The Civil Rights Movement 1960.doc

The Civil Rights Movement 1960-1980The struggle of black Americans for equality reached its peak in the mid-1960s. After progressive victories in the 1950s, blacks became even more committed to nonviolent direct action. Groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), made up of black clergy, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), composed of younger activists, sought reform through peaceful confrontation.In 1960 black college students sat down at a segregated Woolworths lunch counter in North Carolina and refused to leave. Their sit-in captured media attention and led to similar demonstrations throughout the South. The next year, civil rights workers organized freedom rides, in which blacks and whites boarded buses heading South toward segregated terminals, where confrontations might capture media attention and lead to change.They also organized rallies, the largest of which was the March on Washington in 1963. More than 200,000 people gathered in the nations capital to demonstrate their commitment to equality for all. The high point of a day of songs and speeches came with the address of Martin Luther King Jr., who had emerged as the preeminent spokesman for civil rights. I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood, King proclaimed. Each time he used the refrain I have a dream, the crowd roared.But the rhetoric of the civil rights movement at first failed to bring progress. President Kennedy was initially reluctant to press white Southerners for support on civil rights because he needed their votes on other issues. But events forced his hand. When James Meredith was denied admission to the University of Mississippi in 1962 on account of his race, Kennedy sent federal troops to uphold the law. After protests aimed at the desegregation of Birmingham, Alabama, prompted a violent response by the police, he sent Congress a new civil rights bill mandating the integration of public places. Not even the March on Washington, however, could extricate the measure from a congressional committee, where it was still bottled up when Kennedy was assassinated.President Johnson was more successful. A Southerner from Texas, he became committed to civil rights as he sought national office. In 1963, he told Congress: No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedys memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill. Using all his authority, he persuaded the Senate to limit debate and secured the passage of the sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in all public accommodations. The next year, he pressed further for what became the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It authorized the federal government to appoint examiners to register voters where local officials made black registration impossible. The year after passage, 400,000 blacks registered in the deep South; by 1968 the number reached 1 million and nationwide the number of black elected officials increased substantially. Finally, in 1968, the Congress passed legislation banning discrimination in housing.For all of the legislative activity, some blacks became impatient with the pace of progress. Malcolm X, an eloquent activist, argued for black separation from the white race. Stokely Carmichael, a student leader, became similarly disillusioned by the notions of nonviolence and interracial cooperation. He preached the need for black power, to be achieved by whatever means necessary.Violence accompanied militant calls for reform. Riots broke out in several big cities in 1966 and 1967. In the spring of 1968, Martin Luther King fell before an assassins bullet. Several months later, Senator Robert Kennedy, a spokesman for the disadvantaged, an opponent of the Vietnam War and the brother of the slain president, met the same fate. To many these two assassinations marked the end of an era of innocence and idealism in both civil rights and the anti-war movements. The growing militancy on the left, coupled with an inevitable conservative backlash, opened a rift in the nations psyche which took years to heal.The federal commitment to civil rights diminished when Richard Nixon became president. Nixon was determined to consolidate his political base around conservative whites who felt that the movement for black equality had gone too far. The Southern strategy led the administration to reduce the appropriation for fair housing enforcement and in 1970, to prevent, unsuccessfully, the extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. When the Supreme Court ruled in 1971 that busing children was a permissible means of desegregating schools, Nixon denounced the ruling on television and sought a congressional moratorium or restriction. Though he failed to achieve his end, he made his position clear. Opponents of busing gained a victory in 1974 in Milliken v. Bradley, in which the Supreme Court invalidated efforts to transfer inner-city black students to suburban schools that were predominately white.The backlash against preferential treatment for minorities became even more public in a Supreme Court case in 1978. Allan Bakke, a white man, claimed that a quota reserving places for minority applicants was responsible for the rejection of his application to medical school in California. The court ordered his admission, arguing that quotas could no longer be imposed, but then upheld the consideration of race as one of the relevant factors in selection procedures.Nevertheless, the controversy over busing and affirmative action sometimes obscured the steady march of many African Americans into the ranks of the middle class and suburbia throughout these tumultuous years.See also: Protests of 1968See also: African-American Civil Rights Movement (19551968)The civil rights movement was a worldwide political movement for equality before the law occurring between approximately 1950 and 1980. It was accompanied by much civil unrest and popular rebellion. The process was long and tenuous in many countries, and most of these movements did not achieve or fully achieve their objectives. In its later years, the civil rights movement took a sharp turn to the radical left in many cases.Civil rights movement in the United StatesMain articles: African-American Civil Rights Movement (18961954) and African-American Civil Rights Movement (19551968)See also: The Sixties, New Left, New Communist Movement,and Timeline of the African-American Civil Rights MovementIn a relatively stable political system, after a status had been reached in which every citizen has the same rights by law, practical issues of discrimination remain. Even if every person is treated equally by the state, there may not be equality due to discrimination within society, such as in the workplace, which may hinder civil liberties in everyday life. During the second half of the 20th century, Western societies introduced legislation that tried to remove discrimination on the basis of race, gender or disability.The civil rights movement in the United States refers in part to a set of noted events and reform movements in that country aimed at abolishing public and private acts of racial discrimination and racism against African Americans and other disadvantaged groups between 1954 to 1968, particularly in the southern United States. It is sometimes referred to as the Second Reconstruction era.Later, groups like the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, the Weathermen and the Brown Berets turned to more harsh tactics to make a revolution that would establish, in particular, self-determination for U.S. minoritiesbids that ultimately failed due in part to a coordinated effort by the United States Governments COINTELPRO efforts to subvert such groups and their activities.Ethnicity equity issuesIntegrationismSee also: Racial integrationand Jim Crow lawsIn the last decade of the nineteenth century in the United States, racially discriminatory laws and racial violence aimed at African Americans and other disadvantaged groups began to mushroom. This period is sometimes referred to as the nadir of American race relations. Elected, appointed, or hired government authorities began to require or permit discrimination, specifically in the states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Kansas. There were four required or permitted acts of discrimination against African Americans. They included racial segregation upheld by the United States Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 which was legally mandated by southern states and nationwidecitation needed at the local level of government, voter suppression or disfranchisement in the southern states, denial of economic opportunity or resources nationwide, and private acts of violence and mass racial violence aimed at African Americans unhindered or encouraged by government authorities. Although racial discrimination was present nationwide, the combination of law, public and private acts of discrimination, marginal economic opportunity, and violence directed toward African Americans in the southern states became known as Jim Crow.March on Washington for Jobs and FreedomNoted strategies employed prior to the civil rights movement of 1955 to 1968 to abolish discrimination against African Americans initially included litigation and lobbying attempts by organizations such as the NAACP. These efforts were a hallmark of the American Civil Rights Movement from 1896 to 1954. However, by 1955, private citizens became frustrated by gradual approaches to implement desegregation by federal and state governments and the massive resistance by proponents of racial segregation and voter suppression. In defiance, these citizens adopted a combined strategy of direct action with nonviolent resistance known as civil disobedience. The acts of civil disobedience produced crisis situations between practitioners and government authorities. The authorities of federal, state, and local governments often had to act with an immediate response to end the crisis situations sometimes in the practitioners favor. Some of the different forms of protests and/or civil disobedience employed include boycotts as successfully practiced by the Montgomery Bus Boycott (19551956) in Alabama which gave the movement one of its more famous icons in Rosa Parks-, sit-ins as demonstrated by the influential Greensboro sit-in (1960) in North Carolina, and marches as exhibited by the Selma to Montgomery marches (1965) in Alabama. The evidence of changing attitudes could also be seen around the country, where small businesses sprang up supporting the civil rights movement, such as New Jerseys notable Everybodys Luncheonette.7Jesse Jackson has fought for civil rights as his lifes work.The most illustrious march is still probably the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It is best remembered for the glorious speech Martin Luther King, Jr. gave, in which the I have a dream part turned into a national text and eclipsed the troubles the organizers had to bring to march forward. It had been a fairly complicated affair to bring together various leaders of civil rights, religious and labor groups. As the name of the march tells us, many compromises had to be made in order to unite the followers of so many different causes. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom emphasized the combined purposes of the march and the goals that each of the leaders aimed at. These leaders informally named the Big Six were A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King, Whitney Young, James Farmer and John Lewis. Although they came from different political horizons, these leaders were intent on the peaceful success of the march. The march even had its own marshal, ensuring that the event would be peaceful and respectful of the law8. The success of the march is still being debated but one aspect has been raised in the last few years: the misrepresentation of women. A lot of feminine civil rights groups had participated in the organization of the march but when it came to actual activity, women were denied the right to speak and were relegated to figurative roles in the back of the stage. As some female participants have noticed, the March can be remembered for the I Have a Dream speech but for most female activists it was a new awakening, forcing black women not only to fight for civil rights but also to engage in the Feminist movement9.Noted achievements of the civil rights movement in this area include the judicial victory in the Brown v. Board of Education case that nullified the legal article of separate but equal and made segregation legally impermissible, passage of the Civil Rights Act of 196410 that banned discrimination in employment practices and public accommodations, passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that restored voting rights, and passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 that banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.Black PowerMain article: Black PowerSee also: Black Panther Party, Black nationalism,and pan-AfricanismBy 1965 the emergence of the Black Power movement (19661975) began gradually to eclipse the original integrated power aims of the civil rights movement that had been espoused by Martin Luther King, Jr. Advocates of Black Power argued for black self-determination, and to assert that the assimilation inherent in integration robs Africans of their common heritage and dignity; e.g., the theorist and activist Omali Yeshitela argues that Africans have historically fought to protect their lands, cultures and freedoms from European colonialists, and that any integration into the society which has stolen another people and their wealth is actually an act of treason.Today, most Black Power advocates have not changed their self-sufficiency argument. Racism still exists worldwide and it is generally accepted that blacks in the United States, on the whole, did not assimilate into U.S. mainstream culture either by Kings integration measures or by the self-sufficiency measures of Black Powerrather, blacks arguably became evermore oppressed, this time partially by their own people in a new black stratum of the middle class and the ruling class. Black Powers advocates generally argue that the reason for this stalemate and further oppression of the vast majority of U.S. blacks is because Black Powers objectives have not had the opportunity to be fully carried through.One of the most public manifestations of the Black Power movement took place in the 1968 Olympics when two African-Americans stood on the podium doing a Black Power salute. This act is still remembered today as the 1968 Olympics Black Power salute.Chicano MovementMain article: Chicano MovementSee also: Chicano nationalismand Brown BeretsThe Chicano Movement, also known as the Chicano Civil Rights Movement, Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement and El Movimiento, was the part of the American Civil Rights Movement that sought political empowerment and social inclusion for Mexican-Americans around a generally nationalist argument. The Chicano movement blossomed in the 1960s and was active through the late 1970s in various regions of the U.S. The movement had roots in the civil rights struggles that had preceded it, adding to it the cultural and generational politics of the era.The early heroes of the movementRodolfo Gonzales in Denver, Colorado and Reies Tijerina in New Mexicoadopted a histori