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. The vast expanses of almost exclusively black settlement that exploded on the national scene during the riotous 1960s were twentieth-century northern creations. On the eve of the great migration of southern blacks, northern cities, proportionately, held infinitesimal black populations. As was the case in the South, they lived in scattered clusters. With the rapid increase in black population, however, larger, more densely settled black neighborhoods developed. The blacks' disproportionate poverty and cultural affinities, and even the actions of some progressive reformers who tried to serve them on a segregated basis, contributed to their residential isolation. But there is no question that white hostility, vented as rapidly industrializing metropolises obliterated their old, compact "walking cities," radically altered the use of urban space and tangibly expressed the desire to subordinate and control the new black presence.
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 by the use of the non-violence. 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 even allowed to join into the black organization after the year 1965. 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 black struggle for freedom of the 1960s had its roots in the US history. After the Civil Rights Act of 1875 there was no more federal legislation in this field until the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, although several states passed their own civil-rights laws. The 20th-century struggle to expand civil rights for African Americans has involved the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Urban League, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and others. The civil-rights movement, led especially by Martin Luther King, Jr., in the late 1950s and 60s, and the executive leadership provided by President Lyndon B. Johnson, encouraged the passage of the most comprehensive civil-rights legislation to date, the Civil Rights Act of 1964; it prohibited discrimination for reason of color, race, religion, or national origin in places of public accommodation covered by interstate commerce, i.e., restaurants, hotels, motels, and theaters. Besides dealing with the desegregation of public schools, the act, in Title VII, forbade discrimination in employment. Title VII also prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex. So, the struggle for the freedom flowered at this time when the Civil Right Act of 1964 was passed.
In 1965 the Voting Rights Act was passed, which placed federal observers at polls to ensure equal voting rights. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 dealt with housing and real estate discrimination. In addition to congressional action on civil rights, there has been action by other branches of the government. The most notable of these were the Supreme Court decisions in 1954 and 1955 declaring racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, and the court's rulings in 1955 banning segregation in publicly financed parks, playgrounds, and golf courses. But the desegregation was not so welcome by all the American people; in some places, Mississippi for example, in 1992 it was necessary for the U.S. Supreme Court to order the state college system to end its tradition of segregation. In general, the Civil Right Act of 1964 and the Voting Right Act of 1965 were the climax of the movement.
4. The response of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations: The New Deal of John F Kennedy called for economic reforms to counter the lagging economic growth of the Eisenhower years and to "get the country moving again." But in office, Kennedy proved unable to win passage of many of the items on his agenda, including Medicare to provide medical help for the elderly, programs to rebuild the inner cities, and an increase in federal funding for education. 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 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 (Strokely Carmichael led the blacks to shoot at the policemen on the streets with the 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 of the blacks. 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. I did not find anything wrong with the Black Nationalism in the American society today: the only thing that the Americans can blame on it is because of that the holding troops by the blacks endangered to the national security of the United States. Like many non-black civil rights movement, students’ movement, or women’s movement. The “black power” is now a model of the pattern for the other civil rights movements.
