Civil Rights Activists

6 Key excerpts on "Civil Rights Activists"

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  Social Problems

  A Human Rights Perspective

  • Eric Bonds(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  10 Volunteerism, Activism, and the Pursuit of Human Rights

  Sometimes we in the United States tell ourselves comfortable myths about the origins of progressive social change. In one story, for instance, we like to think that politicians ultimately decided to abolish Jim Crow segregation because they were swept up in a broader cultural transformation happening across our country, being spurred on by the eloquence and wisdom of civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. While there is certainly some truth in the idea that changes in people’s thinking and attitudes can instigate broader changes in the priorities of governments, sociologists who have studied the Civil Rights Movement argue that the story is much more complicated. For example, conventional narratives of the Civil Rights Movement overlook the real person of Dr. King by glossing over the fact that he wasn’t simply on a mission to promote “diversity” in American institutions and did not only challenge legally codified racism, but rather sought to challenge the ways racism was embedded in the U.S. economy (Dyson 2001). Dr. King was also a strong critic of the Vietnam War and expressed a vision for the fundamental transformation of the United States in order to achieve justice, peace, and equality, both at home and around the world (King 1967).

  The typical stories we tell ourselves about social change also mislead us into thinking that the Civil Rights Movement’s victories came from the top down, rather than the bottom up. But sociologists who have studied the Civil Rights Movement stress that politicians did not end segregation because it was the right thing to do, but rather because thousands of people at the grassroots level were working in different ways—pushing, pressing, and putting their bodies on the line—to force otherwise reluctant politicians to act (McAdam 1983). The main lesson here is that the stark inequalities that threaten human rights do not typically diminish on their own accord. Even so, grassroots movements can sometimes create profound social changes that diminish inequalities, and when this happens governments can enact laws and create institutions that enhance human rights and wellbeing. In this chapter, we consider how grassroots movements can work to propel advances in human rights. We will situate these movements within our particular historical moment, which is one that is tumultuous and seems as if it could move toward either a more hopeful or a more menacing future in regard to the human condition. First, though, we will discuss the importance and limitations of volunteerism as a kind of human rights work.

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  In Defense of Populism

  Protest and American Democracy

  • Donald T. Critchlow(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press

    (Publisher)

  Those grassroots activists who engaged in the struggle to achieve the American creed that all men and women are created equal showed courage by putting themselves on the line. Even more courageous were the local residents, clergy, and average folks who enlisted in the struggle for their rights. The struggle was not without internal division, and many local projects failed more often than they succeeded. Confronted by racial violence and massive resistance, many young black and white activists turned in the mid-1960s to more radical agendas and rejected King’s call for nonviolent struggle.

  In the halls of Congress, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 provided legal protection for black Americans, as well as other groups faced with discrimination, including women, ethnic minorities, the aged, and religious groups. A broad rights revolution blossomed in America as other groups engaged in grassroots struggles to achieve their rights. The politics of the street set the context for legislative achievement and applied pressure on politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike, to support civil rights legislation. By the end of the 1960s, both political parties had endorsed civil rights in various ways. The northern-based Republican Party endorsed black civil rights earlier than did the southern-based Democratic Party, but under pressure exerted by Civil Rights Activists, both parties stood in favor of black civil rights.

  The struggle for civil rights at midcentury had deep roots in modern America. At the turn of the century, such black leaders as Harvard-educated W. E. B. Du Bois joined other activists to form the Niagara movement to protest passage of Jim Crow laws in the South in the 1890s, which disenfranchised black voters and legalized segregation of blacks in public places. In the 1920s and 1930s, activists protested racism in Hollywood, lynching in the South, and mistreatment of black Americans generally. World War II brought further struggle for black civil rights. Threats by A. Philip Randolph, founder and head of the Sleeping Car Porters, to organize a march on Washington demanding the end of discrimination in defense industries led President Franklin Roosevelt to respond by issuing Executive Order 8802 banning employment discrimination in wartime industries. In 1942, white and black Civil Rights Activists involved in the pacifist organization Friendship of Reconciliation, in which A. J. Muste played a leading role, formed the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The new organization pledged to use nonviolent resistance to end racial segregation.

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  The Black Experience in America

  From Civil Rights to the Present

  • Britannica Educational Publishing, Jeff Wallenfeldt(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Britannica Educational Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Still, in the early 21st century the ascent to the U.S. presidency of an African American, Barack Obama, seemed to reflect a transformation of American society with ramifications for the civil rights movement. Jesse Jackson in his own landmark campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988 had reached beyond the effort to mobilize African American voters and attempted to fashion a “Rainbow Coalition” of “red, yellow, brown, black, and white” Americans. Obama—whose father was a black Kenyan and mother was a white American—presented a life story grounded in a search for a satisfactory racial identity. Ultimately, Obama’s approach to the world and, arguably, his appeal to many voters were transracial, grounded in a sophisticated understanding of the complex nature of racial identity that was no longer merely dichotomous (no longer simply a matter of black or white). Given the deeply rooted racial conflicts of the American past, however, it is unlikely that Obama’s election signaled the start of a postracial era without divisive racial issues and controversies.

  ACTIVISM, ACTION, AND ACTS

  This section takes a close look at the organizations that were at the forefront of the civil rights movement and freedom struggle, including the strategies and tactics employed in the pursuit of justice and equality. It also considers the legal decisions and legislation that came about as a result of the civil rights struggle as well as some of the concepts and issues that are central to this aspect of African American history.

  AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

  Affirmative action, the active effort to improve employment or educational opportunities for members of minority groups and for women, began as a government remedy to the effects of long-standing discrimination against such groups. It has consisted of policies, programs, and procedures that give preferences to minorities and women in job hiring, admission to institutions of higher education, the awarding of government contracts, and other social benefits. The typical criteria for affirmative action are race, disability, gender, ethnic origin, and age.

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  Much Sound and Fury, or the New Jim Crow?

  The Twenty-First Century's Restrictive New Voting Laws and Their Impact

  • Michael A. Smith, Michael A. Smith(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 8

  Civil Rights Groups Respond

  Kevin Anderson

  Introduction

  The central question in a democratic government is, How are citizens’ preferences translated into public policy? Voting as an essential right in a democratic polity is a fundamental element of self-government, and for minority groups access to the ballot is critical to not only basic tenets of democracy but to the protection of rights relative to the majority within their society. How can minorities that historically have been discriminated against and have had to fight for full access to all the rights of full citizenship, respond to policy changes that might create obstacles to the ballot box and that, in context, might complicate other aspects of their everyday life?

  Over the course of American history, the response of civil rights groups and their allies can be roughly grouped into three categories. The legislative strategy is focused on changing the law, for example, the Civil Rights Act of 1965. The legal strategy focuses on seeking redress through the courts. This includes a series of rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court and lower courts declaring various state laws and practices unconstitutional, and it started well before the heyday of the civil rights era in the 1950s and 1960s. Finally, the protest strategy focuses on using protest as a means of building support and pressing for change. It is exemplified in the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Today the BlackLivesMatter movement has engaged on this front and represents a new perspective on voting rights in contemporary politics.

  Historical Strategic Responses

  African Americans have employed numerous tactics to secure and maintain access to the ballot box. At the core of each of these strategies is both an argument for the protection of the individual right to vote as essential to citizenship and the idea of perfecting democratic government in America. The earliest protest actions against voter exclusion rested on the idea of disenfranchisement as a violation of individual liberty inherent in denying citizens the right to vote. Over time, this concern was married to a broader argument that voter exclusion undermined the core idea of democratic government. These two principles helped define the strategic choices of those fighting for the elective franchise. The passage of Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments after the Civil War during the Reconstruction era created new opportunities for political activism. The Union Leagues, originally founded in Northern states during the Civil War to support the war effort, began organizing in the South to boost the new amendments by helping to register and mobilize voters in Southern cities, such as Richmond, Raleigh, and Nashville (Hahn, 2003). The work of these groups helped to undergird the first sustained government action taken to bring African Americans into the political arena. The ability of the national government to act on behalf of a formally excluded population established a pattern in which the goal of political activism for some within the newly freed population is to organize and use the national government to force the entire nation (specifically, state governments) to extend individual rights to all citizens. To define political rights in general, and access to the ballot specifically, as a national concern became a key aspect of the new African American political class.

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  Law and Social Justice in Higher Education

  • Crystal Renée Chambers(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 Student Activism and Institutional Transformation Off campus and on, acts of massive resistance juxtaposed nonviolent civilians against violent state actors, generating photo memories of the 1960s:

  … burning busses in 1961; the hate-filled distorted face on white housewives in New Orleans; fire hoses, dogs, and beatings in Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma, and other places; Sheriffs Bull Conner and Lawrence Rainey; James Meredith at Ole Miss in 1962; George Wallace at the University of Alabama in 1963.

  (Gamson, 1978, p. 15)

  College students across racial lines and institutional types were key actors, often depicted as foot soldiers of the civil rights struggle (Lovett, 2011; cf. Williamson, 2008). But they also contributed to changes that were fundamental to the organizational structure and institutional culture. No part of campus went untouched—academic affairs, student affairs, even business affairs bear the mark of this era.

  This chapter begins with a discussion of social movements, with a specific focus on the civil rights movement and the rise of student-led activism. The initial focus of student activism was civil rights in society more broadly, beginning with desegregation but then turning towards inclusion with the joinder of Latino/a, Native and Asian American rights. By the end of the 1960s, student energies were focused inward, on campus, and transformed colleges and universities into a form we now experience.

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  Encyclopedia of Modern Political Thought (set)

  • Gregory Claeys(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • CQ Press

    (Publisher)

  Morris also argues that later civil rights movements learned from the techniques of mass mobilization and nonviolent direct action used in the African American Civil Rights Movement, and during the 10 years after 1965, were remarkably successful in achieving their goals by applying these methods. He sees the African American civil rights movement from 1954 to 1965 as a model and an inspiration to movements addressing gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, and the rights of persons with disabilities. Forms of nonviolent direct action, such as sit-ins, Freedom Rides, marches, and various demonstrations, were modeled on those of Mahatma Gandhi and applied Gandhian techniques to African American civil rights movements of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Without the techniques developed during these movements and the inspiration of their successes, it is hard to imagine the successes that the many other civil rights movements subsequently achieved after 1965.

  The era of mass civil rights activism is over for now, but it has led to major improvements in the civil rights of African Americans, Indigenous peoples, women, Hispanics, the disabled, and the GLBT community. Although progress often entailed significant human costs, and some progress has been lost, the current high levels of civil rights for these historically oppressed populations would have seemed inconceivable 50 years ago.

  Stephen C. Thomas

  See also Affirmative Action ; Civil Disobedience ; Equality and Egalitarianism ; King, Martin Luther, Jr. ; Rights, Natural and Human

  Further Readings

  Adam , B.

  1987 . The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement. Boston : Twayne .

  Branch , T.

  1988 . Parting the Waters: America in the King Years. New York : Simon and Schuster .

  Carson , C.

  1981 . In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge : Harvard University Press .

  Davis , A.

  1981 . Women, Race and Class. New York : Random House .

  Du Bois , W. E. B

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