Civil rights movements

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Civil rights movements have stretched across every inhabited continent, each one born from a specific moment of refusal. In Dungannon, Northern Ireland, a housing dispute ignited by Austin Currie grew into a mass campaign for voting equality. In Montgomery, Alabama, a bus boycott that ran from 1955 to 1956 gave the world Rosa Parks. In Czechoslovakia, a reformist named Alexander Dubcek called his program Socialism with a human face, only to watch Soviet tanks fill Prague's streets by the night of the 20th of August 1968. These movements did not follow a single script. Some were disciplined and nonviolent. Others ended in armed rebellion or military suppression. Many never fully achieved their goals. What threads them together is the demand that the law protect all people equally. The questions worth asking are: what tactics did these movements share, what distinguished them from each other, and what cost did their participants actually pay?

• 2. Nonviolence and Its Limits

  ›

  The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-1956 in Alabama became one of the founding demonstrations of organized nonviolent resistance in the American civil rights era. By 1955, African American frustration with gradual desegregation had reached a breaking point, and black leadership combined direct action with nonviolent civil disobedience. Economic boycotts, sit-ins, and marches became the principal tools. The Greensboro sit-in of 1960 in North Carolina and the Nashville sit-ins in Tennessee showed how disciplined refusal to leave a segregated lunch counter could force a crisis that authorities had to resolve. The 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade took this to a sharper edge, when children were met by local authorities with fire hoses and attack dogs. That spectacle of official violence against young protesters shifted public opinion in ways that years of petitions had not.

  The Selma to Montgomery marches of 1965 in Alabama were initially attacked by state and local authorities, yet the marches persisted and led directly to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association adopted a similar philosophy in the late sixties and early seventies, consciously modelling itself on the American movement. NICRA organised marches and protests demanding one man, one vote; an end to discrimination in housing and local government; an end to the gerrymandering of district boundaries; and the disbandment of the B-Specials, an entirely Protestant police reserve.

  Yet nonviolence had a ceiling. In Northern Ireland, opposition from Loyalists aided by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which was over 90% Protestant, drove escalation. Violence from both sides eventually produced the Provisional Irish Republican Army and Loyalist paramilitaries. The American Indian Movement's early takeovers in the United States were noticeably violent by contrast with the sit-in tradition; some appeared spontaneous, others involved the armed seizure of public facilities. The Wounded Knee standoff of 1973 lasted 71 days and ended with two deaths. Nonviolence was a strategy, not an inevitable feature of civil rights struggle.

• 3. The March on Washington

  ›

  In August 1963, a coalition of civil rights, religious, and labor groups converged on Washington for what was formally called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Bringing together leaders with different backgrounds and political interests required significant compromise. The organizers, informally known as the Big Six, were A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney Young, James Farmer, and John Lewis. Despite their different constituencies, all were committed to keeping the event peaceful, and the march had its own marshal system to ensure order.

  Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech became the event's most enduring artifact, turning what one account describes as a fairly complicated affair into a national text. The speech eclipsed the logistical difficulties the organizers had faced. Yet the march's legacy carries an internal contradiction. Numerous women's civil rights groups had participated in the organizing work, but when the event took place, women were denied speaking roles and relegated to figurative positions at the back of the stage. Several female activists later described this exclusion as a new awakening, one that pushed Black women to fight not only for racial civil rights but to engage the feminist movement as a parallel cause.

  The march's concrete goal was captured in its full title: jobs and freedom together. The success of the march has remained a subject of debate, but it preceded the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination in employment and public accommodations.

• 4. Beyond Integration

  ›

  By 1966, a strand of thinking within American Black political life was pulling away from the integrationist aims that Martin Luther King Jr. and others had championed. The Black Power movement, active from 1966 to 1975, argued that assimilation into the dominant society stripped African Americans of common heritage and dignity. Theorist and activist Omali Yeshitela put it in explicit terms, arguing that Africans had historically fought to protect their lands, cultures, and freedoms from European colonialists, and that integration into a society built on that theft amounted to treason.

  At the 1968 Olympics, two African-American athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, raised their fists on the medals podium in the gesture that became known as the 1968 Olympics Black Power salute. The image entered global consciousness as the clearest visual statement of the movement's defiance.

  The Chicano Movement ran on a related but distinct logic. Its early leaders, Rodolfo Gonzales in Denver and Reies Tijerina in New Mexico, built their argument on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, contending that the United States government had failed to honor its promises under that treaty. In their account, Mexican Americans were a conquered people seeking to reclaim their birthright within a territory that later became known as Aztlán. In 1968, high school students staged mass walkouts in Denver and East Los Angeles. In 1970, the Chicano Moratorium took place in Los Angeles. College-level activism produced MEChA, the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, which promoted Chicano Studies programs. A decade later, activists including Bert Corona in California broadened the movement to include the rights of undocumented workers.

• 5. Dissent Behind the Iron Curtain

  ›

  Soviet dissidents in the 1960s developed a tactic that set them apart from civil rights campaigners elsewhere: the legalist approach. Rather than making moral or political arguments, they focused narrowly on legal and procedural violations. After landmark trials of writers, including the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial and the trials of Alexander Ginzburg and Yuri Galanskov, the KGB cracked down and coverage of arrests shifted to samizdat, the unsanctioned press circulated hand to hand. In April 1968, this activity produced the Chronicle of Current Events, an unofficial newsletter that reported civil rights violations and Soviet judicial abuses.

  The figures who built this human rights network included Valery Chalidze, Yuri Orlov, and Lyudmila Alexeyeva. Two formal organizations emerged: the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR in 1969 and the Committee on Human Rights in the USSR in 1970. Participants faced dismissal from work, imprisonment in labor camps, and forced psychiatric treatment. The signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975, which contained human rights clauses, gave campaigners new leverage with international bodies. Helsinki Watch Groups formed in Moscow, Kiev, Vilnius, Tbilisi, and Erevan between 1976 and 1977.

  In neighboring Czechoslovakia, Alexander Dubcek's reform program in early 1968 drew broad support including from the working class. Between the nights of August 20 and 21, 1968, armies from five Warsaw Pact countries invaded. Soviet tanks numbering between 5,000 and 7,000 occupied the streets, followed by between 200,000 and 600,000 Warsaw Pact troops. Seventy-two Czechs and Slovaks were killed, 19 of them in Slovakia, and hundreds were wounded through the 3rd of September 1968. Dubcek urged his people not to resist, was arrested, and was taken to Moscow.

• 6. Unfinished Reckoning

  ›

  In Australia, voting rights restrictions persisted in some states until as late as 1965, with Queensland the last to remove them. The granting of native title came into force federally only in 1993. The forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families continued until late in the 20th century. Protests including the Freedom Ride and the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, along with riots such as the 2004 Redfern riots and the Palm Island riot, marked the arc of Indigenous Australian civil rights struggle.

  The Northern Ireland peace process produced a ceasefire among all major paramilitary groups, and a stronger economy raised the province's standard of living. Laws and policies protecting civil rights, along with forms of affirmative action, were implemented across government offices and many private businesses. Yet the road there had passed through Bloody Sunday, the 30th of January 1972, when fourteen unarmed Catholic civil rights marchers protesting internment were shot and killed by soldiers from the Parachute Regiment in Derry. In 1978, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that interrogation techniques used on internees in Northern Ireland amounted to inhuman and degrading treatment.

  In Quebec, the Front de liberation du Quebec had been using terrorism since 1963 to push for sovereignty. The October 1970 kidnapping of British diplomat James Cross and Quebec's Minister of Labour Pierre Laporte, who was later killed, prompted Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau to invoke the War Measures Act and declare martial law. The Parti Québécois, created in 1968, won the 1976 Quebec general election and enacted legislation making French the language of business while restricting English on signs. The Closing the Gap strategy in Australia, the ongoing tensions in Northern Ireland, and the Quebec sovereignty debate all point to the same underlying fact: the movements of the 1960s opened doors that generations of people are still walking through.