CIVIL RIGHTS REVOLUTION
For students in IDST 2315 "America's Diverse Cultural Heritage"
Georgia College & State University
Source: Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1993.
Chapters 13 and 14 (pp. 340-428)
Racial discrimination becoming un-American post WWII
1948 – Truman desegregates armed forces & calls for fair employment w/o discrimination (immigrants from Asia still restricted)
1964 – Civil Rights act
1965 – remove barriers to Asian immigration (Robert Kennedy)
1988 – Congress passed bill providing apology / repayment of $20,000 each to survivors of internment camps for Japanese and Germans during WWII (signed by Reagan)
African Americans fight segregation
1954 – education equality, Brown v Board of Education US Supreme Court declares segregation in schools unconstitutional (NAACP declares it a victory for “whole American people”); integration remains largely ruling on paper, struggle shifts from courts to communities
1955 (Dec. 1) Rosa Parks board bus in Montgomery, Alabama after tiring day at dept. store she sits in sect reserved for whites, driver orders her to give seat to white man. “No. Go on and have me arrested.” Her arrest led to explosive protest vs busses (share rides or walk)
Martin Luther King Jr.
Young Black minister finds self catapulted into leadership of struggle, MLK jr noticed in Montgomery that almost ½ pop = black but confined to domestic service/common labor
KING = leader of Montgomery bus boycott, gives voice to black frustration “There comes a time when people get tired. We are here this evening to say to those who have mistreated us so long that we are tired – tired of being segregated and humiliated; tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression. Our actions must be guided by the deepest principles of our Christian faith. Love must be our regulating ideal. Once again we must hear the words of Jesus echoing across the centuries: ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, and pray for them that despitefully use you.’” (Takaki, 404)
King – espouses non-violence a la Gandhi; after Montgomery protests, sit-ins of black students at Woolworth lunch counters; spreads across South; “freedom rides” acts of civil disobedience to integrate interstate buses in South (Congress of Racial Equality CORE); black and white civil rights supporters defiantly, bravely ride together & sing in buses (often brutally yanked from buses & beaten by racist white mobs before TV cameras)
1963 – March on Washington DC, 100,000s march on Washington gather before Lincoln Memorial to hear King’s “I Have a Dream” speech; vision of blacks/whites living together
Many Jews involved in civil rights (2 murdered w/ James Chaney in Miss summer 1964); often financed actions, e.g. MLK’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference + (long history of Jews supporting abolition, civil war, & condemning white violence vs. blacks)
Jews remembered own persecution & violence in Europe (anti-Semitism)
When civil rights struggle shifted to demand for economic equality black-Jewish “alliance” tested (many business owners, landlords are Jewish)
1967 Arab-Israeli Six-Day War leads to black sympathy for Arabs & Jews turn away from Civil Rights Movement
To “overcome” meant integrate schools, buses, lunch counters, etc (internal colonialism) and message of separatism rather than integration for “black nationalism”
1960’s blacks enter ranks of teachers, social workers, civil service workers and confrontations
Malcolm X
POVERTY not so easily abolished (especially in inner cities in North)
1965 – Watts Riots in LA
Malcolm X – 1964 – “I don’t see any American dream. I see an American nightmare.” (drugs, crime, vermin-infested apartments, garbage, drunks, junkies = shadow figures – noted by King)
Malcolm X – separatist ideology, mocked King’s vision of integration & non-violence. Recommends violence to defend rights (King sees/understands world that produces X). X is necessary to help move forward civil rights. Government knows he's there knocking at door if they don't deal with MLK
1960-1980, percentage of families headed by women doubles (vs 12 % increase for Whites). Baby boomers too many for avail jobs, + unemployment rise (AFDC more than doubles, especially for black women); pushed to welfare by unemployment (contrary to Reagan’s claims). Unemployment for whites = 8-11%; for blacks 13-22% (especially young black men)
Toward the 21st Century
Movement of plants & offices to suburbs during last 3 decades has followed whites, isolated urban blacks from employment opportunities. Also “deindustrialization of America” relocates production in low-wage countries like S. Korea, Mexico etc lose 22 mil jobs between 1969-1976
Starting Late 60’s – no jobs available at all in some regions (Gary, In)
Some argue Asian success on West Coast proof that race doesn’t matter (model minority)
But most Asian Americans live in states with best economies (CA, Hawaii, NY); also “family incomes” based on more people working; many still in poverty (also less willing/inclined to challenge Protestant work ethic)
Since 1955, federal government has spent more than $1 trillion on nuclear arms & other weaponry for Cold War (= 62% all fed research money) and drained resources to produce competitive consumer goods and trade imbalances, contributed to decline in commercial manufacturing, especially for industrial economy where many blacks are employed
1980 – 74,000 (< ½ total) of Native American population no longer live on reservations but in cities (vs 24,000 or 13% in 1940)
Global context of Cold War and immigration of more Jews from former Soviet Union; collapse of communism unleashed new wave of anti-Semitism
South Central L.A. symbolizes plight of poor blacks trapped in inner cities (squalor & poverty present within one of America’s wealthiest & most modern cities), extremely volatile (50% unemployment—higher than nat’l rate during depression)
WE ALL NEED TO BECOME LISTENERS MLK: “A riot is the language of the unheard.”
New era of economic expansion could re-build country, truly a “brave new world”; changes, says Gloria Anzaldua: “The struggle is inner: Chicano, indio, American Indian, Mojado, Mexicano, immigrant, Latino, Anglo in power, working class Anglo, Black, Asian—our psyches resemble the bordertowns and are populated by the saem people. . . . Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society.”
“Re-visioned” history; “revolution from within” grounded in unlearning & substituting more inclusive & accurate history of all the peoples of America “to finally recognize our own invisibility”
See p. 426 poem by Audre Lorde: "It is a waste of time hating a mirror
or its reflection
instead of stopping the hand
that makes glass with distortions"
Melville: “you can not spill a drop of American blood, without spilling the blood of the whole world.” Americans not a narrow tribe, not a nation, “so much as a world”
But America’s dilemma – our resistance to ourselves, denial of immensely varied selves. “We can get along,” Rodney King reassured us during an agonizing moment of racial hate and violence, says Takaki. But requires self-recognition as well as self-acceptance
We need to stop denying our wholeness as members of humanity as well as one nation.
See last paragraph in Takaki, p. 428: "As Americans, we originally came from many different shores, and our diversity has been at the center of the making of America. While our stories contain the memories of different communities, together they inscribe a larger narrative. Filled with what Walt Whitman celebrated as the 'varied carols' of America, our history generously gives all of us our 'mystic chords of memory.' Throughout our past of oppressions and struggles for equality, Americans of different races and ethnicities have been 'singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs' in the textile mills of Lowell, the cotton fields of Mississippi, on the Indian reservations of South Dakota, the railroad tracks high in the Sierras of California, in the garment factories of the Lower East Side, the canefields of Hawaii, and a thousand other places across the country. Our denied history 'bursts with telling.' As we hear America singing, we find ourselves invited to bring our rich cultural diversity on deck, to accept ourselves. 'Of every hue and caste am I,' sang Whitman. 'I resist any thing better than my own diversity.'"