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The Civil-Rights Movement
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From 1952 to 1975, the civil-rights movement shifted from nonviolent civil disobedience, associated with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., to "black power," associated with Malcolm X. What are the causes and results of this evolution?
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Respond to the statement, specifying whether you partly or entirely agree or disagree, and answer the question. Use your knowledge of the time period and the sources provided to support your arguments.
After looking at the documents, establish a thesis that addresses the question. Whatever position you take, be sure to address the who, what, when, and especially the why in your response. Be sure to address the counterargument—what historians might say in opposition to your thesis. Remember that "civil disobedience" and "black power" may have multiple meanings, so be sure to define your terms carefully. Do not forget to consider the point of view of the source, particularly regarding class, race, and location. Note the source of each document—often who is speaking is as important as what is being said.
Select three of the following topics to explore in your answer the question above:
1. the evolution of the Rev. Martin Luther King's priorities
2. the evolution of Malcolm X's priorities
3. the differences between the African American experience in the North and in the South
4. the role of the federal government
5. the relative importance of legal, political, and economic issues
6. the influence of the Vietnam War, the antiwar movement, and the counterculture
7. relations between the SCLC, SNCC, NAACP, CORE, and Black Panthers
Primary source:
Brown v. Board of Education, Supreme Court decision, 1954.
Background information: This landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 declared the segregation of black and white children in American public schools to be unconstitutional.
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To separate [black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. . . . Any language in Plessy v. Ferguson contrary to this finding is rejected. We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. . . . [Separate educational facilities therefore violate] the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
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Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). Full
text of the decision is at http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=347&invol=483.
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Primary source: Bayard Rustin, "From Protest to Politics," magazine article, 1965.
Background information: Bayard Rustin (1910–87), one of Martin Luther King's closest advisors, was a key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington.
The decade spanned by the 1954 Supreme Court decision on school desegregation and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 will undoubtedly be recorded as the period in which the legal foundations of racism in America were destroyed... On the other hand, without making light of the human sacrifices involved in the direct-action tactics (sit-ins, freedom rides, and the rest) that were so instrumental to this achievement, we must recognize that in desegregating public accommodations, we affected institutions which are relatively peripheral both to the American socio-economic order and to the fundamental conditions of life of the Negro people. In a highly industrialized, 20th-century civilization, we hit Jim Crow precisely where it was most anachronistic, dispensable, and vulnerable—in hotels, lunch counters, terminals, libraries, swimming pools, and the like. For in these forms, Jim Crow does impede the flow of commerce in the broadest sense: it is a nuisance in a society on the move (and on the make). Not surprisingly, therefore, it was the most mobility-conscious and relatively liberated groups in the Negro community—lower-middle-class college students—who launched the attack that brought down this imposing but hollow structure.
The term "classical" appears especially apt for this phase of the civil rights movement. But in the few years that have passed since the first flush of sit-ins, several developments have taken place that have complicated matters enormously. One is the shifting focus of the movement in the South, symbolized by Birmingham; another is the spread of the revolution to the North; and the third, common to the other two, is the expansion of the movement's base in the Negro community... No longer were Negroes satisfied with integrating lunch counters. They now sought advances in employment, housing, school integration, police protection, and so forth.
Thus, the movement in the South began to attack areas of discrimination which were not so remote from the Northern experience as were Jim Crow lunch counters...
My quarrel with the [militant] tendency in the civil rights movement . . . parallels my quarrel with the moderates outside the movement. As the latter lack the vision or will for fundamental change, the former lack a realistic strategy for achieving it. For such a strategy they substitute militancy. But militancy is a matter of posture and volume and not of effect...
The role of the civil rights movement in the reorganization of American political life is programmatic as well as strategic. We are challenged now to broaden our social vision, to develop functional programs with concrete objectives. We need to propose alternatives to technological unemployment, urban decay, and the rest. We need to be calling for public works and training, for national economic planning, for federal aid to education, for attractive public housing—all this on a sufficiently massive scale to make a difference... We cannot claim to have answers to all the complex problems of modern society. That is too much to ask of a movement still battling barbarism in Mississippi. But we can agitate the right questions by probing at the contradictions which still stand in the way of the "Great Society." The questions having been asked, motion must begin in the larger society, for there is a limit to what Negroes can do alone.
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Bayard Rustin, "From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement," Commentary, February 1965, pp. 25, 30.
Reprinted by permission from
Commentary
all rights reserved.
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Primary source: Lyndon B. Johnson, "To Fulfill These Rights," commencement address, 1965.
Background information: President Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–73) made this landmark speech to students at Howard University in Washington, D.C., a historically black institution, to outline the Great Society program.
[ . . . ]
In far too many ways American Negroes have been another nation; deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope.
[ . . . ]
In our time change has come to this nation. The American Negro, acting with impressive restraint, has peacefully protested and marched, entered the courtrooms and the seats of government, demanding a justice that has long been denied. The voice of the Negro was the call to action. But it is a tribute to America that, once aroused, the courts and the Congress, the President and most of the people, have been the allies of progress . . .
[ . . . ]
The voting rights bill will be the latest and among the most important, in a long series of victories. But this victory—as Winston Churchill said of another triumph for freedom— "is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
That beginning is freedom; and the barriers to that freedom are tumbling down. Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society—to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others.
But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.
You do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.
Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.
This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and equality as a result. . . .
[ . . . ]
There is no single easy answer to all of these problems.
Jobs are part of the answer. They bring the income which permits a man to provide for his family.
Decent homes in decent surroundings and a chance to learn—an equal chance to learn—are part of the answer.
Welfare and social programs better designed to hold families together are part of the answer.
Care for the sick is part of the answer.
An understanding heart by all Americans is another big part of the answer.
And to all these fronts—and a dozen more—I will dedicate the expanding efforts of the Johnson Administration.
[ . . . ]
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Lyndon B. Johnson, "To Fulfill These Rights," (4 June 1965) in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1966), 2:635–40.
Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum at the National Archives and Records Administration.
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Primary source: Stokley Carmichael, "What We Want," essay, 1966.
Background information: Stokely Carmichael (1941–88), born in Trinidad, invented the rallying cry of "Black Power" in Mississippi, in 1966, as a leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He left America in 1969 for Africa, where he helped found the All-African People's Revolutionary Party.
One of the tragedies of the struggle against racism is that up to now there has been no national organization which could speak to the growing militancy of young black people in the urban ghetto. There has been only a civil rights movement, whose tone of voice was adapted to an audience of liberal whites. It served as a sort of buffer zone between them and angry young blacks. . . .
[ . . . ]
An organization which claims to be working for the needs of a community—as SNCC [Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee] does—must work to provide that community with a position of strength from which to make its voice heard. . . .
Black power can be clearly defined for those who do not attach the fears of white America to their questions about it. We should begin with the basic fact that black Americans have two problems: they are poor and they are black. All other problems arise from this two-sided reality. . . . Any program to end racism must address itself to that double reality. . . .
[ . . . ]
Ultimately, the economic foundations of this country must be shaken if black people are to control their lives. The colonies of the United States—and this includes the black ghettoes within its borders, north and south—must be liberated. For a century, this nation has been like an octopus of exploitation, its tentacles stretching from Mississippi and Harlem to South America, the Middle East, southern Africa, and Vietnam; the form of the exploitation varies from area to area but the essential result has been the same—a powerful few have been maintained and enriched at the expense of the poor and voiceless colored masses. This pattern must be broken. As its grip loosens here and there around the world, the hopes of black Americans become more realistic. For racism to die, a totally different America must be born.
[ . . . ]
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Stokley Carmichael, "What We Want," The New York Review of Books 7, no. 4 (22 September 1966): 5–6.
Courtesy of
The New York Review of Books
.
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Primary source:
Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, photograph.
Background information: Bobby Seale (1936– ) and Huey Newton (1942–89), cofounders of the Marxist Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, in 1966, advocated self-determination and self-rule for black Americans in contrast to the nonviolent, integrationist strategy of Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–68) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
San Francisco Examiner. Used with permission.
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Primary source: "A group of Negro Students . . . ," photograph, 1960.
Background information: In 1960, students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, a historically black institution, defied segregation by sitting at the luncheon counter of the F.W. Woolworth store in Greensboro.
"A group of Negro Students . . . ," photograph, 2 February 1960.
New York World-Telegram and Sun Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division. Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-114749 (9-9).
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Primary source: "October 1966 Black Panther Party
Platform and Program."
Background information: Bobby Seale (1936– ) and Huey Newton (1942–89), cofounders of the Marxist Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, in 1966, advocated self-determination and self-rule for black Americans in contrast to the nonviolent, integrationist strategy of Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–68) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community. . . .
2. We want full employment for our people. . .
3. We want an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our Black Community. . .
4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings . . .
5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in present-day society . . .
6. We want all Black men to be exempt from military service . . .
7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of Black people . . .
8. We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails . . .
9. We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States . . .
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations–supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the Black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate, for the purpose of determining the will of Black people as to their national destiny . . .
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"October 1966 Black Panther Party Platform and Program," at The Sixties Project.
Sixties Project, is copyright (c) 1993 by the Author or by Viet Nam Generation, Inc., all rights reserved. This text may be used, printed, and archived in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of U.S. Copyright law. This text may not be archived, printed, or redistributed in any form for a fee, without the consent of the copyright holder. This notice must accompany any redistribution of the text. The Sixties Project, sponsored by Viet Nam Generation Inc. and the Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, is a collective of humanities scholars working together on the Internet to use electronic resources to provide routes of collaboration and make available primary and secondary sources for researchers, students, teachers, writers and librarians interested in the 1960s.
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Primary source: "Chocolate City," song lyrics, 1975.
Background information: The militant black-power phase of the civil-rights movement had its musical corollary in the rise of funk, an urban, gritty genre most often associated in the late 1960s with James Brown (1928– ) and Sly and the Family Stone. The band Parliament burst onto the national scene in the mid-1970s.
What's happenin' C.C.?
They still call it the White House, but that's a temporary condition too.
Can you dig it C.C.?
To each its reach and if I don't cop it, it ain't mine to have.
But I'll be reachin' for ya, cause I love ya C.C., right on.
There's a lot of Chocolate Cities around:
We got Newark, we've got Gary;
Somebody told me we got L.A.
And we're workin' on Atlanta.
Gainin' on ya . . .
Hey C.C., they say you're jive and game and can't be changed.
But on the positive side, you're my piece of the rock, and I love you, C.C.
Can you dig it?
We didn't get our forty acres and a mule, but we did get you, C.C.
Gainin' on ya . . .
God bless C.C. and its vanilla suburbs.
Gainin' on ye . . .
What's happenin' black? Brother black. Blood even . . .
And when they come to march on ya
Tell 'em to make sure they got their James Brown pass
And don't be surprised if Ali is in the White House . . .
And Miss Aretha Franklin, First Lady. . . .
A Chocolate City is no dream,
It's my piece of the rock. . . .
God bless Chocolate City and its vanilla suburbs . . . .
Gainin' on ya! . . .
Just got New York, I'm told.
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Copyright 1991 by Bridgeport Music Inc. (BMI). All Rights reserved. Used By Permission
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Primary source: Martin Luther King
Jr., "Beyond Vietnam," speech, 1967.
Background information: This speech was delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City.
Martin Luther King Jr., "Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam," speech (4 April 1967), at http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/speeches/Beyond_Vietnam.pdf.
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