Introduction
Issues of respect for the civil rights and freedoms of different peoples are among the most pressing problems. Such issues are an integral part of the domestic policy of any state, especially a multinational state such as the United States. One of the many categories of the U.S. population is represented by African Americans, who were forcibly brought to the continent and fought for their rights for centuries. After the official liberation of African Americans, the road to their ultimate liberation from oppression and discrimination was not easy for activists and human rights activists and took decades of serious effort.
African American Protests and Confrontations
All forms of protest by African Americans in the 1950s and 1970s can be divided into spontaneous and organized. Spontaneous protests by African Americans included rebellions in black ghettos in the 1960s. The organized movement of African Americans for their rights was not homogeneous (Cook et al. 837). It can be divided into nonviolent forms of protest with the central figure of Martin Luther King and the terrorist forms led by the Black Panthers.
Black community leaders called for a bus boycott, which hit the city’s finances hard. The civil rights struggle became widespread after a federal district court and then the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Alabama’s bus segregation laws unconstitutional (Rothstein 26). It was led by organizations that had emerged during the struggle, including the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SLCLC) led by M.L. King, the Student Coordinating Committee for Nonviolent Action (SCCNA), and Black American organizations.
The confrontation between supporters and opponents of segregation took on the character of a crusade, a life-and-death battle. Some were willing to kill to defend their principles; others were willing to die for the cause. The gospel commandments had helped generations of enslaved Black people survive. Their descendants turned faith into a weapon of radical politics; they called the young pastor their Moses. King himself was arrested in a white restaurant in the fall of 1960 and sentenced to community service.
In 1963, the movement entered a new phase. One day in Birmingham, black students walked into a “white man’s” diner and politely asked for a Coke. They were not served, but they sat patiently until closing time. The next day, they came back with friends. Day by day, the number of friends increased (Gibbons 15). Then black visitors went to white libraries, to white stores, to white parks, to white toilets.
These actions were demonstratively in violation of the laws of several states (Rothstein 43). Participants in the movement received sentences, jail terms, and fines. In April 1963, forty volunteers moved into action: some sat down in diners in “white” places, others picketed buildings. A store boycott also began, and in the following days, hundreds of people went out to participate in demonstrations and pickets, and they were arrested.
Besides, the Black Panthers were especially active at this time and were not just spontaneous ghetto rebels like many young people who had never picked up a book. They read a lot and liked to discuss what they read in small communal kitchens in Harlem (members of secret organizations often lived together, so communal kitchens were voluntary). Left-wing extremism in twentieth-century America differed in that its fighters were young and educated minorities. In contrast, right-wing groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the White Citizens Council, or the Christian Identity movement involved adults and uneducated members of the white majority.
The Role of Federal Elected Officials in Securing Citizenship Rights for All Americans
Throughout U.S. history, no presidential candidate of either political party has gone as far as the then-young Democratic leader John F. Kennedy did on this score. The presidential candidate made the following commitments. First of all, he promised to submit to Congress, without delay, a bill to make the rights of Negroes equal to those of whites to speed up the Supreme Court decision of May 17, 1954, to desegregate public schools (Cook et al. 837). The President pledged to end discrimination in housing, create a Fair Employment Commission, make a permanent body of the President’s Commission on Civil Rights, and report regularly on discrimination.
Matthew McColum, one of the founders of black rights activism in the South, began working in Orangeburg, where racist attitudes prevailed, even before the Montgomery bus boycott. The sit-in demonstrations in that town were superbly organized. Coughlin College and South Carolina State College students were divided into forty groups (Cook et al. 837). Plans of action were carefully drawn up, every detail taken into account, including precise timing, yet many students were arrested.
Conclusion
Thus, black rights activists showed how a minority could effectively use democracy to achieve their goals. The civil rights movement broke the law and used the law. By violating state laws, King and his supporters forced the government to enact and enforce federal laws.
King and various organizations used tradition, religion, and national myths to seek revolutionary change. He did not contrast democracy with patriotism, which appealed to American values. Still, at the same time, he skillfully used world public opinion to pressure the United States, blackmailing the country’s political elite at times. The political figures fighting against segregation in the North and the South were John Kennedy and Mattew McColum. They made great efforts to change the situation using different political and organizational decisions.
Works Cited
Cook, Lisa D., et al. “Rural Segregation and Racial Violence: Historical Effects of Spatial Racism.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, vol. 77, no. 3-4, 2018, pp. 821–47, Web.
Gibbons, Andrea. City of Segregation : 100 Years of Struggle for Housing in Los Angeles. Verso, 2018.
Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Liveright Publishing, 2017.