Challenging the Status Quo in the Civil Rights Movement

Civic Engagement

The right to vote is a constitutional one in the US and it was passed by Congress in 1869: it ensured that everyone had the right, regardless of race, creed or color. Yet nearly a century later in the US, people were still being segregated and discriminated against because of race, creed and color. Why? The reason is that the power structure in the US did not want certain types of people voting or having influence or power of their own. It is why many immigrant communities were broken up by federal plans to create new interstate roads. It is why there have only been two Catholic presidents and one black one in the nation’s more than 200-year history. The US has always been a fundamentally WASP-driven affair, with help from elite (often Jewish) families that dominate banking, finance, and media. There is no room in that paradigm for other races, creeds, or colors since the “founding fathers” of the US and the financial elites both viewed themselves as the chosen people of God. The “chosen ones” do not want competition—and voting rights open the door to competition. The elite ruling class wants to keep the status quo.

The Civil Rights Movement was a movement against the status quo. One big issue for blacks was the ability to have equal employment: after the end of slavery, blacks were still treated as second-class citizens. The Movement was about an oppressed people lifting itself up to challenge the status quo and the ruling elites. One of the keys to change was education—but blacks were still forced to learn in their own schools. White schools, where the best education was to be found, were denied to blacks.

The Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 changed all that and opened the door to integration—but it also provoked racism in various states, particularly in the South. Activists fought back, with the Freedom Riders doing their part to draw attention to the institutionalized racism of the system. But the Riders were targeted and met with violence, too.

So if the system was against equal rights, why was the constitutional amendment made in the first place? The US has a history of engaging in lip service to mollify a certain segment of society—but it rarely has the intention of actually following through on what it says. The Declaration of Independence, for example, stated that all people are created equal—yet there was no equality for women or for blacks in America: what the signers actually meant was that all property-owning white men should consider themselves as the elite rulers of the new independent nation. The founding fathers were simply paying lip service to Enlightenment ideals and philosophy like that promoted by Thomas Paine. Paine truly believed in equality and he wanted blacks to be free and equal to whites in America. He was welcomed by the founding fathers for his influence and voice, but when it came to practical implementation of ideals, he was shunned and dismissed by the emerging power structure.

The same is true of Lincoln: he was useful in undermining the strength of the South by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation—but after the war when he suggested that forgiveness be the order of the day he was assassinated and blacks in the south were hamstrung by sharecropper agreements that essentially kept them from having any true autonomy. Blacks needed a social movement in order to gain what they were constitutionally guaranteed in writing but which the power structure routinely allowed them to be denied in practice.

But what makes a social movement in general successful is the ability of the leaders and members of that movement to adhere to principles of peace while maintaining their conviction even in the face of violence. Thanks to leaders like Fred Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr., the Civil Rights Movement was a social movement that maintained its discipline, vision, and strength. It succeeded because its leaders and members were thoughtful, articulate, politically active, and able to withstand violent assaults without engaging in violence themselves. Thus, the fight for the right to vote was eventually won.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 removed the taxes and tests that had kept blacks in some states from being able to exercise their constitutional right to vote. It was a tremendous victory, and one that King, pictured above with President Johnson, helped to bring about through his various marches and speeches and leadership. Through civil disobedience the members of the Civil Rights social movement were able to bring change to the system that wanted things to basically stay the same. But the social and political consciousness of the nation was changing, and that was because the people of the Civil Rights Movement refused to back down: their stories were told in the media, and their actions were seen as heroic by many.