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CIVIL RIGHTS
The civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 60’s was, like the feminist movement, a struggle for equality not just at the level of federal laws but also in the workplace, the neighborhood, and the home. Black people in the US experienced overt violence and explicit bias – from redlining, in which banks and realtors denied blacks the ability to buy a home, to racial profiling and harassment by the police, mass incarceration, inferior schools, and lower pay and opportunities for advancement. They also faced systemic racism and implicit bias – unconscious attitudes and stereotypes held by individuals based on the characteristics of another person, such as race. The civil rights movement sought change not only in formal institutions (through policy change) but also in informal institutions – society’s norms, beliefs, and understandings about race.
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The birth of the civil rights movement is often attributed to Rosa Parks, who in 1955 refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama and sparked the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott – leading the Supreme Court to declare in 1956 that segregated buses were unconstitutional. One wing of the movement was led by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who advocated for change through nonviolent protest and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to organize the movement across the South. Not all civil rights activists agreed with King’s non-violent tactics and integrationist goals. The influential leader Malcolm X was a proponent of Black Nationalism – the belief that blacks constituted a nation which should seek independence and resist assimilation to white culture.
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