History

profilemashan669
280ModernCivilRightsMovement.ppt
Home>History homework help>History

Veterans Day

To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country's service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nation.

Woodrow Wilson, Issuing “Armistice Day” Proclamation, 1919

We have come to dedicate a portion of [this] field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate. . .we cannot consecrate. . . we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

Abraham Lincoln, dedicating National Cemetery at Gettysburg, PA, 1863

Modern Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1968

“If I am not who you say I am, then you are not what you think you are.”

James Baldwin

The Chris Rock Show (1999)

Howard Beach: SW Queens (NYC), 2 blacks injured 1 killed 12/20/1986 (Michael Griffith run down by car driven by whites as Griffith tried to flee)

The biggest problem with Civil Rights today is in remembering
the past

America before 1954

  • A Completely Racially Segregated Country

Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896

Chinese Exclusion, Korematsu, “Judge Lynch”

Source of Change?

  • Progressivism

Environmental causes of inequality could be addressed

Interest Group politics could affect the political process (NAACP)

  • Second World War

Racial prejudice “un-American”

Growing Federal involvement in daily life

“Double V” campaign of Civil Rights Leaders

Source of Change?

  • Grass Roots Activism: A constant fight to demand equality based on the promise of the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence

Driven by a desire to live the “American Dream”

Dates back to Reconstruction

  • Affluence: Economic growth creates upward mobility, non-white middle-class emerges

Big Questions for HIST-1302

  • How do you get a majority to cede power to a minority? To grant a minority equal legal status?
  • What is different about the regional approaches to Civil Rights? Southern v. Northern?
  • Where does MCRM succeed and where does it fail? (or; since the U.S. now elected a black president, does this mean the civil rights movement is over?)

What are the primary goals of the “Modern Civil Rights” Movement?

1. Legal desegregation as a means to equal citizenship.

2. Legal equality as an end of the movement.

3. Eliminating “race” as meaningful social distinction as a means to avoiding future prejudice, inequality.

4. Addressing the “cost of racism” to American citizens as an end of the movement. (e.g. Affirmative Action)

NAACP Legal Defense Fund

3 General Approaches

Gradualist/Incremental

Chip away at influence of Plessy

Guinn v. U.S. (1915) State grandfathered voting rights in OK

Buchannan v. Warley (1917) Housing segregation in KY

Nixon v. Herndon (1927) All-white primaries in TX

2. Equal Opportunity: Education

Special cases, Plessy irrelevant

Hocutt v. UNC (1933) Law School

Murray v. Maryland (1935) Med School

Gaines v. Canada (1939) Law School

3. Direct Assault on Plessy

Overturn precedent of Plessy

But Supreme Court unwilling

Smith v. Allwright (1944) rejected by SC

Shelley v. Kramer (1948) rejected by SC

Plessy now accepted precedent – needed to be wholly rejected

“Gradualists” Aided by Pressure from U.S. Popular Culture

  • Marian Anderson (1939)

  • Music

Rhythm & Blues (becomes Rock-n-Roll)

Youth music embraces desegregation

“It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing”

  • Harry Truman

Desegregates Army (1948)

Based on EO#8802

Jackie Robinson (1947)

  • 3-letter athlete at UCLA
  • Lifetime .311 hitter in MLB (Brooklyn Dodgers)
  • 6x All-Star; 6 Pennants; 1 WS Championship
  • 1st Black Athlete enshrined in BB-HOF, 1962
  • 1997 MLB retires #42 on all teams

All three approaches combined in one case: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 1952-1954

Brown v. Board (1954)

  • Known to be “the watershed case of the century”

S.C. Accepts case 1952

Much opposition by Chief Justice Vinson

William Rehnquist, clerk to Justice Robert Jackson, “I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be re-affirmed”

  • Earl Warren (R-CA) appointed by Eisenhower

Assumes Chief Justice Sept. 1953

Demands unanimity

Dying, Justice Jackson is brought to reading on stretcher

"Does segregation of school children solely on the basis of color, even though the physical facilities may be equal, deprive the minority group of equal opportunities in the educational system? We believe that it does”

  • First effort to enforce the 14th Amendment (1868)
  • Demands end to segregation “at all deliberate speed”

Substantial Backlash

  • Called “Massive Resistance” by many whites
  • “Southern Manifesto”

Not signed by LBJ, Gore Sr., Kefauver

  • Revival of KKK (again)
  • White Citizen’s Councils
  • Federal Government

A. C. Powell Amendment to ban aid to institutions practicing segregation opposed by:

Eisenhower

NEA

Harry Truman

AFL-CIO

As with McCarthyism and Red Scare, Eisenhower Administration does little to provide leadership or prevent abuses.

Modern CRM emerges as a LOCAL phenomenon.

Murder of Emmitt Till, 1955

  • Chicago boy who just celebrated his 14th birthday

Visits relations in Money, Mississippi

County 2/3 black

No blacks allowed to vote; none had served on a jury

“Wolf whistle” at white woman; beaten, shot, body dropped in river

  • Murderers arrested and tried

Till’s uncle identifies abductors

Defense att’y to jury: “I am sure that every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men”

Deliberation for 45 minutes, non-guilty

Jurist: “If we hadn’t stopped to drink pop, it wouldn’t have taken that long”

Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56)

"Our mistreatment was just not right, and I was tired of it. I kept thinking about my mother and my grandparents, and how strong they were. I knew there was a possibility of being mistreated, but an opportunity was being given to me to do what I had asked of others.”

Rosa Parks, 1994

Arkansas Public Schools (1957)

  • Ordered to desegregate (based on Brown ruling)

Governor Orval Faubus calls out Arkansas National Guard to defy the ruling

President Eisenhower reluctantly sends in Federal troops and takes control of the Guard

Students brought to school under armed guard

  • Is this the intent of Brown?
  • It still looks a lot like the era of Jim Crow

Violence is contained by use of federal troops

  • Remember WWII study of Gunnar Myrdal, The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy

  • Finds that all Americans share certain values – political, economic, cultural, social

  • Whites refuse to believe that non-whites share these same values

Martin Luther King, Jr.

  • King does not start the Civil Rights movement!!!

Montgomery Activist: “The Reverend didn’t stir us up, we’ve been stirred up for a mighty long time”

  • King channels the movement into non-violent, moral questions

What really is America?

Who really are Americans?

  • MLK explains Civil Rights to whites in ways that connect to shared values

MLK on Boycott “Victory”

Tenets of King’s Approach

  • 1. Non-Violence (Ghandian concept of satyagraha or “truth force”)
  • MLK: "To meet hate with retaliatory hate would do nothing but intensify the existence of evil in the universe. Hate begets hate, violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love; we must meet physical force with soul force. Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding."
  • SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference): “nonviolence actively resists evil in any form. It never seeks to humiliate the opponent, only to win him. Suffering is accepted without retaliation. … Creatively used, the philosophy of nonviolence can restore the broken community in America.”

Tenets of King’s Approach

  • 2. Christian theology (an early “faith-based initiative”?!)

Old Testament (King loves book of Isaiah)

Prophetic “deliverance”; the American dream

Moses out of Egypt; Emancipation

God’s promise; the Constitution’s promise

New Testament

Jesus’ message of unqualified love; nonviolence

  • Many references to Christianity in Reverend King’s speeches. March on Washington:

“Every valley shall be exalted”

“Rough places shall be made plain”

“The glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together”

  • 3. Passive Resistance/Civil Disobedience

Henry David Thoreau: "Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.“

  • SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Council)

The SCLC “firmly believes that all people have a moral responsibility to disobey laws that are unjust… From a purely moral point of view, an unjust law is one that is out of harmony with the moral law of the universe, or… the Law of God. More concretely, an unjust law is one in which the minority is compelled to observe a code which is not binding on the majority.”

In disobeying the law, one “does so peacefully, openly, and nonviolently. Most important, he willingly accepts the penalty for breaking the law.”

King jailed 19 times

The Message Creates a Movement; Why?

  • Southern Black Churches (pre-1865)
  • NAACP (1909)
  • CORE (1942) & “Freedom Rides”
  • SCLC (1957)
  • Black Colleges & SNCC (1960)

Sit-Ins (1960)

Freedom Rides (1961)

New Generations: John Lewis

  • Born 1940, Troy, Alabama

1 of 9 children to sharecropper family

Attends segregated schools (if at all)

Called to Baptist ministry, Nashville

  • Engaged in Civil Rights

Chairman SNCC, Sit-ins 1960

Freedom Rides, 1961

Keynote Speaker, March on Washington (1963) at 23 years of age!

Selma (“Bloody Sunday”), 1965

Beaten over 30x in protests

  • 1986 Elected to U.S. Congress from Atlanta (4th District)

2000 DNC Keynote Speaker

Intentionally Allow (and take the brunt of) Violence to Come to the Surface

  • Riots on College campuses in South (100s injured)
  • Fire-bombing of buses and churches
  • NAACP official Medgar Evars murdered outside his home (pushes JFK to act and MLK to Washington)
  • Freedom Rides: 80 injured, 6 murdered

Medgar

Evars

King goes to Birmingham, AL (1963)

“Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” MLK, Jr., 1963

Then to Washington (1963)

Pressure Maintained

  • Two weeks after “I Have a Dream” speech, King’s home and four churches fire-bombed

4 Sunday School girls incinerated

  • Kennedy forced to place Civil Rights high on domestic agenda

Proposes sweeping Civil Rights bill, knew it stood no chance

Angers Southern Democratic base (MCR goes nowhere under JFK)

  • Selma March (1964) – More Violence
  • MLK wins 1964 Nobel Peace Prize – World wide recognition of “race problem” in U.S.

Victory: Passage of Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts

  • Johnson uses raw emotions of JFK assassination to lead Congress
  • Civil Rights Act of 1964

Outlaws discrimination at work

Outlaws discrimination in public

Allows FEDERAL GOVERNMENT to bring suit against violators (not just NACCP Legal Defense Fund or private citizens)

“Enables” 14th Amendment (1868)

LBJ proud, but also knew passage was “the day we gave the South to the Republican Party for the rest of our lifetimes.”

  • Voting Rights Act of 1965

Federal enforcement of voter registration and voting

Suspends literary testing and poll taxes

“Enables” 15th Amendment (1871)

  • A very long, historical struggle was reaching a turning point: America proved willing to defend the Constitution rather than the racial prejudices of the majority. THIS is what it means to be American.

Impact of the Voting Rights Act of 1965

Party Affiliation Flips

Victory of MCR: end segregation to achieve legal equality

  • Effects of legal equality BEGIN in the 1970s

First elected officials since Reconstruction

First significant numbers of blacks and other minorities in professional schools (law, medicine, graduate school)

First opportunity for middle management positions in larger firms

First chance to move to previously segregated suburbs

Home equity ($$)

Suburban values (aid children’s ability to adjust to white society)

  • Not until the 1980-90s do these changes begin to take hold across the country!! First generation of truly middle-class African-Americans

Then put this into context: Black man elected POTUS 2008!!!

  • King and MCR movement turns to lowering cost of RACISM; a VERY DIFFERENT PROBLEM than Equality

Means and Ends

  • Legal equality and a means to full participation as U.S. citizen

Brown v. Board, Voting Rights Act, Civil Rights Acts

  • Eliminating costs of racism

Usually this was economic: live in poorest parts of cities, worst education, highest crime/vice, worst access to middle-class jobs, healthcare

King Moves North

  • By 1960 ~ 70% black population live in cities
  • Urban politics support DE FACTO segregation (not legal, as in the south; many use illegal “red-lining”)

Chicago a “city of neighborhoods”

Whites abandoning the city, federal subsidies for suburban home ownership, urban tax base collapsing

  • Activism from blacks alone

Rev. Jesse Jackson – Operation Breadbasket (1966)

Few whites connected to N. urban MCR

  • King: “Poor Peoples Campaign”

“I choose to identify with the underprivileged. I choose to identify with the poor. I choose to give my life for the hungry. I choose to give my life for those who have been left out of the sunlight of opportunity. I choose to live for and with those who find themselves seeing life as a long and desolate corridor and with no exit sign. This is the way I'm going. If it means suffering a little bit, I'm going that way. If it means sacrificing, I'm going that way. If it means dying for them, I'm going that way, because I heard a voice saying, 'Do something for others.'"

Mixed Northern Movements

  • Younger, less established black culture in North

Race and class issues mixed

Not as tied to Christian churches (reject moral tone of MLK as too preachy)

  • Nation of Islam

Afro-centric

“The Honorable Elijah Muhammed”

Malcolm X

  • Rhetoric of RESISTANCE

Much like W.E.B. DuBois

  • Notice how King and X differ radically on their views of the COSTS OF RACISM… moving on to the second end/means of the MCRM

Pop Culture, Race, and Muhammad Ali

  • Ali emerges in a sports era that is changing as a result of television

Young, handsome, witty, verbal

  • As Cassius Clay, he defeats Sonny Liston in 1964

Displays a new urban black culture (unlike Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson)

Verbal attacks, playing the “dozens”

Often goes too far: Joe Frazier as “Tom”

  • Conversion to Nation of Islam

Rejection of assimilation, black nationalism

MLK and others “brain-washed” about the reality of racial equality

“The System” responds by shutting down his access to his profession - banned from boxing

  • Extremely proud of black heritage

Malcolm X promotes term “African-American” over Negro or black

Black Panthers

  • Afro-centrism (cultural)

Do what feels good, validate long-held biases (bigotry) of blacks toward whites

Led by Huey P. Newton, later CORE and SNCC

See the “Black man of the ghetto” the true leader, not the bourgeois middle-class “Negro” who wants to be accepted by white society as an equal

Anti-Intellectual: Book learning is “acting white”

Keeping it “real” means justifying any outlandish behavior – domestic violence, male abandonment of the family, drug use

Militant

An “eye for an eye”

Reject King’s approach and leadership

Too slow

Demands white acceptance

Tied to rise of African anti-colonial wars of liberation

Blacks in America like Africans throwing off European rule

Panthers and NOI very good at local aid, concern for blacks in local environment

Similar to Marcus Garvey (and Jane Addams) of Progressive Era

Movement Weakens: Why?

  • Victory: The Primary goal of MCRM realized; legal equality enforced!!!

Desegregation

Voting Rights

Fed. Gov’t begins to focus on economic and educational opportunity

  • Northern and Southern movements just too different for effective cooperation

The experiences of urban poverty created problems that even Southern black society (conditioned by years of racial violence) couldn’t effectively deal with!!!

Northern society far more “modern” – individualistic and divided – and far more like the pattern to come

Movement Weakens

  • Violence (does not translate into democratic change)

Malcolm X (1965), MLK (1968) assassinated

Riots in 1965, 1968, 1969

CORE and SNCC reject white liberal assistance, assume more openly militant and black nationalist stance

MCR Movement Weakens

  • Federal Government/Democratic Party wracked by political indecision

Democrats undermine their Southern base with Civil Rights

Viet Nam undermines rest of Dem. party

Collapse of Liberal coalition, rise of New Right

By 1972, Nixon practices “Benign Neglect” or “Southern Strategy” – draws dissatisfied whites to Republican party

  • Conservative Backlash of late 1980s

Argue that race is not a problem of poverty, and vice versa

Suggest “missing values” or “lack of capitalist initiative”

EVERY STUDY of the black inner-city shows that poor residents exhibit the SAME VALUES of hard work and capitalism

William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears (1996)

Conclusions

1. The focus on schools critical to success of Civil Rights

At root, Americans agree that everyone deserves an equal opportunity to succeed (note: Cisneros case in CC, TX)

Little agreement beyond this (movement stalls)

2. Mixed legacy of Civil Rights

Positives

Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Oprah, Robert Johnson (BET), Barack Obama (who?), thousands of local, state, and federal representatives

Tiger Woods, Williams’ Sisters, LeBron James, Derek Jeter

Early success in sports instructive: when rules are fair and enforced, race and ethnicity become meaningless

Best athletes are gifted, but they spend hours every day perfecting these skills

Negatives

Black families still earn less than 2/3 of what White families earn

Poverty undermines black family

Crime

“Hyper-ghettoes” of the inner-city offer no way out (except crime)

“Father” becomes “Baby Daddy”

Conclusions (cont)

3. African-Americans the pioneers, but many follow their model

Latinos/Tejanos/Chicanos (ongoing)

Sexual Orientation (begins 1960s, ongoing)

Conservative Christians like Moral Majority use same tactics, rely on same “movement culture” of Civil Rights (begins 1970s, ongoing)

Anti-abortion

4. Probably no single man affected America more than King from 1954 to the present

Redefined the terms of the debate

Racism simply un-American because it assumes citizens are inherently un-equal

Profound implications for U.S. foreign policy

Validates all of our founding documents (based on notions of equality)

“It was a great day”

But Second Goal of MCR Stalled

  • First Goal: Legal Equality
  • Second Goal: Address the historic costs of racism

Racial attitudes still strong, evident at times of stress:

Howard Beach murders about “race”

O.J. Simpson about “race”

Barry Bonds about “race”

“Race” makes bigots feel good (the “problem” becomes “those people” rather than politics or class)

  • “If I am not who you say I am, then you are not what you think you are”

What role does racial categorization play today in explaining tensions of the modern era?

See Obama’s “More Perfect Union” speech, Philadelphia, March 12, 2008.

Google: “Obama race speech”

Today every time one discusses race, they are accused of “playing the race card” – so we don’t talk about it at all

  • We’ve reached an impasse:

Screaming and “victimhood”

Ends and Means

  • Race and social tensions: Spike Lee, Do the Right Thing (1989)

What happens when we use “race” to generalize about individuals?

Tendency of HUMAN BEINGS to use external differences to explain conflict; not more personal issues like money or low social status

Very crude language… but notice how absurd these characters appear. They don’t see “human being” but rather the projections of their own fears (of people who are different)

Affirmative Action

  • Affirmative action argues that racism is meaningful only if coupled with power
  • Policy of Affirmative Action emerges from MCRM

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (created by JFK, then 1964 Civil Rights Act [based on WWII FEPC])

Bans discrimination, gives access to federal contracts by minority owned businesses

Title IX of Educational Amendment Act (1972)

“Affirmative action” must offer WOMEN equal opportunities – LAW “SEES” WOMEN AS CATEGORY – NOT “BLIND” TO SEX!

  • Conservative backlash: “special treatment” for poor

Argue that special treatment “demeans” those historically refused equal opportunity

1980-1990s, “activist” U.S. Federal Courts roll back affirmative action initiatives

1978 U. California v. Bakke; 1996 Hopwood v. Texas; 2003, Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger

  • 2004 the Supreme Court rejects "quotas” but rules that affirmative action is constitutional

The use of race as a consideration in hiring and admission to school is appropriate as long as it is not the sole factor under consideration

Affirmative Action

  • Comedian Chris Rock (2003) on Affirmative Action?

Again, crude language; but to highlight a larger point