America´s Civil Rights Movement in the United States
Introduction to the America´s Civil Rights Movement
According to theEncyclopedia of the American Constitution, because “the basic rights of citizenship were not equally available to all Americans at the nation’s inception, civil rights movements involving groups excluded from full political participation (including males without property and african americans) have been a continuing feature of U.S. history.
Civil Rights Movement in the Period 1960-1980
The 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 Woolworth’s 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 nation’s 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 Kennedy’s 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 assassin’s 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 nation’s 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. (1)
Civil Rights Movement in the Period 1954-1985
In the spring and early summer of 1968, as US involvement in the Vietnam War continued to
expand, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Their murders sparked riots and protests in streets across the nation. Further violence flared later that summer at the Democratic National Convention when antiwar protestors clashed with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s police force. Republican candidate and former Vice President Richard Nixon responded to the turmoil by campaigning on a platform of “law and order”; that fall, he was elected president.
(Before) the killing of Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago on December 4, 1969, (…) in 1967, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover launched a new, secret program under a domestic surveillance initiative called Counter Intelligence Program or COINTELPRO. The new program was designed to crush what the
department called “militant black nationalist organizations,” which included the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC). With President Nixon’s approval, COINTELPRO intensified years of covert surveillance of
civil rights organizations in an effort to undermine their leadership.
By late 1968, members of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the police had clashed in several
cities. The BPP, which Hoover called “the single greatest threat to the internal security of the United States,” became the focus of the FBI’s attention.
Using the Oakland chapter as a model (…), the BPP opened a new branch in Chicago’s West Side in 1968. Under the leadership of Fred Hampton and Bobby Rush, the new chapter started social service programs, including a free breakfast program. In the fall of 1969, after several police raids and other confrontations, the conflict between the BPP and the police escalated. In December, Chicago police raided Fred Hampton’s apartment. Hampton and Clark were shot dead.
Despite police attempts to portray the shootings as self-defense, evidence produced by independent investigators indicated that the police had likely murdered the two Panthers.
Following Hampton’s death, critics of the criminal justice system expressed growing distrust of
the FBI and its “counterintelligence” program. In March 1971, political activists broke into the FBI
office in Media, Pennsylvania, and uncovered evidence that the FBI engaged in widespread spying and civil rights violations. The scale of FBI surveillance and harassment of radicals, civil rights activists, and black Americans suspected of “subversive” activities highlighted the connections between law enforcement and racial oppression in the United States. Further analysis by social scientists exposed the disproportionate incarceration of minorities in the US penal system. As a result, some activists shifted their focus from working in the streets to reforming the criminal justice system and clamored for its reform.
In the Attica State Correctional Facility, in upstate New York, black and Latino inmates, who constituted the majority of prisoners, lived in inhumane conditions and were subjected to routine abuse by the predominantly white correctional staff. Influenced by the ideas of black power (…), the prisoners began to agitate for more humane and dignified treatment. When news of the killing of Black Panther George Jackson by correctional officers in a California prison reached Attica on August 21, 1971, troubled prisoners protested his death. Three weeks later, a fight between two prisoners and guards sparked a full-scale revolt in the prison. After a violent takeover, inmates subdued guards and established new prison leadership. They then demanded that the state negotiate a resolution of their demands, which included an amnesty for the insurgents, increased wages, and educational opportunities for prisoners.
Negotiations with state officials broke down, however, when New York Governor Nelson
Rockefeller refused to grant amnesty for those participating in the uprising. The standoff continued until Rockefeller ordered two hundred state troopers to storm the prison. During the assault, thirty-nine people died (ten of whom were hostages), and eighty-eight were seriously injured. Evidence produced subsequently proved that all casualties had been inflicted by state troopers and prison guards. Testimonies and news footage also showed that all prisoners were subjected to barbaric treatment in the wake of the uprising.
Despite the termination of COINTELPRO in 1971, the murder of Black Panthers by local police,
other revelations of FBI illegal activity, and the criminalization of minorities in the 1960s and 1970s, provided strong evidence that there were fundamental flaws in the US law enforcement system. (2)
Resources
Notes and References
- ”An Outline of American History”(1994), a publication of the United States Information Agency (USIA). Editor: Howard Cincotta
- A Study Guide by Blackside Publication
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