’ve linked to in case you don’t know it. The lyrics are haunting, referencing the prevalence of lynchings in the South. This is in 1939, remember, the same year the war began. Only two years later America would be entering the war in outrage after Pearl Harbour, yet lynchings in the South were still a fact of life. Many African Americans served in the armed forces, and when they returned home, they felt they’d served their country and earned the rights of citizenship. But the situation wasn’t much changed. This was one driving force behind the protest movement. After four years of war, Strange Fruit was still a thing.

Also key was the fact that the United States had gone to war as a ‘good guy’, to stop the tyranny of Germany and Japan. Yet at home, African Americans were still segregated and suffering under Jim Crow laws. Adding to the problem was the Cold War. America stood as the defender of freedom against communist Russia. The hypocrisy was striking when black children still couldn’t live in safety. Emmett Till was viciously tortured and murdered in 1955 because he spoke to a white woman in Mississippi. He was 14. All of this contributed to more public attempts at protest, and a spurring on of the movement into the public eye.

The importance of the leaders themselves is difficult. Would the movement have been successful without Dr. King? Maybe not. But the African American community had had strong leaders protesting against racism for over a century. Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass are the most famous and obvious examples. They had all done their part. And as I said in this post(which is quite messy – I apologise), the movement wasn’t made by Dr. King or the other leaders, it was made by the people. The Civil Rights Movement was a grassroots campaign by African American communities across the country to change their situation.

So the leaders weren’t a reason for a growing demand for Civil Rights, rather they were shunted into the spotlight by that demand. The main reasons were rooted in the changing political climate, where the New Left was beginning to emerge; the ideological ideas of the forties and fifties, where it was recognised that America had fought in the name of freedom, but freedom was denied to a huge portion of its citizens at home; and the continued atrocities of Jim Crow, in the form of lynchings like Emmett Till’s, and segregation.