How Civil Rights Movement Shapes the Political Ground of America
Introduction
“No, no we are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,” in a keynote speech delivered by Martin Luther King, a human rights advocate at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The speech, “I Have a Dream” becomes the most famous public address of 20th century America, the impact made an immediate effect that shaped American history.
The Civil Rights Movement in the United States has been a very long arduous and characteristically non-violent struggle to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to all Americans. The movement coursed through lasting impact on the society of the United States, the increased social and legal acceptance of civil rights brought about exposure of the prevalence and cost of racism among the black and white Americans.
The Civil Rights Movement began to a series of noted events and reform movements in the United States aspired to abolish public and private acts of racial discrimination against African Americans between the years 1954 to 1968. By 1966, the emergence of the Black Power Movement, which lasted from 1966 to 1975, expanded and gradually eclipsed the initial aims of the movement to encompass other such as racial dignity, economic, and political self-sufficiency, and freedom from white authority
These laws disadvantaging Afro-American were referred to as Jim Crow. These laws had been practiced to different states.
The last decade of 19th century in America, racial discriminating laws and violence aimed at Afro-Americans began to spread out rapidly. Elected, appointed, or hired government authorities began to ask and require permit discrimination in different states specifically in 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 that included racial segregation– upheld by the United States Supreme Court decision in v. in 1896 – which was legally mandated by southern states and nationwide at the local level. Among them were 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.
The publicly known strategies employed before the Civil Rights Movement of 1955 to 1968 to abolish discrimination against African Americans initially included litigation and lobbying efforts by traditional organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). These efforts were the distinction 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, the citizens adapted a combined strategy of direct action with nonviolent resistance known as civil disobedience. These acts produced crisis unimaginable situations between practitioners and government authorities. Officials from the federal, state, and local government units often had to execute immediate response just so to end the crisis.
Most of these civil disobedience employed included boycotts as successfully practiced by the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-1956) in Alabama, “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.
One of the noted achievements of the Civil Rights Movement are the legal victory in the vs. (1954) case that overturned the legal doctrine of “separate but equal” and made segregation legally impermissible, passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned discrimination in employment practices and public accommodations, passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that restored voting rights, passage of the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965 which dramatically changed U.S. immigration policy, and passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 that banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.
The racial discrimination suffered by the black Americans continued to become harsher and harsher in the past decades, an irony of the present America that boasts as the free world. Yes, the past was that dimmed with so much racial discrimination, pitted with social hate and typecast, that viewing today is so much unthinkable.
Afro-American
It has been pondered that Afro-Americans faced different racism in his native land, and most Americans are aware of it, although it assumes varying forms and intensity in different regions of the country and among diverse groups of the American people.
African Americans who migrated north found greater political, social, and economic opportunities than they had in the South; the North did not fulfill its potential as a “promised land.” Blacks remained the last hired and first fired, disproportionately relegated to low-skilled and poorly paying jobs. ‘s breaking of the color line in major league baseball proved the exception, not the rule, as most blacks found blatant barriers to entry in numerous segments of the labor market. Residential segregation prevailed, confining blacks to poor neighborhoods and since schools were located in the neighborhood in which one lived, African American migrants had less of a chance to move up the economic and social ladder than their white counterparts. When African Americans pushed the limits of this informal system of apartheid in seeking housing in all-white neighborhoods, they were physically turned out. In Detroit, in 1943, for example, conflicts over housing climaxed in one of the worst race riots in American history. By the time the riots subsided, seventeen blacks lay dead — no whites were killed — and the federal government had reneged on an agreement to allow African Americans to move into the Sojourner Truth Homes, a new federal public housing project in a Polish American section of the city. Similarly, in the immediate post-World War II years, blacks in Chicago found themselves routed out of all-white neighborhoods and relegated to overcrowded and underserviced slums (., (1998)).
In spite of the great violence (1998), the great migration of Afro-Americans from the South to the urban North continued, because the situation in the South gotten worse. On February 1946, Isaac Woodwar of Aiken, South Carolina, was fatally beaten by a white policeman only hour after he was honorably discharged from the military. Woodward had spent his fourteen months fighting Japanese in the Philippines, and he was wearing the uniform when he was assaulted. The policeman who killed Woodward was acquitted of all charges against him. Less than two weeks after Woodward’s murder, white Americans went into a rampage against blacks after a heated altercation between a white radio repairman and a black female customer and her son who came to her defense in Columbia, Tennessee. Albeit the whites were the ones who precipitated the violence, the police arrested seventy blacks, charging over twenty of them with capital crimes. Two black prisoners were reported to die inside the police custody.
Meanwhile, the protests by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) (1998) about these atrocities prodded President Harry Truman to form a special Committee on Civil Rights. Despite the effort of Truman to push forward his committee’s surprisingly strong pro-civil rights report, entitled To Secure These Rights, which constituted, among others, the right to vote, the ability to serve in a non-segregated military, and the opportunity to be treated equally in the fields of education and employment, these did pass the Congress. Indeed, Truman’s effort to push for civil rights split his party, as southern “Dixiecrats” bolted from the Democrats in 1948 to support their own presidential candidate. And even though Truman won in 1948, the threat of political disunion over civil rights discouraged him and the Congress for about fifteen long years (., (1998)).
When America celebrated its affluence, millions of African Americans continued to pine away in poverty. At the time when the government was developing numerous programs that benefited most white middle class (from tax deductions for home owners to massive spending on superhighways), blacks, who were trapped in segments of the economy that were rapidly shedding surplus workers, lacked the political will and economic power to demand federal help. The only significant racial reform that benefited the black was the desegregation of the armed forces enacted by the federal government in the decade after the end of World War II, as ordered by President Truman in 1948. To some blacks, this was even represented a Pyrrhic victory. To wit, if a black leader dared declare that African Americans would or should not “go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations,” as Paul Robeson did in 1949, they were branded as traitors, attacked by mobs, and told to get out of America. As Congressman of Mississippi put it, “If that N— Robeson does not like this country, let him go to Russia.” Meantime, many blacks who enlisted themselves in the military encountered blatant discrimination while in the service and then, after risking their lives for the preservation of the free world, returned to a society that continued to deem them second-class citizens (., (1998)).
To most Americans, the Negro (or the politically correct term is Afro-American) has distinctly negative connotations. It suggests something difficult to settle and equally difficult to leave alone. It is discomforting and makes for moral uneasiness. The very presence of the Negro in America, his fate in this country through slavery, Civil War and Reconstruction, his recent career and his present status, his accommodation, his protest and his aspiration, in fact his entire biological, historical and social existence as a participant American represent to the ordinary white man in the North as well as in the South an anomaly in the very structure of American society. To many, this takes on the proportion of a menace – biological, economic, social, cultural, and, at times political. This anxiety may be mingled with a feeling of individual and collective guilt. A few see the problem as a challenge to statesmanship. To most it is a trouble (., (1992)).
Brown vs. Board of Education
Over ninety years proceeding in the year 1954, race relations among the black and white in the United States has been so unhealthy that it had been dominated with segregation. The plaintiffs, though, asserted that such system of racial separation, while masquerading as providing ‘separate but equal” treatment of both black and white Americans, instead perpetuated inferior accommodations, services, and treatment for black Americans.
Segregation in the academe varied wildly from the different 17 states, which required segregation to the 16 which prohibited it. Brown was undoubtedly the most famous of a group of U.S. Supreme Court cases which deal principally with the efforts of racial activists to promote the interests of the people they represented.
In the year 1951, a class action suit was filed against the Board of Education of the City of Topeka, Kansas in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas. The suit called forth the school district to reverse its policy of racial segregation. Separate elementary schools were operated by the Topeka Board of education under an 1879 Kansas law which permitted (but did not require) districts to maintain separate elementary school facilities for black and white students in twelve communities with populations over 15,000.
Oliver Brown, who worked as a welder for the Santa Fe railroad and was studying for the ministry, was convinced by his childhood friend, Charles Scott, to join the lawsuit. His daughter, Linda Brown, a third grader, had to walk six blocks to her school bus stop to ride a mile-away segregated school, while Sumner Elementary, a white school, was only seven blocks from her house.
And as directed by the NAACP leadership, the parents each attempted to enroll their children in the closest neighborhood school in the fall of 1951. They were each refused enrollment and instead directed to enroll their kids to the segregated school, which was, in fact, a one mile away from their homes.
It was only a year after the Supreme Court first heard oral arguments about the hearing. The death of Chief Justice Fred Vinson and the Court’s call for more information on the intent of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, however, delayed its decision. Finally, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in favor of Brown that “separates educational facilities are inherently unequal”, with Chief Justice Earl Warren’s opinion making it clear that v. (1896), the case that had upheld segregation, had been overturned (., (1998)).
Because of this result, people behind the NAACP celebrated the court’s ruling, which Thurgood Marshall and NAACP president wrote “compliance without legal action will be the rule,” and that NAACP “looked confidently to the future,” The Washington Post, popular daily news in America even predicted “a new birth of freedom.” Cincinnati Enquirer had its share of elation and shared that the justices had “acted as a conscience of the American nation,” that the days of stepping on the black man had come to an end (., (1998)).
And yes, the winning of the case was a redefining moment of American history, putting the law of the land on the side of those who sought to eradicate racial inequality, the decision signaled only the beginning of the modern civil rights movement, not its culmination. It gave the black Americans new hope, setting much of the agenda for the following years.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott
On December 1, 1955, after a day’s work at the Montgomery Fair department store, Rosa Parks, a middle-aged black seamstress, boarded a Montgomery, Alabama bus to take her home. Several stops later, the bus driver requested that she give up her seat in favor of a white passenger. Montgomery law required black passengers to occupy seats in the back of the bis in favor of the white persons to sit at the front. When Parks refused, the bus driver informed her that he was going to have a call to the police. Still Parks refused to comply (., (1998)).
In a conversation with the police with Parks, the police asked her if she was told by the driver to stand up, she said yes. When asked why she didn’t, she simply said that she didn’t think she should have to stand up. “After I had paid my fare and occupied a seat, I didn’t think I should have to give it up.”
’s action (1998) caused the black Americans to boycott every bus in Montgomery. The boycott was well-received and in itself obtained an overwhelming support from the black community around the country and some of the white sympathetic citizens. One day of the boycott, E. D. Nixon, an officer with the all-black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and local head of the NAACP, with whom had worked, asked Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist minister, to present the keynote address at the mass meeting of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), the name given to the body officially in charge of the protest.
King delivered his keynote speech before an overflowing audience at the Holt Street Baptist Church, which, like many other black churches. He delivered one of the most memorable and moving orations of his life.
In his speech, after reviewing the long history of the abuses that African Americans had suffered, King declared, “We… are tired – tired of being segregated and humiliated; tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression.” Warming the audience, King later contrasted the actions of the boycotters to those of the Citizen’s Councils and the KKK. The latter organizations, King said, “are protesting for the perpetuation of injustice… we are protesting for the birth of justice… Their methods lead to violence and lawlessness… our actions must be guided by the deepest principles of our Christian faith.” In the future, King prophetically concluded, “when the history books are written… the historians will have to pause and say, ‘There lived a great people – black people – who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilizations’” (., (1998)).
Redefining the American’s present
And so, we have read about how the hardships these black Americans went through more than a decade of atrocities committed – no less – by his own brother. How this Jim Crow browbeat so literally these hapless black citizens to be segregated, much more humiliated them, regarded as second-class citizens. If laws could speak, Jim Crow would so tell these black Americans, “to go away, you filthy niggers.”
Oliver Brown had his fair share of this racist situation. His heart must have bled to see his daughter, an elementary student at that, to go everyday to her segregated school when there should have had been a school just near their home, but off-limits for it was only intended for the fortunate white kids.
Other Afro-Americans were even discriminated by these “segregated laws” even in buses.
We had read Rosa Parks’ plight when she was asked by the driver to stand up and let the white American sit. She defended that she paid her fare then she deserved to keep it. But, what did she deserve of this retaliation of her right? She was handcuffed much like a criminal.
These atrocities in the dark ages of the American history should have to be well remembered. The Civil Rights Movement initiated by these peace-loving black, as well as sympathetic white Americans is enough reason why the Americans of today should be proud and be informed about how painstaking and glorious were those days.
Today, an American gets to enjoy the freedom, whether he may be a black or a white to go to school without being told to go to a segregated school. Today, an American regardless of his color may sit anywhere in the bus without being told to get up and find another seat because a more sophisticated and richer American will have to sit to his or her place. Today, regardless of his roots, an American can enjoy malling, shopping, playing, walking, running, and voting without someone telling him that he should not suppose to do that because he is a second-class citizen and that he has no luxury to prove to the world.
Anyone can just do whatever he wants anchored to the laws of the land. For indeed, the movement of Civil Rights have been an encompassing plight that paved its way to a more free America. And such long, arduous, and glorious causes of Oliver Brown, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and other countless black Americans who suffered and fought back to defend their freedom, to defend their liberties, and rights should mark in our hearts and in minds that this freedom that we enjoy now were never theirs. We should be glad of these people have had brought to today’s America. For that, may they be remembered, and their causes are cherished.
The success of movement can never be fathomed. For how can you, when this freedom the current Americans enjoyed are the defining adjective what Americans are now.
Bust just how successful was the movement? Ask the black American student who joyously study her course among the different nationalities. Ask Oprah, a successful black American celebrity, how she was accepted by the public – both the black and the white. Ask a middle-aged black American now, who rides in a bus, happily talking to a white-skinned American. Ask a black parent who sends his kids in a school studied by both Americans. Ask a white American what he thinks about Michael Jordan, a black American.
Sources:
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
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