The Civil Rights Movement Research Paper

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The modern American Civil Rights Movement was one of the pivotal freedom struggles of the twentieth century. This research paper will discuss the historic oppression of African Americans and how the Civil Rights Movement fought to liberate that population. It will also analyze the origins of that movement as well as its national and international achievements.

1. Black Oppression

Even as late as the middle of the twentieth century, millions of Black citizens in the USA were socially oppressed, economically exploited, and disenfranchised politically. These conditions of subjugation endured in a nation viewed as the world’s leading democracy. This view of the USA was projected nationally and internationally by White US leaders. The US image of democracy contrasted sharply with the actual treatment of African Americans. Unlike European immigrants, Black Africans were forcibly transported to America as slaves. As captives of the institution of slavery for over two centuries, Blacks supplied the free slave labor that assisted the USA in becoming an economic superpower. Slavery denied Blacks the basic rights that constitute the foundation of a democracy. Indeed, during slavery, African Americans were officially defined as chattel, not human beings.

The American Civil War (1861–5) was the force that overthrew the slave regime. With the triumph of Union forces in 1865, Black equality became a real possibility. For a brief period following the Civil War it appeared that the former slaves would be granted their democratic rights. During the Reconstruction period, Blacks gained expanded citizenship rights including freedom of movement, restricted male access to the franchise, and access to employment. This was a promising beginning but it would not endure for long.

By the turn of the twentieth century the Reconstruction period had come to an end. In the early 1900s, a formal system of racial segregation known as Jim Crow was firmly established. The new form of racial oppression required that Blacks and Whites be segregated on the basis of race. Thus, legally the two races were not allowed to attend the same movie theaters, drink from the same water fountain, sit on the same side of a courtroom, or be sworn in with the same Bible. Blacks and whites were prohibited from occupying the same space on a public bus or train. In short, Blacks were denied equal access to public accommodations. Moreover, Blacks were excluded from the political process. Toward the close of the nineteenth century the emerging Jim Crow regime received backing from the highest court of the nation. Thus an 1896 Supreme Court Ruling, Plessy vs. Ferguson, declared that racial segregation was constitutional. It ruled that it was constitutionally legal for the two races to use separate-but-equal facilities. With this ruling the Jim Crow regime became national in scope although it was more rigorously enforced in the South.

By the middle of the twentieth century the majority of Blacks were disenfranchised. In the South, Blacks held no significant political offices and they were constant victims of terror and violence including lynchings. In the labor market Blacks were restricted to low-paying undesirable jobs. As a result, economic exploitation of Blacks was widespread. Beyond material subjugation, African Americans experienced daily personal humiliation because racial segregation marginalized them as a people and labeled them as an inferior race. Human dignity was stripped from African Americans: simple titles of respect such as ‘Mr.’ or ‘Mrs.’ were withheld, and even White youngsters held symbolic authority over all Blacks, however elderly or eminent.

2. The Movement ’s Origin

African Americans consistently attacked the Jim Crow regime. Black protests began during slavery and remained evident during the Jim Crow period. At times, resistance was collective and public, while at other times it remained covert and limited in scope. By the 1950s African Americans had produced a long, rich tradition of social protest. The modern Civil Rights Movement drew upon this tradition and embedded itself deeply within the historic struggle for Black liberation.

The Civil Rights Movement took deep root in the south in the mid-1950s. Thus, this movement emerged where Black oppression was most intense and where racial segregation was firmly entrenched. Given the scope of oppression and the power of the White opposition, the birth of a powerful resistance movement was unanticipated, especially by Whites who thought that segregation had become part of the natural order.

The movement took off during this period for several reasons. First, by the 1950s large numbers of African Americans had migrated to southern cities where they developed tightly knit urban communities and dense, effective communication networks. These resources made it possible for mass mobilization to occur. Second, by the 1950s the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had won successful legal rulings against the Jim Crow system, especially in the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown s. Board of Education, which reversed the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson decision. The Brown ruling stated that separate schooling based on race was unconstitutional. The implications of this ruling went far beyond this case for it delegitimized the entire system of racial segregation and encouraged struggles to implement the court orders.

Additionally, changing international relations were important to the birth of the movement. By the middle of the twentieth century African and Third World countries were gaining independence through anticolonial struggles. African Americans identified with those struggles, which intensified their own thirst for freedom. Moreover, the context of decolonization and Cold War rivalry rendered the US Federal Government susceptible to pressure from an oppressed Black population because the USA sought to persuade these new Third World nations to model themselves after US democracy, not the Soviet alternative. However, US racial oppression stood as a barrier to harmonious relations between the USA and new Third World nations. The proliferation of television and communication satellites made it possible for Black oppression to become visible worldwide. America’s participation in the two world wars and the Korean War also rendered it vulnerable to Black protest because in those wars the USA championed egalitarian values. In this context, Black soldiers were radicalized while fighting for democracy on distant shores. Thus, the federal government came under increased and sustained international and domestic pressure to support efforts to overthrow institutionalized racial segregation.

2.1 Strategies, Tactics, And Goals

These factors created the fertile soil from which the Civil Rights Movement emerged. By employing the strategy of mass, nonviolent, direct action, this movement mobilized widespread social protest. For such a strategy to succeed, White communities, businesses, and institutions had to be disrupted and prevented from doing business as usual. To this end, civil rights leaders and organizers mobilized thousands of African Americans to confront the Jim Crow regime through social protest.

The Civil Rights Movement succeeded in mobilizing massive nonviolent social protest. Innovative tactics included economic boycotts (beginning with the yearlong boycott of a bus company in Montgomery, Alabama, sparked by the arrest of Rosa Parks, in December 1955 and led by Martin Luther King Jr.); sit-in demonstrations intensified in February 1960 by Black college students at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina; dramatic confrontations in the streets of Birmingham, Alabama in 1963; and mass marches (including a massive mobilization of Whites and Blacks in the August 1963 March on Washington, which culminated in King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech, and protest marches led by King that met with police violence in Selma, Alabama, in January 1965).

The goal of these protests was to overthrow racial segregation and empower African Americans by seizing the franchise. Southern officials utilized their institutional power and the resistance of the larger White community in an intense, and often violent, effort to defeat the movement and to maintain legally enforced racial segregation. Movement participants—many of them women, children, and college students—were often beaten and brutalized by southern law enforcement officials, and thousands were arrested and jailed for their protest activities. Some leaders and participants—such as Medgar Evers, of the Mississippi NAACP in 1963, and three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964—were murdered.

Nevertheless, the widespread and highly visible confrontations in the streets, which contrasted the brutality and the inhumanity of the White segregationists with the dignity and resolve of Black protestors, made the cause of Black equality the major issue in the USA for over a decade during the 1950s and 1960s. The nation and its leaders were forced to decide publicly whether to grant African Americans their citizenship rights or to side with White segregationists who advocated racial superiority and the undemocratic subjugation of African Americans.

3. National Achievements

The movement could not be dismissed. Eloquent leaders and their massive followings sustained the pressure on local elites and the federal government. Countless heroic figures inspired and organized a massive following. Among them were Rosa Parks, a dignified older woman and local NAACP activist, who sparked the Montgomery bus boycott when she defied an order to move to the back; Martin Luther King, Jr., who emerged from the Montgomery bus boycott and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to assume a position of preeminent moral leadership and national influence; James Forman, executive secretary of the more militant Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who was to challenge SCLC’s and King’s strategy; SNCC’s leader, Stokely Carmichael (now Kwame Toure), who introduced the slogan ‘Black power’; James Farmer and Floyd McKissick who led the Congress of Racial Inequality (CORE); and Fannie Lou Hamer, who went to a voter registration meeting run by SNCC, was arrested at the courthouse in Indianola, Mississippi, when she tried to register to vote, and then was viciously beaten in prison. Hamer personified the thousands of women who played important roles in organizing and leading the movement.

These leading figures and thousands of movement participants articulated Black suffering and the democratic aspirations of African Americans of every generation and circumstance. In addition, thousands of Whites (students, ministers, lawyers, and other civil rights workers) were inspired to join the Movement. They participated in lunch-counter sit-ins, mass demonstrations, and campaigns such as the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, a campaign that involved hundreds of volunteers in voter registration drives and the creation of ‘freedom schools.’ Some, like Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were involved in the Freedom Summer campaign, and Viola Liuzzo, a Michigan homemaker shot by Klansmen after a rally in support of the march from Selma to Montgomery, lost their lives in the Movement and, in turn, helped inspire others.

Differences regarding ideology, leadership style, and goals emerged within the movement as the SCLC, NAACP, SNCC, CORE, and other organizations reached different judgments about the value of nonviolent action, racial integration and separatism, the role of Whites in the movement, and the influence of Black nationalism. Despite these controversies, the moral challenge and the widespread social disruption caused by the economic boycotts, the marches, the sit-ins, and other forms of nonviolent direct action, coupled with the international pressure, created an impasse in the nation that had to be resolved.

As a result, the Civil Rights Movement achieved important legislative victories in Congress. The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination in public accommodations on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin and it identified the legal measures to be used to achieve racial integration. Moreover, it barred discrimination in employment practices on grounds of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex. The passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act was another major achievement, for it suspended the use of literacy tests, authorized the attorney general to challenge the constitutionality of poll taxes, and introduced procedures that provided for the appointment of examiners to ensure that all restrictions on Black voter registration be ended. In short, the Voting Rights Act enfranchised the southern Black population, making it possible for a historic Black elected political class to emerge.

3.1 International Achievements

The significance of the Civil Rights Movement extends far beyond its historic overthrow of the Jim Crow regime. This Movement has affected US politics in fundamental ways. It demonstrated to the oppressed Black community how such protest could be successful, and it made social protest respectable. The Civil Rights Movement also proved that social protest is capable of generating significant change. Hence, the movement broadened the scope of US politics and inspired diverse movements for citizenship rights and social justice in the USA and abroad. Before the Movement, many groups in the USA—women, Hispanics, Native Americans, farm workers, the physically disabled, gays and lesbians, etc.—were oppressed but unaware of how to resist or galvanize support. The Civil Rights Movement provided a model of successful social protest and produced a host of new tactics and social change organizations. Moreover, this Movement had an influence on freedom struggles around the world. Participants in freedom struggles in Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and China have made it clear that they were deeply influenced by the US Civil Rights Movement.

4. Continuing Challenges

For all its success and influences, however, the Civil Rights Movement did not solve all of America’s racial problems. At the start of the twenty-first century, African Americans and many other non-White groups are still at the bottom of the social and economic order. These current conditions are exacerbated by a social climate in which the disadvantaged are often blamed for their own predicament. Thanks to the Civil Rights Movement, a relatively large Black middle class has emerged. Yet, over a third of the Black community remains trapped in poverty. Black Americans are disproportionately the victims of police brutality and housed in the rapidly growing prison industry. Thus, during the infancy of the new millennium, some Blacks are the recipients of middleclass comforts while millions of others are victims of poverty and degradation. Poverty and inequality are also widespread outside the Black community. It may be that protest remains the only viable means to achieve greater empowerment. If this is the case, the Civil Rights Movement has left a rich legacy to inspire and inform future struggles. The sparking of a renewed interest in the academic study of social protest is an unnoticed legacy of the Civil Rights Movement. Through such studies it is possible that new mechanisms of social change will come to light.

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