Because the basic rights of CITIZENSHIP [1,I] were not equally available to all Americans at the nation's inception, civil rights movements involving groups excluded from full political participation have been a continuing feature of U.S. history. Males without property, African Americans, and women are among the groups that have engaged in sustained struggles to establish, protect, or expand their rights as American citizens. These struggles have resulted in fundamental departures from the limited conceptions of citizenship and the role of government that prevailed during the early national era.
The term "civil rights movement" more narrowly refers to the collective efforts of African Americans to advance in American society. These efforts are aspects of a broader, long-term black freedom struggle seeking goals beyond CIVIL RIGHTS [1,1], but they have had particularly important impact on dominant conceptions of the rights of American citizens and the role of government in protecting these rights. Although the Supreme Court in the DRED SCOTT [2] decision of 1857 negated the citizenship status of African Americans, the subsequent extensions of egalitarian principles to African Americans resulted in generalized expansions of the scope of constitutionally protected rights. In particular, both the FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT [2,I] and the FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT [2] to the Constitution, despite retrogressive Court decisions such as PLESSY V. FERGUSON (1896) [3], ultimately served as foundations for major civil rights reforms benefiting black Americans and other groups. During the twentieth century, African Americans have participated in many racial advancement efforts that have enlarged the opportunities and protections available to individuals in other groups. More recently, as a result of sustained protest movements of the period after WORLD WAR II [1], the term "civil rights" has come to refer not only to governmental policies relating to the equal treatment of individuals but also to policies equalizing the allocation of resources among groups. In short, the modern civil rights movement in the United States has redefined as well as pursued rights.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an interracial group founded in 1909, has been the most enduring institution directing the course of twentieth-century American civil rights movements. Although many organizations later challenged the NAACP's priorities and its reliance on the tactics of litigation and governmental lobbying, the group's large membership and its increasingly effective affiliate, the NAACP LEGAL DEFENSE & EDUCATIONAL FUND [3], made civil rights reforms into principal black political objectives. Among the outgrowths of NAACP-sponsored legal suits were the Supreme Court's SMITH v. ALLWRIGHT (1944) [4] decision outlawing white primary elections and the BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION (1954, 1955) [1] decision against segregated public schools. These landmark cases helped to reverse earlier Court decisions such as Plessy--that limited the scope of civil rights protections.
In the years after the Brown decision, other civil rights organizations departed from the NAACP's reform strategy and placed more emphasis on protest and mass mobilization. Starting with the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-1956, southern blacks, aided by northern allies, successfully used boycotts, mass meetings, marches, rallies, sit-ins, and other insurgent tactics to speed the pace of civil rights reform. The Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), founded in 1957 and led for many years by MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. [3], and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), founded in 1960, spearheaded a series of mass struggles against white racial domination in the South. The NAACP also supplied many of the participants and much of the legal support for these struggles, while the predominantly white Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) contributed activists and expertise in the use of Gandhian nonviolent tactics. Although DESEGREGATION [2] was initially the main focus of southern mass movements, economic and political concerns were evident from their inception.
King and the SCLC played especially important roles in mobilizing mass protest campaigns in the Alabama cities of Birmingham and Selma in 1963 and 1965. SCLC leaders orchestrated clashes between nonviolent demonstrators and often brutal law enforcement personnel. Such highly publicized confrontations made northern whites more aware of southern racial inequities, particularly the pervasive and antiquated Jim Crow system of public SEGREGATION [4]. As the southern struggle's best-known spokesperson, King sought to link black civil rights aspirations with widely accepted, long-established political principles. During 1961 he identified the democratic ideals of the Founding Fathers as an unrealized "noble dream." "On the one hand, we have proudly professed the principles of democracy, and on the other hand, we have sadly practiced the very antithesis of those principles," he told an audience at Lincoln University. Speaking at the 1963 March on Washington, he insisted that the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE [2] and the Constitution were "a promissory note" guaranteeing all Americans "the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." By exposing the contradictions between American ideals and southern racial realities, the SCLC's southern campaigns strengthened northern white support for civil rights reforms.
Although the SNCC was an outgrowth of the student sit-in movement of 1960, its most significant activities were concentrated in the rural areas of Mississippi and Alabama. In these areas, SNCC staff members worked with indigenous black leaders seeking to overcome economic and political oppression. During the first half of the 1960s, SNCC concentrated its efforts on the achievement of voting rights for southern blacks and federal protection for civil rights workers. SNCC organizers also helped to create new institutions, such as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party and the Lowndes County (Alabama) Freedom Organization, under local black leadership. By 1966, the "black power" slogan, popularized by SNCC's chair Stokely Carmichael, summarized the group's emerging ideas of a struggle seeking political, economic, and cultural objectives beyond narrowly defined civil rights reforms.
By the late 1960s, organizations such as the NAACP, SCLC, and SNCC faced increasingly strong challenges from "black nationalist" leaders and new militant organizations, such as the Black Panther party. Often influenced by Malcolm X and by Pan-African ideologies, proponents of "black liberation" saw civil rights reforms as insufficient because they did not address the problems of poor blacks. Black nationalists also pointed out that African American citizenship had resulted from the involuntary circumstances of enslavement. In addition, racial-liberation proponents often saw the African American freedom struggle in international terms, as a movement for "human rights" and national "self-determination" rather than for civil rights.
The most significant legislation to result from the mass struggles of the 1960s were the CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964 [1] and the VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1965 [4]. (Congress also passed notable civil rights bills in 1968, 1972, and 1990.) Taken together, these laws greatly enhanced the civic status of blacks, women, and other minority groups and placed greater responsibility on the federal government to protect such groups from discriminatory treatment. Although the 1964 and 1965 acts were in some respects simply restatements of protections specified in the constitutional amendments enacted during RECONSTRUCTION [1], the impact of the new legislation was greater because of the expanded scope of federal regulatory powers and the continued militancy by victims of discrimination.
Since the mid-1960s, national civil rights policies have evinced awareness that antidiscrimination legislation was not sufficient to achieve tangible improvements in the living conditions of many blacks or to bring about equalization of the distribution of resources and services among racial groups in the United States. In 1968 the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission) concluded that despite civil right reforms, the nation was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white separate and unequal." By the time of this report, the liberal coalition that had supported passage of the major civil rights legislation was divided over the role, if any, government should play in eliminating these persistent racial inequities. A "white backlash" against black militancy and claims that black gains had resulted in 11 reverse discrimination" against whites undermined support for major new civil rights initiatives during the 1970s and 1980s.
Although militant protest activity declined after the 1960s, civil rights movements have remained a significant feature of American political life. The increased black participation in the American political system that resulted from previous struggles lessened black reliance on extralegal tactics, but civil rights issues continued to stimulate protest, particularly when previous gains appeared to be threatened. Furthermore, women, homosexuals, disabled people, and other groups suffering discriminatory treatment have mobilized civil rights movements and created organizations of their own, thereby contributing to the continuing national dialogue regarding the scope of civil rights and the role of government.
During the 1970s and 1980s, debate continued over the appropriateness of employment AFFIRMATIVE ACTION [1,I] programs and court-ordered compensatory remedies for historically rooted patterns of discrimination. Nevertheless, despite contention regarding these issues and notwithstanding the conservative political climate of the period, most national civil rights policies established during the 1960s have survived. Moreover, civil rights advocates have continued to press, with limited success, toward implementation of policies for group advancement rather than individual rights, tangible gains rather than civil status, and equality of social outcomes rather than equality of opportunity. The modern African American freedom and liberation struggles of the 1960s therefore produced a major but still controversial shift in prevailing norms regarding the nature of civil rights in the United States.
CLAYBORNE CARSON
In Encyclopedia
of the American Constitution,
edited by Leonard W. Levy et al.
New York: MacMillan Publishing, 1992.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Branch, Taylor. 1988 Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Carson, Clayborne. 1981 In Struggle: SNCC and the Black