With the approach of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, The State News looked back on the impact Dr. King and the civil rights movement had on laws in East Lansing, the state of Michigan and the nation.

East Lansing

East Lansing has its own history of discrimination towards Black people, particularly when it came to housing.

Malcolm X lived in the Lansing area for 12 years during his childhood. Malcolm X’s father was court-ordered to leave his house in Lansing when Malcolm was just three years old because the home was in a white neighborhood. It was later burned down with the family inside and they were forced to flee to East Lansing where black residents weren’t allowed in town at night.

Malcolm X wrote that he gave a speech at MSU in 1963, relating to students “how East Lansing harassed us so much that we had to move again, this time two miles out of town, into the country.”

It wasn’t until Feb. 20, 1967 the East Lansing City Council adopted Ordinance No. 192, which defined civil rights in the city.

Michigan

Michigan’s history with racism is better than most states.

Slavery in Michigan had been outlawed since it became a territory just before 1800 but inequality among black and white people remained. In the mid-19th century, Michigan enacted laws protecting fugitive slaves.

Though fugitive slaves could be legally recaptured and taken back, slave catchers did not receive a friendly welcome in Michigan, according to History of Michigan Law.

After the Civil War, the state did not require black people to register with the state and did not set a quota on how many could migrate. Though segregation was not prohibited until 1967, black residents were allowed education and Michigan sometimes ignored legislation prohibiting them from voting.

Michigan still clung to some of the day’s social laws, which prevented equality and did not allow interracial marriage.

With passage and ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, black people were given the right to vote across the U.S. and Michigan eliminated racial terminology in its constitution.

In 1885 Michigan passed its first Civil Rights Act, which stated those within Michigan were “entitled to full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, restaurants, eating-houses, barber shops, public conveyances on land and water, theatres, and all other places of public accommodation and amusement.”

In 1952 discrimination was outlawed with government housing and, in 1955, employment.

The rewrite to the Michigan state constitution approved in 1963 created the Michigan Department of Civil Rights to help prevent discrimination and promote compliance with civil rights laws.

The USA

Before King and the civil rights movement, black people struggled to even gain citizenship, let alone equality. With nearly four million slaves by 1860 the country held black people in human bondage as lower than people in many areas of the south and some parts of the north.

Laws existed to tell black people they had no legal rights, even in “free” states. The Fugitive Slave Act, for example, allowed escaped former slaves living in free states to be captured and returned to slavery.

Laws that further restricted the already-limited rights of slaves included the Slave Codes passed in various Southern states, which banned slaves from such rights as basic education and self-defense and made the killing of slaves by masters legal.

The passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution guaranteed the end of slavery, civil rights for all citizens born or naturalized in the U.S. and the right of black men to vote.

For nearly a century after the war, black people faced terror at the hands of local white terrorists groups like the Ku Klux Klan and had to live with Jim Crow Laws preventing them from gaining an equal footing with white people. Black people endured lynching, segregated schools and housing discrimination.

As these frustrations boiled over, the civil rights movement arose thanks to political figures like King and Malcolm X. Landmark legislative acts and legal decisions, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Brown vs. Board of Education, outlawed segregation discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin across America.