Yaolee Chen

HIS 359 The Class Discussion

The Civil Rights Movement

Robert McCoy

1. The primary goals of the civil rights movement in the years leading up to 1965 were for the economic equality.
2. The civil rights movement of the 1960s called the “Second Reconstruction” because from 1960 to 1965, the desegregation was the purpose of Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers. Institution and organization from the north, like CORE and SNCCS, encouraged the civil rights movement. But after 1965, the civil rights movement had shifted from non-violence to violence to the use of the violence; and, the whites were not allowed to join into the black organization. National conferences on black power were held annually beginning in 1966. The increasingly radical and separatist resolutions agreed upon at these gatherings called for a boycott of the military draft by blacks, self-defense training for black youths, and the partition of the country into separate black and white nations. The patter of the black reformation was like the reconstruction right after the Civil War that the northerners forced the southerner to free the slave. And like the first reconstruction, by 1875, poverty, discrimination, violence continued in the south, the African Americans of the late 1960s wanted them to be separated from the white community and lunched on a “no revolutionary nationalism” in the second reconstruction. Both were legacy, the speech of the King became “I Have a Dream?” because the black power prevented it to happen.
3. The struggle for black freedom flower during the 1960s was by the legal legislation procedure of the Civil Right Act of 1964 and the Voting Civil Right Act of 1965.
4. The response of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations: Kennedy had a bunch of idea, like the housing, education, and medication for the poor. But many of the Kennedy’s ideas were opposed by the congress. Yet, in Johnson’s administration, Luther led the multitude lunched on Washington, Johnson pressed on the legislation procedure and the congress had no choice but grant the equal rights to the blacks. Since, the federal protection was granted to the blacks.
5. An explanation on the Black Nationalism: Elder bridge Cleave ton and Henry P Newton, based on the Black Parthenon Party (a party led the blacks to shot at the policemen on the streets with machine guns), said no revolutionary nationalism. The Black Nationalism is worse than the Black Parthenon Party because it uses violence to attack the whites, and yet, called their action “ a self-defense”. In the 1950s and 1960s the most prominent nationalist organization was the Lost-Found Nation of Islam, which had been established in Detroit in the 1930s and was quietly rehabilitating many blacks from society's "lower depths." Although Elijah Muhammad was its head, it was the charisma and articulate rage of Malcolm X, his chief aide that captured the attention of black people as a whole, broadening the influence of the organization. Its preoccupation with race, however, rather than broader human values, was at sharp variance with classical nationalist thought. In 1964, with his influence growing in the civil rights movement, Malcolm X left the Nation. Like Garvey's emphasis on color distinctions, Malcolm X placed his nationalism outside the classical tradition. The Black Nationalism continues to grow after his assassination of 1965. Another name for the blacks nationalism is the “Black Power”, and it exists even till today in the American society.