Minority Civil Rights Movements and the Prison Industrial Complex

Introduction: Post-WWII Minority Activism

The Second World War (WWII) witnessed an outbreak of activism — a form of resistance — by Native Americans, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Chicanos, as the campaign for civil rights inspired other racial minorities in America to demand total equality for themselves. The era from the 1950s to the 1970s saw dramatic changes to United States society, especially for ethnic and racial minorities who rallied and protested against their subordination, demanding full political and civil rights. Minority advocates confronted demeaning media stereotypes and misrepresentation within educational institutions, reclaiming ethnic and racial identities that had earlier been suppressed in frequent — and often futile — bids to assimilate into mainstream white society.

Every social movement employs numerous tactics and strategies to accomplish its goals. While some civil rights campaign strategies, such as nonviolent civil disobedience, became the movement's most enduring and iconic images, most strategies were derived from Gandhi's nonviolent principles or from earlier labor movements (Fitzgerald 176).

African-American Civil Rights Struggles

African-Americans constitute the most dominant minority group in all of American history. Brought initially to America in 1619 on slave ships, the first twenty Africans to step foot on American soil may not actually have been brought as slaves. Rather, just as most white laborers of the period, the Africans were perhaps indentured servants. The African transformation into chattel slaves constitutes a story of slavery's "hidden" origins. The nineteenth-century political uproar over slavery nearly destroyed America, and ever since emancipation and the Civil War, race in the United States has been chiefly defined with respect to African-Americans — encompassing the underclass, segregation, affirmative action, and civil rights.

Representing the largest minority community in U.S. society, African-Americans have stood at the forefront of the campaign for civil rights. (It should be noted, however, that in terms of total U.S. population, Hispanics are presently the largest minority community and are expected to constitute the majority as early as 2042.) This struggle is an enduring reminder of America's moral vision as a nation committed to liberty (Takaki 7–8).

The "Jim Crow" segregation policies of Southern states, intended to physically mark the subordination of Black Americans in an era when that subordination could no longer be taken for granted, arose after the Civil War. In 1955, Black residents of Montgomery, Alabama, opposed racial segregation on public transportation — successfully — through a massive city-bus boycott lasting 381 days. This boycott was initiated by Rosa Parks, an African-American seamstress and member of the local NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), who refused to give up her bus seat to a white male passenger, as was then required by Alabama law and custom throughout the Southern states.

Parks was neither the first nor the last African-American person to be arrested for disobeying segregation laws, but her arrest catalyzed the Montgomery Bus Boycott — a pivotal event in the history of the civil rights movement. In response to the boycott, white Alabamians established White Citizens' Councils, middle-class white organizations formed for the sole purpose of opposing desegregation. Black advocates faced economic and political opposition, as well as violence at the hands of local white supremacists. The lawsuit challenging Montgomery's desegregation laws had, by 1956, reached the Supreme Court, which ruled that such laws were unconstitutional (Fitzgerald 184–185).

Asian-American Identity and the Redress Movement

The cultural and social conditions following WWII that stimulated the civil rights movement also contributed to Asian-American activism, in addition to oppressive conditions that Asian-Americans faced uniquely. Some of these conditions included a growing awareness of historic discrimination — such as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1924 National Origins Act excluding Japanese immigration, the internment of more than 110,000 persons of Japanese origin during WWII, and pervasive anti-Asian attitudes stemming from America's wars in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam (Fitzgerald 205).

Asian-American movements both created and were driven by a broad pan-Asian identity, rather than individual ethnic identities such as Chinese-American, Korean-American, or Japanese-American. Specific circumstances in the 1960s facilitated the emergence of this new ethnic consciousness. Because of immigration restrictions, by the 1960s American-born Asian-Americans outnumbered Asian immigrants. A shared language — English — enabled them to unite against common forms of oppression. Moreover, many Americans accorded similar treatment to all Asian-Americans, owing to an unwillingness or inability to distinguish between different Asian ethnicities. These factors combined to produce a collective Asian-American identity that proved effective in rallying for comprehensive cultural, civil, and political rights.

The movement demanded that U.S. educational institutions establish Asian-American Studies programs at universities and raised concerns about the under-enrollment of Asian-Americans in colleges relative to European-Americans. Among the movement's most significant victories was redress for Japanese-Americans interned during WWII. The Redress Campaign, which sought a formal apology and monetary compensation for the Japanese American internment, culminated in President Ronald Reagan's signing of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which authorized $1.25 billion in reparations for approximately 70,000 Japanese-American internment camp survivors (Fitzgerald 206).

References

Davis, Angela Y., and Robin D.G. Kelley. The Meaning of Freedom. 2012. Print.

Fitzgerald, Kathleen. Recognizing Race and Ethnicity: Power, Privilege, and Inequality. Westview Press, 2014.

Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror. N.d. Internet resource.