higher history obstacles to civil rights essay

After the 1960s the civil rights movement confronted new issues and forged new alliances. The new stage of struggle also saw more active coalition-building with other groups affected by discrimination and inequality. Blacks and Jews had worked together in the early postwar decades to secure anti-discrimination measures. After 1968, Blacks and Latinos and Asian Americans sometimes joined together in campaigns for substantive equal treatment and better life chances. Campuses saw “Third World Coalitions” surge in the 1970s over shared demands for ethnic studies programs and affirmative action or open admissions, for example. Mainstream civil rights groups and feminist groups supported one another’s lawsuits to end discriminatory employment and open institutions to all. Black and Puerto Rican activists built coalitions with white feminists to end the practice of sterilization abuse, which targeted women of color, and to seek a broad range of reproductive rights, including quality child care and maternal and child health care. Poor black women in the welfare rights movement, for their part, sometimes found stronger allies among liberal white women and progressive Catholics than among mainstream male-led civil rights groups fearful of being associated with unmarried mothers seeking better public assistance.

Even with the legislative victories of the 1960s, many obstacles to equality remained, especially in employment and housing. Still, efforts to promote equity and inclusion throughout American society faced daunting road blocks, and it was clear as early as the mid-1960s that they would not be removed easily. Two and a half centuries of slavery and another hundred years of pervasive discrimination had left deep imprints on all American institutions. Every industry that employed African Americans had developed its own variant of entrenched occupational segregation. The housing markets of every major metropolitan area bore the marks of decades of restrictive covenants and real estate red-lining, and of postwar white flight to homogenous suburbs. School systems, honoring those dividing lines and funded by unequal property taxes, systematically underserved black children. In the North as well as the South, they left black youth ill-prepared for an emerging labor market that demanded ever-higher levels of education to achieve economic security. Rather, as the mechanization of southern cotton picking and demise of sharecropping led millions of migrants to head to the cities of the North and West from the 1940s through the 1960s, hopes of good jobs met the reality of vast structural unemployment due to automation and later de-industrialization, and declining urban tax bases due to suburbanization.

Economic equality lagged behind social and political equality, especially in the nation's cities. All these influences conspired, by the late twentieth century, to produce unprecedented levels of concentrated poverty in the nation’s inner cities, poverty from which escape was well-nigh impossible for most residents. The cumulative result caught the notice of growing numbers of social scientists by centuries end, who documented a vast “wealth gap” between blacks and whites. Afflicting higher earners along with the poor, it came from having been systematically cut off over generations from being able to buy homes in neighborhoods where home values appreciated. That “asset poverty,” as it came to be called, made “ self-help ,” strong as that tradition was in black history, a steep and slippery climb. Combined with harsh drug laws passed after the 1970s, all these forms of structural inequality contributed to After the 1960s a rising movement mounted a political challenge to efforts aimed at expanding equality. surging black incarceration rates that put the United States on par with some of the most repressive nations of the world in the proportion of its citizenry that lived behind bars.

The cultural impact of the civil rights movement was not fully realized until after the 1960s. The quest for self-determination and communal development that followed the legislative victories of the mid-1960s sparked tremendous cultural and intellectual creativity. The Black Arts movement produced a renaissance in literature, theater, art, music and dance. Black history became one of the most dynamic fields of U.S. history, led by scholars such as John Hope Franklin (1915-2009). Self-fashioning changed as natural “Afro” hair styles came into vogue, along with African-derived dress styles such as the dashiki and Kente cloth. In countless cities around the country, community organizers set to work, often with initial funding from Great Society programs, to alleviate poverty, fight hopelessness, and generate the power and resources for community development.

Seen in the light of all this activity, the 2008 presidential election, which surprised so many in both the U.S. and the wider world, becomes more explicable. The ongoing, if usually unheralded, activism after the mid-1960s altered American institutions and culture profoundly, even if the outcomes fell far short of the egalitarian visions those who worked so hard to produce change. Their efforts to open and transform workplaces, schools, politics, and communities had, bit by bit, opened a pathway for Barack Obama to reach the pinnacle of power, even as it was his own prodigious talent that carried him up that path to the Oval Office. His candidacy stirred deep wells of black pride and aspiration and elicited unprecedented turnout from millions of hitherto discouraged first-time voters. At the same time, tens of millions of white Americans were by then yearning for the “change” and “hope” that candidate Obama promised. They, too, worried about their and their children’s prospects in the new low-wage service-based economy, struggled to get decent health care, and sought better relations between the U.S. and the wider world. The inauguration seemed a time of widely shared national elation. Yet, when the new President set to work to bring the promised change in the form of policies such as national health care reform, he met determined resistance from the conservative movement, which now dominated the Republican Party. Indeed, by 2010, the nation faced stormy clashes as the two streams of post-1968 civil rights history met in Washington: an accomplished and enduring civil rights struggle, now joined to a wider reinvigorated liberalism, and a potent conservative power base determined to fight any equalization of the nation’s racial practices and economic policies.

Guiding Student Discussion

The post-1968 civil rights story is one of the most important—and therefore sometimes the most difficult—discussions to have with students. It involves core values and lived experience about which many adults, let alone teenagers, are not especially reflective. White students can get defensive, while black students sometimes assume they know more than they actually do about how we got to where we are. Abstract assertion on the instructor’s part (like what I’ve just done, due to space limitations) is least likely to work well in conveying the issues. Fortunately, there are excellent materials easily available for experiential learning, the kind most likely to succeed and leave a lasting imprint. There are powerful primary sources , for example, with which to bring these themes to life and enable students to engage in activities such as role play debates that build empathy and circumvent defensiveness. Films also work well. Try, for example, segments of the Eyes on the Prize II series; or At the River I Stand , about the Memphis strike; An Unlikely Friendship , about class, schooling, and community power; or Chisholm ‘72: Unbought and Unbossed , about Shirley Chisholm’s race for the presidency.

Help students see that racism is not simply a matter of individual behavior or belief. The biggest challenge is to get beyond the notion that racism is simply an individual attitudinal or ethical failing. This notion is promoted by popular culture and official ideology alike, and a big barrier to understanding. Students cannot make sense of the post-1968 history if they remain stuck in this conceptual rut. So the trick is to find ways to get them thinking in social-structural and situational terms, without losing sight of human agency. Encountering a dramatic fight over northern segregation can help, such as Dr. King’s experience in Cicero, Illinois , or exploring the housing sub plot of Lorraine Hansberry’s widely assigned Raisin in the Sun . The core conceptual task is to understand the difference between formal legal equality and substantive equal treatment. You can make a start on this by exposing the fiction that the racial divide of the North resulted from innocent de facto , as opposed to de jure , segregation. In fact, northern segregation was also created and sustained by Help students understand that racial inequality in both the North and the South was deliberately instigated and maintained. intentional policy, if in a less in-your-face manner than its southern sibling, as you can show with exercises to help students understand practices such as real estate steering , bank red-lining of black communities, school boundary gerrymandering, and white flight from racially changing neighborhoods. Once students grasp the intentional agency that produced racial inequality, they can better appreciate why the civil rights movement saw race-conscious remedies as vital, among them metropolitan busing and taxation plans, affirmative action in employment and education, and scatter-site public housing.

The achievements of the civil rights movement allowed differences among African Americans to be more freely expressed. As students reckon with the structural determinants of racial inequality, they will be better equipped to recognize the diversity among African Americans that has been such a driving feature of post-1968 history. Differences derived from class position, gender, color , political orientation and more always existed, but the civil rights victories of the 1960s freed them to be expressed more openly than ever before. Since then, we’ve seen many kinds of public clashes: black radicals arguing against black liberals; black mayors opposing strikes of city workers; black feminists challenging male domination in movement organizations; black conservatives challenging black civil rights figures; black female employees charging black male supervisors with sexual harassment; and black lesbians and gays confronting black ministers who promote homophobia.

Help students understand that the "black community" is as diverse and complex as the "white community." All students need to appreciate such intra-group differences to make sense of their world. When they speak of blacks or whites in unitary terms (as presumably all sharing the experiences and views), challenge them with contrary cases from the more complex reality until it becomes second nature to specify who exactly they are talking about when they venture generalizations. At the same time, exercises that help to explain why it is that race remains the prime determinant in how Americans vote will help students balance diversity and change with how much “race [still] matters,” in the apt phrase of Princeton philosopher Cornell West .

Scholars Debate

Because of the relative recency of these events, the books that first set the terms of debate were heavily influenced by media representations. Scholars took their cues from press coverage and from their own political inclinations, while few of the early cohort were African Americans themselves because blacks were still so poorly represented in research institutions. Accounts in this mode by Allen Matusow and Todd Gitlin established the conventional wisdom still found in most textbooks. They tell a tale of decline after the mid-1960s with Black Power—sometimes rendered as an “identity politics” break from “universalism”—featured as the culprit. It seems almost willful in its alleged destruction of a purported liberal coalition.

Over the last two decades especially, a rich literature has emerged that has undermined this interpretation among most scholars of this history, if not in the general public. First, the declension story misses the vast extent of ongoing activism after the late 1960s. It thus understates the great advances that came from black nationalism , among them the explosion of black history and African American studies. But above all, the declension story misreads the sources and dynamics of radicalization because it all but ignores the ways in which New Deal policies and labor movement practices, which benefitted many blacks along with most whites, also entrenched racial inequality in America in ways that snowballed over the decades after the 1930s. Both historians and social scientists have together revealed what has come to be called America’s “two-track welfare state”: a bifurcated structure that from the outset disproportionately benefitted white men and disadvantaged most people of color and women of all backgrounds. Ostensibly neutral policies such as wage and hour laws and Social Security thus excluded agricultural workers and domestic servants, while Federal Housing Administration mortgage insurance was unavailable in predominantly black or transitional neighborhoods. So-called “identity politics,” then, have their roots in these structures: prompted by the inequities they created, such organizing has aimed to promote, ultimately, a genuinely inclusive universalism.

One school of interpretation that synthesizes well these varied discoveries of recent scholarship is “the long civil rights movement” framework, summarized by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall in a presidential address under that title to the Organization of American Historians. As the phrase suggests, this framework draws attention to the deep earlier roots of the struggles of the 1960s in the civil rights unionism and expansive black activism of the New Deal era and World War II, as it also carries the story up to the present, well beyond the mid-1960s closure of conventional wisdom. The long movement literature draws attention to how racial inequality was built into the workings of the U.S. labor market and social policy, and highlights enduring conservative resistance to social democracy and racial inclusion alike. Two historians, Sundiata Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, have criticized the long civil rights movement framework, arguing that it understates rupture over time, the distinctiveness of the South, and the clashes among different streams of black politics. Yet at the time of this writing, growing numbers of scholars seem to be embracing and refining the long civil rights movement approach, because they find in it a strong conceptual handle for the complex story of an evolving and internally varied movement that stretches back at least until the late 1930s and far beyond the 1960s. Indeed, that framework, better than any other, explains both the election of Barack Obama and the tough challenges he faced in governing a starkly polarized nation that had yet to take to heart Dr. King’s admonition that “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.”

Nancy MacLean was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2008-09. She holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is currently Peter B. Ritzma Professor of History and African American Studies at Northwestern University. MacLean is the author of Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (1994); Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (2006); The American Women’s Movement, 1945-2000: A Brief History with Documents (2008); and, with Donald T. Critchlow, Debating the Conservative Movement: 1945 to the Present (2009).

Illustration credits

To cite this essay: MacLean, Nancy. “The Civil Rights Movement: 1968—2008.” Freedom’s Story, TeacherServe©. National Humanities Center. DATE YOU ACCESSED ESSAY. <https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/freedom/1917beyond/essays/crm2008.htm>

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Introductory Essay: The Struggle Continues: Stony the Road (1898–1941)

To what extent did Founding principles of liberty, equality, and justice become a reality for African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century?

• I can explain the challenges and opportunities African Americans faced as a result of the Great Migration.
• I can compare the views of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois on how best to achieve equality for African Americans.
• I can explain how lynching and other forms of racial violence continued to threaten African Americans.
• I can identify and explain the ways in which African Americans took action to confront restraints upon their rights and dignity.
• I can explain why African Americans’ service during two world wars created conditions to challenge segregation and racism within the United States after the end of World War II.

Essential Vocabulary

The struggle continues: stony the road (1898-1941).

The first half of the twentieth century witnessed significant change for all Americans as the United States entered an increasingly industrialized and urban age. Blacks specifically seized opportunities for social mobility, industrial jobs, higher education, military service, artistic achievement, and activism in the new society. The signs of hope and progress they saw were mitigated by the ever-present cloud of segregation and discrimination.

Still, many Black Americans participated in the new opportunities afforded by a changing nation. Millions left southern farms and sought jobs and social mobility by moving to southern cities, northern cities, and the West during the Great Migration . Those who left the perpetual indebtedness of sharecropping , in which they had rented land from white landowners in exchange for a portion of the crop, sometimes moved West to farm. But more often they migrated to cities, where they found limited employment opportunities in low-paying service sector work, such as jobs for janitors or maids. They also faced housing discrimination and were forced to reside in segregated Black neighborhoods. However, Black churches and civic organizations were often a foundation of mutual support and strength, and many Black Americans improved their lives.

The number of Black schools and colleges grew quickly after the Civil War. Black education achieved an impressive record of increasing Black literacy from around 20 percent in 1870 to almost 80 percent in 1920. These gains were realized despite southern state governments cuts to the already meager funding and white supremacists watching Black schools to ensure they did not promote Black equality.

Black Americans organized into groups to fight for equality and justice, laying the foundation of the Civil Rights. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was the most prominent organization that led the struggle for Black civil rights after its founding in 1909. Its mission included contesting racial prejudice and segregation with striving for civil rights and educational opportunities. W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Mary Church Terrell helped establish the NAACP. Du Bois served as the editor of its publication, The Crisis, and brought the struggles of Black Americans to light.

A new generation of Black intellectuals conducted a continuing and vibrant debate over the place of a Black person in the United States and the best path to racial equality. The most prominent debaters were Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois.

Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois differed in their thoughts on how best to achieve equality for Blacks. Washington’s life was shaped by slavery, poverty, and the work ethic fostered at Hampton Institute. Du Bois was 12 years younger than Washington and was born and raised in the small community of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Du Bois praised Washington’s famous 1895 speech at the Cotton States Exposition, but later grew critical of Washington and his leadership.

Booker T. Washington graduated from Hampton Institute (today known as Hampton University) and was the first head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, one of many Black colleges formed in the period. In his famous “Atlanta Exposition Address” (1895), Washington advocated vocational education, hard work, and moral virtues for Blacks as a means of proving themselves to whites and advancing socially and economically.

W. E. B. Du Bois was a critic of Washington’s stance, which he thought too accommodationist, or too willing to compromise with whites. Du Bois was Harvard educated, and in his most famous work, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), he maintained that Blacks should pursue a liberal arts education and fight for full political and civic equality. He argued that a “Talented Tenth” would provide the leadership and vision in achieving progress in racial equality. Although these Black intellectuals held radically different visions, they concurred on the goal of achieving greater Black equality.

Another figure of the time, Marcus Garvey, presented an alternate view supporting racial separation rather than integration. Garvey was an immigrant from Jamaica who founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). He supported Black separatism and a pan-African movement advocating migration back to Africa. He employed more militant rhetoric and advocated armed self-defense.

Black artists, writers, and musicians expressed themselves creatively in different media to convey their Black pride and celebrate African and African American history. The most famous movement of Black culture in the first half of the twentieth century was the Harlem Renaissance . This was a flourishing of Black art among a remarkable concentration of artists in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s and that also included Black artists and culture around the nation and world. In 1925, Alain Locke helped launch the movement with the anthology “The New Negro,” which advanced Black self-expression and art. The rich array of artists included writer Zora Neale Hurston, poet Langston Hughes, and musicians Josephine Baker, Louis Armstong, and Duke Ellington. These artists and many others left an indelible mark not only upon Black culture but on American culture more generally.

A number of violent racial incidents marred race relations throughout this period. Black Americans were the victims of lynchings , and Congress did not pass an antilynching bill despite repeated calls for one. The Great Migration to urban cities fueled racial tensions and led to a number of race riots during and immediately after World War I in several cities across the country. In the infamous Tulsa Massacre of 1921, armed white mobs burned down several square blocks of Black neighborhoods, including a wealthier part of town called “Black Wall Street,” where successful, enterprising Blacks lived and worked. The white mobs fired their weapons at Blacks, killing dozens.

The racial violence after World War I was replicated during World War II, most notably in Detroit in 1943 as tensions over segregated neighborhoods stirred crowds of whites and Blacks to violence. Hundreds were injured, and President Roosevelt sent the army to quell the violence.

The wider political reform movements of the first half of the twentieth century did not offer Black Americans significant relief. Southern progressivism supported segregation as a means of achieving greater social order. Many labor unions excluded Black workers and thus forced them to rely upon mutual-aid societies. Moreover, the popularity of Social Darwinism , even among scientists and intellectuals, meant that belief in a racial hierarchy became widespread, relegating those of darker skin to the bottom. The federal government generally followed discriminatory hiring practices, most notably during the Wilson administration. Blacks also often received less government assistance. For example, during the New Deal, President Franklin Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression, the administration deferred to racist local and state governments on the distribution of aid. Still, Blacks welcomed the federal relief they received during those difficult times, and many switched from the Republican Party, often called the party of Lincoln, to the Democratic Party.

Local and state governments also continued to suppress Black voter registration, especially in the South. The court deferred to the states to set voting qualifications in Giles v. Harris (1903), though in Nixon v. Herndon (1927) it did ban discrimination when it was egregiously and overtly aimed at restricting the Black vote in primaries. The court affirmed the Nixon ruling in Smith v. Allwright (1944), by banning the attempt in Texas to exclude Blacks by allowing primaries to be regulated by private associations like political parties that could discriminate.

Black men and women played a vital role in the war effort during both world wars. Pictured are a group of the Tuskegee Airmen at a U.S. base in February 1944 and women working at a welding plant on the home front in 1943.

Even though they did not enjoy the full rights of citizenship at home, Blacks served in the fight against autocracy during two world wars—350,000 soldiers in World War I and 1.2 million in World War II. Black soldiers in the armed forces mostly served in segregated units that were typically assigned menial support labor. However, many fought courageously, such as the Harlem Hellfighters in the 369th Regiment of the 93rd Division at the Meuse-Argonne offensive in 1918, and the bomber and fighter squadrons flown by the highly decorated Tuskegee Airmen. Other significant contributions to the war included the Redball Express, which brought desperately needed supplies and troops to Europe during the Battle of the Bulge. Black members of the armed services resisted racist acts in the armed forces during World War II. After fighting fascism abroad, they were more likely to make a stand against segregation and racism at home after the war.

By World War II, Black leaders such as A. Philip Randolph were directly confronting the Roosevelt administration and the larger society to protest discrimination in the armed services and defense industries. When Randolph threatened a 100,000-person march on Washington, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, banning discrimination in hiring for federal agencies and contractors, and established the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) to enforce the order. This success was a landmark in Black direct action in the struggle for freedom and equality.

The first half of the twentieth century was a period of segregation and second-class status for Black Americans. However, they took action to defy the restraints upon their rights and personal dignity. They formulated and debated paths to equality, expressed their creativity in dynamic and powerful ways, fought for a country that denied them equal opportunity, cooperated for mutual support, and took direct action to confront oppression and injustice. These generations of Black intellectuals, artists, soldiers, and activists demonstrated the moral courage that laid the foundation of the civil rights movement.

Reading Comprehension Questions

• What factors led to the Great Migration? How did the Great Migration change life for the many Black Americans who moved? How did it alter the Black experience in the United States?
• Compare and contrast the ideas of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. How would they critique each other’s ideas? On what did they agree?
• Why do you think Blacks served their country in the armed forces when they suffered discrimination and segregation within both the military and the larger society?

An evaluation of the reasons for the development of the Civil Rights campaign, after 1945

Economic Factors

End of Second World War saw a shift in the economic position of African Americans. Many moved to northern states for better job opportunities during the Great Migration , leading to larger African American populations demanding civil rights.

The prosperity seen in the post-War era, known as the Post-War Economic Boom , raised expectations among African Americans. They felt they deserved a share of the wealth and better living conditions.

Political Factors

The Cold War played an important role as the USA, claiming to be the leader of the ‘free world’, faced international scrutiny for its racial inequality, leading to pressure for change.

The foundation of the United Nations in 1945 and its Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 put further international pressure on the USA to increase its civil rights protections.

Social Factors

The Double V campaign during World War II, which called for both victory in the war and equality at home, highlighted the hypocrisy of fighting for freedom abroad while denying basic rights at home.

Increased exposure of African American soldiers to different social norms during the war was a major factor. On return, many refused to accept segregation and second-class citizenship, becoming the frontline in the battle for civil rights.

Legal Context

Supreme Court rulings such as Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 set legal precedent for the desegregation of schools, while other lawsuits aimed at segregating public facilities.

The constitutionality of segregation was increasingly being questioned, including segregation on buses which Rosa Parks famously protested against in 1955.

Actions of Prominent Figures and Groups

• Leadership from figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and organisations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) provided effective and visible advocacy for the cause.

Media Influence

• The proliferation of television and other media outlets helped bring attention to civil rights issues, including brutal enforcement of segregation, making it a key issue for the public, and impossible for politicians to ignore.

Remember each of these points is interconnected and had varying degrees of impact on the development of the Civil Rights campaign. Assess their individual significance while also understanding their cumulative effect.

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Higher History USA: Essay 5 Development of the Civil Rights Movement

Subject: History

Age range: 11-14

Resource type: Other

Last updated

22 February 2018

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