Essay 3, Unit IV

Compare and contrast the Black civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s with the Native American movement of the 1970s.

   The decade of the 1950s witnessed a dramatic development in the struggle to gain equal civil rights under the law for Afro-Americans. The efforts to escape from the second-class citizenship to which Southern "Jim Crow" laws and Northern de facto segregation consigned them first achieved media attention and national prominence in Montgomery, Alabama in the mid-1950's. There an apparently trivial incident brought the Black community together and thrust into leadership a young Black minister who would become recognized world-wide for his contribution to human rights.

   The Montgomery bus boycott started after a Black maid, Rosa Parks, found that there was no seating in the "Colored only" section at the rear of the bus. Since her feet and legs hurt after standing at work all day,

   Mrs. Parks took an empty seat in front of the sign. The bus driver stopped and demanded that she "move to the back of the bus." When she refused the bus driver had her arrested for violating a city ordinance requiring segregated seating. News of the arrest spread and the Black community met at a church to decide what to do. Martin Luther King, Jr., the young Black minister, became the spokesperson for the protest and led the boycott which led to an eventual victory with the Montgomery city council repealing the bus segregation law.

   The approach that M.L. King preached from the very beginning was that of an appeal to the Christian conscience of white Americans through direct confrontation of institutonalized racism. The confrontation was to be one of peaceful, non-violent, passive resistance to evil. This remained King's approach throughout all his years of leading the Black civil rights movement, even as he suffered physical abuse and jail sentences. His tactics were too direct for many white "moderates" who said they shared his basic concern. King responded to this criticism in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," in which he assailed the moderates for agreeing with his goals but not his methods. He contended that they "preferred order to justice."

   King's goals and methods spread across the nation as his moral leadership of the movement attracted the support of millions of whites as well as Afro-Americans. Peaceful "sit-ins" led to the desegregation of Woolworth department stores dining counters and restaurants in the University of Texas area by 1960. "Freedom rides" put pressure on bus lines to eliminate segregated seating in interstate transportation. And marches to secure equal voting rights for Southern Blacks caught the nation's attention and pricked its conscience. By the late 1950s and early 1960s two new organizations committed to King's goal and approach replaced the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as the leading Black civil rights groups.

   The two organizations that took the lead in the movement were the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, established by King himself, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, composed primarily of college and university students nation-wide. These groups engaged in a host of marches, sit-ins, prayer vigils and other demonstrations in behalf of equal civil rights. Both the executive and judicial branches of the federal government took notice of and responded to the growing demand for "equal justice under the law." In 1954 the Supreme Court, in "Brown v. Topeka Board of Education," declared separate educational facilities to be inherently unequal, thus striking down the "Plessy v. Ferguson" decision of 1896.

   The South responded to court-ordered school desegration with massive resistance. Some school districts (Prince Edward county in Virginia) even closed down public schools rather than allow racial integration. In the mid-1950s the University of Texas at Austin allowed Afro-Americans as students for the first time. But frequently Southern states chose to defy the Supreme Court's decision. In 1962, for example, the Kennedy adminstration and the governor of Mississippi (Ross Barnett) had a showdown over the enrollment of the first Black (James Meredith) in the University of Mississippi. Kennedy finally sent in federal marshalls to force Meredith' admission. Thus the agonizingly slow process of school desegregation was begun.

   While sympathetic to King and the civil rights movement the Kennedy administration rarely went to the lengths of sending in federal marshalls as at the University of Mississippi. Kennedy's attitude toward Southern racism and discrimination was revealed in his indirect approach of combining executive leadership and cooperation with civil rights activists. The legislative branch proved more reluctant to respond to the civil rights movement than either the executive or judicial. A weak voting rights bill was passed in the last year of Eisenhower's administration, but was not effectively enforced. Even Kennedy was unable to push a civil rights bill through Congress. It was not until 1964 that the omnibus civil rights bill passed.

   By the mid-1960s the Black civil rights movement began to change both its goals and its methods. Dissatisfied with the results of progress made in securing civil rights, a more aggressive group of Afro-American leaders began to demand immediate improvements in Black education, employment, and housing. These "bread and butter" issues began to replace those involving civil rights. And by the late 1960s Black militants abandoned King's peaceful, non-violent, passive resistance to evil, and urged forceful demonstrations of "Black Power." Stokely Carmichael, who coined the phrase, explained that Black Power meant simply the same kind of economic, social, and political power always exercised by whites but in Black hands.

   Whatever Carmichael might have intended white Americans began to feel threatened by the Black Power of the late 1960s. Their fear was intensified as the Black Panther movement began to spread. Organized originally in Black urban ghettos, like Watts in Los Angeles, the Black Panther movement indicated that while it would never initiative violence, neither would it "turn the other cheek" if it was a target of violence. Eldridge Cleaver became one of the leading spokespersons for the Black Panthers. As the goals and methods of the Black civil rights movement began to shift from those of M. L. King, Jr., so did white sympathies with the movement. By the late 1960s a white backlash had occurred, reflected in the emergence of White Citizens Councils.

   When the Native American (Indian) protest movement finally gained national attention in the 1970s it sought a very different set of goals from those of the Afro-American civil rights movement. Unlike King, Native American spokespersons did not seek full integration into the white society. Rather they sought the right to maintain their separate Indian identity and culture, not to gain admittance into the mainstream of white society. The primary goals of the Native American protest movement were to achieve tribal autonomy and recognition of Indian rights accorded them by federal treaties. And because Native Americans comprise less that one percent of the nation's population they realized they could not depend upon political clout.

   The most active of the Native American protest organizations of the 1970s was the American Indian Movement (AIM), founded by such leaders as John Trudell, Russell Means, and Dennis Banks. This organization sought to call attention to the plight of the Native Americans through a series of dramatic confrontations with the federal government. When the government closed the federal prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, the Indians, in accordance with treaty rights, sought to occupy it and establish a Native American culture center. They were forced off the island by federal marshals, reflecting the government's continued refusal to take seriously the promises made to Indian tribes in federal treaties.

   Next the American Indian Movement occupied offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C. to demonstrate against perceived paternalism and poor adminstration of Indian affairs by the Bureau. Once again federal marshals dislodged the Indians. In the most dramatic confrontation with federal power over what the AIM viewed as violation of treaty rights, Native Americans attempted to take over lands around Wounded Knee, South Dakota. This action resulted in a violent confrontation with federal marshals and led to the deaths of an Indian and a federal agent. While the American Indian Movement continued the battle for tribal autonomy and treaty rights thoughout the 1970s it was not very effective in achieving its goals.

   While AIM caught the attention of the American public it did not gain much non-Indian support. Another organization, working quietly behind the scenes through the legal system was more successful during the decade in winning battles in the federal court of the nation. The Native American Rights Fund (NARF) chalked up some notable victories for Indians using federal Indian treaties as a basis for their legal challenges. NARF secured recognition of many Indian tribal rights, including rights to lands, and natural resources on tribal lands. With the legal asssistance of NARF the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy tribes of Maine, for example, won title to 300,000 acres of land and $20 million in compensatory funds. NARF continues the legal fight today.

   FBI Director - J. Edgar Hoover testifies before the House Un-American Affairs Committee concerning Communists in the United States.

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