|
| |
The Civil Rights Movement
From: The New York Public Library
| By:
The Schomburg Center |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
From the end of the Civil War through the twentieth century until today, the modern civil rights movement has spread widely across a broad spectrum of political ideologies. The accommodationist policies of Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent resistance campaigns vary greatly from the Black Power initiatives of Stokely Carmichael and Marcus Garvey's Pan-Africanism. The following excerpt from The New York Public Library's African American Desk Reference describes these different movements and their common interest in celebrating the African American community. |
 he modern civil rights movement began in the South during the years after the Civil War, when newly emancipated African Americans fought for their rightful place in society. The earliest civil rights demonstrations took place during the late 1860s and early 1870s, as African Americans forced an end to segregated public transport in cities such as Charleston, Richmond, New Orleans and Savannah. These early victories were negated by the rising tide of Jim Crow laws in the South, and civil rights efforts were repressed throughout the latter part of the 19th century, when accommodationist policies of Booker T. Washington held sway. A revival of civil rights activity was heralded by the emergence of the Niagara Movement and the rise of the NAACP during the first decade of the 20th century. |
The modern civil rights movement
The modern civil rights movement matured after World War II, when many African Americans who had served with honor in the war were no longer willing to accept racial discrimination and injustice in the country they had fought so hard to defend. Further, many blacks had made economic gains in the wartime economy and used their newfound wealth to further their education. Membership in the NAACP flourished, and its increased financial support from both whites and blacks helped push through the passage of historic civil rights legislation. The NAACP had begun its concerted legal campaign against segregation in the 1930s. In 1941, A. Philip Randolph's March on Washington Committee was a major step forward and led to the creation of a federal commission to promote integration in wartime defense industries. |
The civil rights movement entered its major phase after the 1954 Brown decision outlawing segregation in public schools; at this point, African American leaders determined to break down all racial barriers, and European Americans in the South dug in for a last desperate strand. Events such as the Montgomery bus boycott (1955-1956), the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) (1957) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) (1960), the Freedom Rides (1961), the March on Washington (1963), and Freedom Summer (1964) were milestones in the successful struggle to abolish Jim Crow. |
Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, when the attention of African Americans turned to racism and de facto segregation outside the South, there was widespread disagreement about the future direction of the civil rights movement. The younger generation of civil rights workers was impatient with the tactics of nonviolence and gradualism, while their elders maintained faith in the tactics that had produced landmark victories in the past. In 1968, the assassination of Dr. King unleashed the pent-up anger of younger African Americans and also deprived the civil rights movement of its most dynamic and influential leader. From the 1970s on, civil rights advocates found themselves increasingly on the defensive, as political conservatives and other groups contested government efforts to integrate schools and implement affirmative-action programs. However, the growth of the African American voter participation and the number of African American officeholders on all levels, testifies to the fundamental achievements of the civil rights movement in the modern era. |
Black nationalism and Black Power
Although some post-Civil War black leaders believed that the American dream could and would include the African American people, many other African Americans, especially the poor, were dubious. They feared that African Americans would never be allowed to become equals either economically or politically in the bigoted political and social climate of the United States, and they espoused racial nationalism rather that integration. These "race first" advocates became known as black nationalists. |
Philosophically, the black-nationalist movement and its offshoot, the Black Power movement, extended the black-nationalist principles that were first espoused during the 19th century by leaders such as Martin Delany, Henry Highland Garnet and David Walker. In addition, these movements were given new impetus in the 20th century by Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. |
"Black Power," as first used by congressional representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and later by members of SNCC, meant a belief in economic and political self-help. The Black Power movement had its roots in the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) of Alabama, which emerged in 1965 as an all-black political party that chose the image of a black panther as its emblem. Despite harassment from whites, the LCFO put up a number of candidates in the November 1966 county elections, vying for offices such as sheriff, tax collector and coroner. Though the local Democratic Party used a variety of shady tactics to ensure the defeat of all the black candidates, the LCFO's success in galvanizing black voters had a powerful impact on other activists. SNCC chair Stokely Carmichael, a fervent supporter of the LCFO, formally proclaimed the advent of Black Power on June 17, 1966, when he addressed a rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, after being released from jail for an earlier confrontation with police. In his speech, Carmichael rejected the participation and direction of whites in the civil rights movement. He called upon African Americans to embrace their heritage, build their communities, and take over leadership of their own organizations. After the disappointment and frustrations of countless confrontations with hostile police and civilians in the segregated South, Carmichael was essentially espousing a more militant and confrontational approach to obtaining civil rights. |
Though condemned by mainstream civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, and Bayard Rustin, Carmichael's initiative had great resonance for younger African Americans frustrated by the entrenched nature of racism in American society. Black Power inspired Huey Newton and Bobby Seale to form the Black Panther Party the following October in Oakland, California. In July 1967, 1,000 delegates from all over the United States (as well as Bermuda and Nigeria) attended the National Conference on Black Power in Newark, New Jersey. Prominent participants included Maulana Karenga, Ossie Davis, Dick Gregory, James Farmer, H. Rap Brown, and Amiri Baraka. After conferring for three days, the delegates addressed numerous social and economic issues, advocating that African Americans secure a larger measure of control over their own communities and take greater pride in their heritage. Among the more radical proposals were calls for the formation of a black militia, affirmation of the right of African Americans to revolt, and for a national debate on partitioning the United States into separate black and white nations. |
The Black Power ideology also had roots in the Nation of Islam (NOI), which had long rejected the goal of integration while maintaining its own education system, military organization, and economic development program, under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad. In the late 1990s, Minister Louis Farrakhan of the NOI has been the most prominent proponent of the Black Power tradition. |
Pan-Africanism
As an intellectual and cultural movement, Pan-Africanism has two main goals: to foster unity among peoples of African descent across barriers of geography and language, and to celebrate the contributions of Africa to world history and civilization. Political ties between Africa and the Americas first developed through the colonization schemes of the early 19th century and developed further through the work of religious missionaries such as Alexander Crummell and early black nationalists such as Martin Delany and David Walker. Among the early organizations promoting Pan-African ideas was the U.S.-based African Civilization Society, founded in 1861 to promote Christianity, self-reliance, and self-government. |
Pan-Africanism entered a new phase in 1897, when the Trinidad-born lawyer Henry Sylvester Williams founded the Pan-African Association in London and laid the groundwork for a series of influential Pan-African conferences. The first of these, the London Conference of 1900, marked the first occasion on which the actual term Pan-Africanism was used in an international context. During the early years of the century, the Tuskegee Institute, the student body of which included a number of Africans, played an important role in fostering Pan-African ideals; in 1912, for example, Tuskegee hosted the International Conference on the Negro, a forum for planning African American religious and economic projects in Africa. Subsequently, W.E.B. Du Bois organized Pan-African Congresses in 1919 (Paris), 1921 (Paris, London and Brussels), and 1923 (London and Lisbon). Attended by delegates from the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa, the conferences coordinated efforts to end European colonialism in Africa and to champion black political rights worldwide. During this era, Pan-African ideas achieved their greatest popular impact through Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), founded in 1914. |
During the 1930s, blacks throughout the world supported Ethiopian resistance against Italian aggression, working mainly through the International Committee on Africa. After World War II, this organization, along with the Council on African Affairs, played an important role in the fight for African self-determination. To hasten the process, W.E.B. Du Bois organized the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, England, in 1945. The conference was notable for the participation of Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, and other prominent Africans, who at this time assumed leadership of the Pan-African movement. During the 1960s, Pan-African ideas exerted a powerful influence on African Americans, prompting the upsurge in black nationalism and Afrocentric ideas, a rejection of mainstream U.S. culture, the adoption of African-related dress and hairstyles, and the demand for African and African American Studies programs. In the following decades, numerous cultural and political links have been forged between Africa and the Americas. This was dramatically manifested during the 1980s and early 1990s as African American organizations such as TransAfrica persuaded U.S. government and business leaders to isolate the white-supremacist regime in South Africa. |
This feature is derived from pages 60-63 of The New York Public Library's African American Desk Reference, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. |
|
| |
