The Beginnings of the American Civil Rights Movement

 What led to the commencement of the civil rights movement?
First, the American civil rights movement refers to the mass protest movement against racial segregation and discrimination in the southern United States that came to national prominence during the mid-1950s. This movement had its roots in the centuries-long efforts of enslaved Africans and their descendants to resist racial oppression and abolish the institution of slavery.
Although enslaved people were emancipated as a result of the American Civil War and were then granted basic civil rights through the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, struggles to secure federal protection of these rights continued during the next century. Through nonviolent protest, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s broke the pattern of public facilities being segregated by “race” in the South and achieved the most important breakthrough in equal-rights legislation for African Americans since the Reconstruction period (1865–77).
Although the passage in 1964 and 1965 of major civil rights legislation was victorious for the movement, by then militant Black activists had begun to see their struggle as a freedom or liberation movement not just seeking civil rights reforms but instead confronting the enduring economic, political, and cultural consequences of past racial oppression.
Now, American history has been marked by persistent and determined efforts to expand the scope and inclusiveness of civil rights. Although equal rights for all were affirmed in the founding documents of the United States, many of the new country’s inhabitants were denied essential rights. Enslaved Africans and indentured servants did not have the inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that British colonists asserted to justify their Declaration of Independence.
Nor were they included among the “People of the United States” who established the Constitution in order to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Instead, the Constitution protected slavery by allowing the importation of enslaved persons until 1808 and providing for the return of enslaved people who had escaped to other states.
Well, as the United States expanded its boundaries, Native American peoples resisted conquest and absorption. Individual states, which determined most of the rights of American citizens, generally limited voting rights to white property-owning males, and other rights—such as the right to own land or serve on juries—were often denied on the basis of racial or gender distinctions.
A small proportion of Black Americans lived outside the slave system, but those so-called “free Blacks” endured racial discrimination and enforced segregation. Although some enslaved persons violently rebelled against their enslavement (see slave rebellions), African Americans and other subordinated groups mainly used nonviolent means—protests, legal challenges, pleas and petitions addressed to government officials, as well as sustained and massive civil rights movements—to achieve gradual improvements in their status.
Then, during the first half of the 19th century, movements to extend voting rights to non-property-owning white male labourers resulted in the elimination of most property qualifications for voting, but this expansion of suffrage was accompanied by brutal suppression of American Indians and increasing restrictions on free Blacks. Owners of enslaved people in the South reacted to the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia by passing laws to discourage antislavery activism and prevent the teaching of enslaved people to read and write. Despite this repression, a growing number of Black Americans freed themselves from slavery by escaping or negotiating agreements to purchase their freedom through wage labour.
By the 1830s, free Black communities in the Northern states had become sufficiently large and organised to hold regular national conventions, where Black leaders gathered to discuss alternative strategies of racial advancement. In 1833 a small minority of whites joined with Black antislavery activists to form the American Anti-Slavery Society under the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison.
During this time, Frederick Douglass became the most famous of the formerly enslaved persons who joined the abolition movement. His autobiography—one of many slave narratives—and his stirring orations heightened public awareness of the horrors of slavery. Although Black leaders became increasingly militant in their attacks against slavery and other forms of racial oppression, their efforts to secure equal rights received a major setback in 1857, when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected African American citizenship claims. The Dred Scott decision stated that the country’s founders had viewed Blacks as so inferior that they had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” This ruling—by declaring unconstitutional the Missouri Compromise (1820), through which Congress had limited the expansion of slavery into western territories—ironically strengthened the antislavery movement, because it angered many whites who did not hold enslaved people. The inability of the country’s political leaders to resolve that dispute fueled the successful presidential campaign of Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the antislavery Republican Party. Lincoln’s victory in turn prompted the Southern slave states to secede and form the Confederate States of America in 1860–61.
And Although Lincoln did not initially seek to abolish slavery, his determination to punish the rebellious states and his increasing reliance on Black soldiers in the Union army prompted him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) to deprive the Confederacy of its enslaved property. After the American Civil War ended, Republican leaders cemented the Union victory by gaining the ratification of constitutional amendments to abolish slavery (Thirteenth Amendment) and to protect the legal equality of formerly enslaved persons (Fourteenth Amendment) and the voting rights of male ex-slaves (Fifteenth Amendment).
Despite those constitutional guarantees of rights, almost a century of civil rights agitation and litigation would be required to bring about consistent federal enforcement of those rights in the former Confederate states. Moreover, after federal military forces were removed from the South at the end of Reconstruction, white leaders in the region enacted new laws to strengthen the “Jim Crow” system of racial segregation and discrimination. In its Plessy v. Ferguson decision (1896), the Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” facilities for African Americans did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, ignoring evidence that the facilities for Blacks were inferior to those intended for caucasian people.
The Southern system of white supremacy was accompanied by the expansion of European and American imperial control over nonwhite people in Africa and Asia as well as in island countries of the Pacific and Caribbean regions. Like African Americans, most nonwhite people throughout the world were colonised or economically exploited and denied basic rights, such as the right to vote. With few exceptions, women of all races everywhere were also denied suffrage rights.
NOTABLE DEVELOPMENTS DURING THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
This brings us to the second question regarding what were some of the notable developments during the civil rights movement? First is the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In December 1955 NAACP activist Rosa Parks’s impromptu refusal to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, sparked a sustained bus boycott that inspired mass protests elsewhere to speed the pace of civil rights reform. After boycott supporters chose Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr., to head the newly established Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), King soon became the country’s most influential advocate of the concepts of nonviolent resistance forged by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Despite the bombing of King’s house and other acts of intimidation by segregationists, MIA leaders were able to sustain the boycott until November 1956, when the NAACP won a Supreme Court order to desegregate the bus system. In 1957 King and his supporters founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to provide an institutional framework supporting local protest movements.
Another notable development in this period took place when Four Black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, sparked a new phase of the Southern civil rights movement on February 1, 1960, when they staged a sit-in at a drugstore lunch counter reserved for whites. In the wake of the Greensboro sit-in, thousands of students in at least 60 communities, mostly in the upper, urbanised South, joined the sit-in campaign during the winter and spring of 1960. Despite efforts by the NAACP, SCLC, and CORE to impose some control over the sit-in movement, the student protesters formed their own group, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), to coordinate the new movement. SNCC gradually acquired a staff of full-time organisers, many of whom were former student protesters, and launched a number of local projects designed to achieve desegregation and voting rights. Although SNCC’s nonviolent tactics were influenced by King, SNCC organisers typically stressed the need to develop self-reliant local leaders to sustain grassroots movements.
Third was the Freedom rides of 1961. The Freedom Rides signaled the beginning of a period when civil rights protest activity grew in scale and intensity. CORE sponsored the first group of bus riders who sought to desegregate Southern bus terminals. After attacks by white mobs in Alabama turned back the initial protesters, student activists from Nashville and other centres of sit-in activities continued the rides into Jackson, Mississippi, where they were promptly arrested for disobeying racial segregation rules. Despite U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s plea for a “cooling-off” period, the Freedom Rides demonstrated that militant but nonviolent young activists could confront Southern segregation at its strongest points and pressure the federal government to intervene to protect the constitutional rights of African Americans. The Freedom Rides encouraged similar protests elsewhere against segregated transportation facilities and stimulated local campaigns in many Southern communities that had been untouched by the student sit-ins.
SCLC leaders worked with Birmingham, Alabama, minister Fred Shuttlesworth to launch a major campaign featuring confrontations between nonviolent demonstrators and the often brutal law-enforcement personnel directed by Birmingham’s police commissioner, Eugene T. (“Bull”) Connor. Televised confrontations between nonviolent protesters and vicious policemen with clubs and police dogs attracted Northern support and resulted in federal intervention to bring about a settlement that included civil rights concessions. King’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” of April 16, 1963, defended civil disobedience and warned that frustrated African Americans might turn to Black nationalism, a development that he predicted would lead inevitably to a frightening racial nightmare. International news coverage of the Birmingham clashes prompted Pres. John F. Kennedy to introduce legislation that eventually became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Similar mass protests in dozens of other cities made white Americans more aware of the antiquated Jim Crow system, though Black militancy also prompted a white “backlash.” Those mass protests culminated on August 28, 1963, in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which attracted over 200,000 participants. King used his concluding “I Have a Dream” speech at the march as an opportunity to link Black civil rights aspirations with traditional American political values. He insisted that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution comprised “a promissory note” guaranteeing all Americans “the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
And while media attention concentrated on the urban demonstrations in Birmingham, the voter-registration campaign in rural Mississippi and Alabama, spearheaded by SNCC and groups under the auspices of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), stimulated the emergence of resilient indigenous leadership and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). COFO director Robert Moses spearheaded a summer project in 1964 that brought together voting rights organisers and hundreds of Northern white volunteers. While the murders of three civil rights workers focused national attention on Mississippi, the MFDP, led by Fannie Lou Hamer, failed in its attempt to unseat the regular all-white delegation at the 1964 National Democratic Convention. During the following year, however, mass protests in the Alabama cities of Selma and Montgomery led Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson to introduce legislation that became the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
MODERN CONTINUATION OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT AND ITS CRITIQUES
This brings us to the final question regarding what are the critiques that have followed the modern continuation of the civil rights movement? As we’ve alluded to, despite its aspirations, the civil rights movement was not without critique. However, this has become even more heightened in the 21st century manifestation of the civil right’s movement – especially when looking at the Black Lives Matter movement. Black Lives Matter (also known as BLM), is an international social movement, formed in the United States in 2013, allegedly dedicated to fighting racism and anti-Black violence, especially in the form of police brutality. The name Black Lives Matter is also said to be aimed at signalling condemnation of the unjust killings of Black people by police (Black people are far more likely to be killed by police in the United States than white people) and the demand that society value the lives and humanity of Black people as much as it values the lives and humanity of white people.
However, BLM has been the subject of varied and apt criticism. First, it is critiqued on its ideology and tactics. For instance, some conservatives, such as Mike Gonzalez of The Heritage Foundation, have accused Black Lives Matter of being a Marxist movement based on a comment by one of its co-founders saying that she and another co-founder “are trained Marxists.” In addition, even some black civil rights leaders such as Cecil “Chip” Murray, Najee Ali, and Earl Ofari Hutchinson have criticised BLM as disrespectful and ineffective, with Ali claiming “all they can do is disrupt and make noise.” Economist Glenn Loury, while supportive of the fundamentals of the movement, has criticised backlash against “White politicians who state All Lives Matter” and the apparent polarising effects of the movement.[24]
In his 2018 book The Once and Future Liberal, Mark Lilla criticises Black Lives Matter as part of his broader left-wing critique of identity politics. Though he agreed with their aims, he called their rhetoric “a textbook example on how to not build solidarity”, arguing that the campaign alienates people with their negative attitude toward American society and law enforcement and with their overbearing tactics. He also compared them unfavourably to the civil rights movement leaders, who he says were “consciously appealing to what people share” instead of emphasising differences of race and other identities. But, because BLM appears to be impervious to irony and embarrassment, Lilla has in turn been criticised for apparently “trolling disguised as erudition” and of “making white supremacy respectable, again”. However, his sentiments are not wrong.
Some critics accuse Black Lives Matter of being anti-police and endorsing violence against the police. Sgt. Demetrick Pennie of the Dallas Police Department filed an unsuccessful lawsuit against Black Lives Matter in September 2016, which accused the group of inciting a “race war.”Marchers using a BLM banner were recorded in a video chanting, “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon” at the Minnesota State Fair. Law enforcement groups claim the chant promotes death to police. The protest organiser disputed that interpretation, saying: “What we are promoting is that if black people who kill police officers are going to fry, then we want police officers to face the same treatment that we face as civilians for killing officers.”
Tied to this, some in black community leaders have come out against the movement as disconnected from the people it claims to represent. In opposing August 2020 budget cuts, New York City Councilman I. Daneek Miller, co-chairman of the council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus opposed reducing police funding and stated, “Black folks want to be safe like everyone else…we can’t allow folks from outside our community to lecture us about Black lives.” Vanessa Gibson of the Bronx’s 16th Council District stated that, “My working-class people, my homeowners, my tenants, my neighbours—they are not out there screaming and yelling, because they have to work.” Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark, New Jersey, called “defund the police” a “bourgeois liberal” solution to racism.
Then, of course, there is corruption and mismanagement of funds. In particular, allegations of mismanagement of funds by the organisation Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation were raised after funds were used to purchase a home that cost $6 million in southern California to be used as a facility for a Black artists fellowship.The property included six bedrooms, a recording studio, and a swimming pool.
But, it is worth noting that BLM also has a biassed perspective on justice, which was exposed with the Georgel Floyd case. For some context, George Floyd was being apprehended for using counterfeit bills, and at the time this was happening, he had 4 times the lethal amount of fentanyl in his system – this is why he could not breathe (hypoxia). The police weren’t apprehending him in a “violent and fatal manner” (in fact, he asked to be put on the ground) – instead, they were dealing with an erratic person (while they did not know what he was on).
This is not to say that people who overdose on fentanyl must be treated poorly or even die without much probe or consequences – emphatically no. Rather this is to bring to attention the fact that the George Floyd case largely became about social justice imposed by the BLM and not genuine justice. The facts on that case were so distorted and less considered in many discussions; in fact, what many people know is simply that a white police officer put his knee on a black man’s neck and suffocated him to death while another officer restrained the black man (which is obviously not accurate).
And this is worth noting even today because the portrayal of George Floyd as a victim of being the wrong race, in the wrong place at the wrong time is creating a harmful narrative – that if not careful, will come back to harm the African American community. It does not take away from genuine instances of racism to acknowledge when an incident is not racist. In this case, George Floyd was a previous violent offender, who was being apprehended at the time for another crime. He also had 4 times the lethal amount of fentanyl in his body, while behaving erratically. It’s acceptable to admit this, while advocating for a less racist society. It is also acceptable to say that George Floyd was not and never was killed by racist police officers; instead George Floyd was killed by a drug overdose.
And with these critiques discussed, perhaps it is time that the civil rights movement in the US was assessed to determine its focus and relevance today.
~Written by with Lindokuhle Mabaso.