Civil Rights: African-Americans and Women\'s

¶ … Civil Rights:

african-americans and women'S RIGHTS

Throughout the long course of American history, many groups of people from various racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds have attempted to obtain their rights as American citizens outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Most of these groups have also used a number of different ways to obtain these rights, whether through political means, demonstrations, protests or boycotts; some have succeeded quite well, while others have failed miserably. Out of all these groups, two in particular stand out, being the African-American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950's and 1960's and the Women's Liberation Movement of the 1960's and 1970's, both of which share many similarities related to the process used to gain their rights. These two movements also share similarities in relation to basic, underlying causes, their overall goals and especially their leaders who guided each of movement from a grassroots organization to national prominence and success.

Although African-Americans have been discriminated against and viewed as less than second-class citizens going back as far as the founding of the United States of America in the late 18th century, it appears that the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement happened in May of 1954 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in the U.S. public schools was unconstitutional. In the opinion of Chief Justice Earl Warren, "separate schools are inherently unequal" and help to breed "in the minds of Negro children a sense of inferiority. . . Therefore, these Negro children" have been denied "the equal protection of the law" required by the Fourteenth Amendment to the constitution (Riches, 45).

Certainly, this important decision by the Supreme Court inspired African-Americans to continue their struggle for civil rights, especially when President Dwight D. Eisenhower "accepted the desegregation ruling of the court as valid" and then in 1956, sent one of the first civil rights bills to the U.S. Congress, "designed to fulfill the obligation of Congress to enforce by appropriate legislation the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments" and to create a division in the Department of Justice to "enforce the civil rights of the individual," including the right to vote. This bill, although not supported by many Southern democrats, was passed by Congress and was signed into law by President Eisenhower in September of 1956 (Powledge, 134).

The first important test of this Supreme Court-ordered desegregation law happened in Little Rock, Arkansas in September of 1957 when the school board of that city announced that it would admit Negroes into the all-white Central High School. When the school opened on September 3, the governor of Arkansas "sent the National Guard to the school and prevented Negro students from entering the building," but on September 24, Eisenhower ordered federal troops into Little Rock and on the next day escorted the Negro students into the school (Powledge, 144).

In the meantime, in other areas of the country, African-Americans began a much broader attack upon discrimination and segregation, spurred on by the response of President Eisenhower to the events at Little Rock and the passing of the first major American civil rights bill. In December of 1955, Rosa Parks, a lower middle-class, hard-working black woman, was ordered by a white bus driver in Montgomery, Alabama, to give up her seat to a white man. When she refused, she was arrested and sent to jail. Black leaders in Montgomery were infuriated and organized a boycott of the buses, and for almost a year, almost all African-Americans in Montgomery refused to ride the buses despite hundreds being arrested.

As this boycott continued, other African-American leaders began to widen their efforts and in November of 1956, the Supreme Court ruled once again in their favor, for it determined that segregation on mass transit public carriers was unconstitutional which then forced the bus company to accept the demands of African-Americans in the city of Montgomery (Riches, 66). This decision also forced other mass transit companies to abandon their segregation policies and it was not long before the Civil Rights Movement took on additional power and influence.

The success of the Montgomery boycott gave southern African-Americans a new confidence, a new weapon and a new leader in the form of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a charismatic young Baptist minister who preached the gospel of non-violent resistance to all forms of racial discrimination. Before the boycott, the leadership of the Civil Rights Movement had come almost entirely from national organizations with headquarters in northern cities, notably the NAACP, the National Urban League and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); thus, Dr. King became the first southern black to work entirely within the South to emerge as a regional leader of the attack upon segregation.

In 1957, he strengthened his position of leadership when he organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as the sole vehicle for conducting a non-violent crusade against all forms of discrimination, both white and black. His hero was

Mahatma Ghandi whom like King supported non-violent actions against the British Empire in India as a way of bringing India into the modern world as a free nation. In 1965, Dr. King organized a series of demonstrations in Selma, Alabama which ended with King and his supporters being arrested; on March 15, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress and committed his administration to ending all racial discrimination and quoted King with the expression to Congress that "We shall overcome" (Riches, 73) which then led to the federal government initiating new voting rights laws, something which Dr. King had long advocated.

Thus, Dr. King became greatly admired because he consistently advocated and practiced the doctrine of non-violence in the pursuit of his goals to obtain civil rights for not only African-Americans but all racial/ethnic groups. He also gained the support of a large segment of the white American community which effectively made him the leader of the Civil Rights Movement.

As a result of Dr. King's efforts to ensure that all Americans were given their rights and the laws passed by Congress, the Civil Rights Movement became a triumph of human energy, perseverance and dedication. But when Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, the Civil Rights Movement "lost its most effective spokesperson" and "seemed to flounder in futility for many months" (Powledge, 178). But by the late 1960's, the movement achieved new energy and accomplished great things related to giving African-Americans the rights they deserved when then led to a substantial degree of equality with white Americans, something which continues to grow even today.

In comparison to the African-American Civil Rights Movement, that of women's liberation, also known as the Feminist Movement, shares many similarities related to the causes for the movement, their overall goals and the leaders who came to the forefront of national recognition. Much like African-Americans, women (especially black women) in the United States have long been discriminated against, due to men seeing them as second-class citizens and as property, similar to how African-American slaves were seen by white Southerners during the Civil War.

To support this, one prominent American feminist historian has been quoted as saying that in the 19th century, women "were considered as sub-sets of their husbands and after marriage they did not have the right to own property, maintain their wages or sign a contract, much less vote" ("The History of Women's Suffrage," Internet).

This movement seems to have begun in a place called Seneca Falls, New York, where in 1848, a meeting was held as the first Women's Rights Convention. This historical meeting was attended by "an American delegation which included a number of women," such as Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who were "forced to sit in the galleries as observers because they were women" ("The History of Women's Suffrage," Internet).

As a result of being treated as second-class citizens, Mott and Stanton held their own conference to "discuss the social, civil and religious rights" of all American women and used the Declaration of Independence as a guide to Stanton's Declaration of Principles which included recommendations for immediate change in the political, economic and social status of American women ("The History of Women's Suffrage,"

Internet). One of these recommendations, known as Resolution 9, demanded that women be given the right to vote which later on during the Feminist Movement in the early 1900's "became the centerpiece of the women's rights movement" ("The History of Women's Suffrage," Internet).

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, women reformers like Stanton and Mott, along with Sojourner Truth and Susan B. Anthony, lobbied the U.S. Congress and their state senators to eliminate slavery from the face of the earth. Unfortunately, this did not occur until well into the last decades of the 19th century; however, these reformers demanded that "women and slaves alike must be granted the same rights as the white man," but things did not turn out in favor of American women, for the right to vote was given to African-Americans first, a political move which President Abraham Lincoln saw as more important than allowing women to vote ("The History of Women's Suffrage," Internet).

Much like African-American leaders and reformers that brought about the end of racial discrimination and segregation via the Civil Rights Movement, in 1866, Stanton created the American Equal Rights Association, aimed at organizing women in the long fight for equal rights. In 1868, the U.S. Congress ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which "defined citizenship and voters as male" and excluded women; in 1870, Congress ratified the Fifteenth Amendment which also excluded women in favor of African-American males ("The History of Women's Suffrage," Internet).

At this point, the women's movement split into two factions, the National Woman

Suffrage Association, headed by Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and the American Woman Suffrage Association, a more conservative organization headed by Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone. By 1890, these two opposing factions joined forces to create the National American Woman Suffrage Association under the leadership of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Gurko, 145).

Sometime around 1910, an era known as the Progressive Movement came about which allowed women reformers to "rattle their spears in defense of their rights as American citizens to vote, hold office, and maintain their own standard of living" comparable to that of men (Gurko, 147). Within a short period of time, the often radical ideas linked to the Progressive Movement began to spread to every state in the nation, something which helped women reformer greatly in their decades-long struggle for equal rights.