be ?white?-they would only be Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and others engaged
in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity…White
poverty could be ignored and whites’ paranoia of each other could be overlooked
primarily owing to the distinctive American feature: the basic racial divide of
black and white people.?14
This ?racial divide? is what caused the evolution of the black Civil
Rights movement. The Civil Rights Movement was the first mass movement to evolve
in the 60’s. But it was not the first time that African Americans had waged
struggle against racial oppression. It was the first time that a mass movement
emerged under a non-violent ideology. Slave revolts occurred on plantations and
even aboard the ships that brought them here from Africa. The Civil War happened
to take over the South, not to free the slaves. The northern government didn’t
really care about the slave so after the After the Civil War, African Americans
lived in a system of neo-apartheid in the South. Whites had developed a system
of oppression with total white economic control, exclusion on black people from
the political system, racial segregation and the general notion that blacks were
inferior to whites. Separate drinking fountains for whites and blacks. “Colored
balconies” in movie theaters. Seats in the back of the bus. It may be difficult
to believe these were examples of conditions in America less than 40 years ago.
The struggle to change these conditions, and to win equal protection under the
law for citizens of all races, formed the backdrop of the civil rights movement.
What follows is a brief, far from comprehensive timeline of the black civil
rights movement in the US.
In 1954 the momentous Brown vs. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court,
banned segregation in public schools. The NAACP put this up in court and beat
the white supremacist laws down. Then in 1955 the murder of a black youth named
Emmett Till, for allegedly whistling at a white woman, triggered black an, for
the first time, placed white supremacy in the South in check. Also n 1955 the
bus boycott is launched in Montgomery, Alabama after Rosa Parks is arrested on
December 1 for refusing to give up her seat to a white person on the bus. She
was not the first to do this, but was the first to have received publicity for
it because she was the secretary for the local NAACP. In 1956 on December 21
after more than a year of boycotting the buses and a legal fight, the Montgomery
buses are desegregate. In 1957, At a previously all-white Central High, Little
Rock, Arkansas, 1,000 paratroopers are called by President Eisenhower to restore
order and escort ?The Little Rock Nine? to attend school.
In 1960, the sit-in protest movement begins in February at a Woolworth’s
lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina and spreads across the nation. The
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is formed at a meeting
organized by Rosa Parks. The SNCC would become a major force throughout the 1960′
s. Later, leaders like Stokely Carmichael, would lead blacks into the Black
Power Movement which was spawned from Malcom X and the urban ghettos. Then, in
1961 the ‘freedom rides’ begin from Washington, DC, where groups of black and
white people ride buses through the South to challenge segregation. Two people
are killed, many injured in riots in response to the freedom rides as James
Meredith is enrolled as the first black at University of Mississippi.
In 1963, police arrest Martin Luther King and many others demonstrating
in Birmingham, Alabama, then Bull Connor (police chief) orders fire hoses and
police dogs turned on the nonviolent marchers. That same year Medgar Evers,
NAACP leader, is murdered June 12 as he enters his home in Jackson, Mississippi.
250,000 people attend the March on Washington, DC urging support for pending
civil-rights legislation. The event was highlighted by King’s “I have a dream?
speech. On September 15th four girls killed in bombing of the Sixteenth Street
Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. In1964, SNNC and much of the youth of
America are unable to agree on which ideology to follow: direct action or
revolutionary politics. Three civil-rights workers are murdered that year
leading to a more violent opposition by protesters. On July 2, president Johnson
signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Malcolm X is murdered Feb. 21, 1965. On August 6. President Johnson
signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The act, which King and SNCC, registered
qualified voters and suspended devices such as literacy tests that aimed to
prevent African Americans from voting. During August 11-16 the Watts riots leave
34 dead in Los Angeles. Then in 1968 The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is
assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, unleashing violence in more than 100 cities.
In order to diversify university enrollment priorities are given to
underrepresented minorities.
In more resent years, the U.S. Supreme Court outlaws racial quotas in a
suit brought by Allan Bakke, a white man who had been turned down by the medical
school at University of California, Davis.1989 Douglas Wilder of Virginia
becomes the nation’s first African American to be elected state governor. Four
years ago, in 1992, the first racially based riots in years erupt in Los Angeles
and other cities after a jury acquits LA police officers in the videotape
beating of Rodney King, a black man.
The Civil Rights Movement made some changes except they all seem to fall
short when we look at their results today. The movement was happening in the
midst of war over ideology (capitalist vs. socialist) and people felt the need
to stick with their country even if it didn’t them serve them and exploited them.
The US government continual undermined the movement while it pretended to be
helping it. Many of the people involved put their faith in the system and never
thought of a revolution to change the system. From the Montgomery bus boycott to
the sit-ins to the violent rebellions, black people are still not equal to
whites.
?Black infants die in America at twice the rate of white infants. (Despite the
increased numbers of the middle class blacks, the rates are diverging, with
black rates actually rising.) One out of every two black children lives below
the poverty line (as compared with one out of every seven white children).
Nearly four times as many black families exist below the poverty line as white
families. More than 50 percent of African American families have incomes below
$25,000 dollars. Among black youth under age twenty, death by murder occurs
nearly ten times as often as among whites. Over 60 percent of birth to black
mothers occur out of wedlock , more than four time the rate of white mothers.
The net worth of the typical white household is ten times that of the typical
black household. In many states, five to ten times as many blacks as whites age
eighteen to thirty are in prison.?15
Although the US civil rights movement sparked advantageous legislation
to be passed, data exhibits that the inner-city, of our country are more
hazardous and deplorable residences then ever. The rates of poverty,
unemployment, serious crime, single-female headed families, welfare dependency
and non-marriage child birth have continued to rise until reaching the combat
zones of today. These bullet hole and blood spattered places are growing and are
now four to five times bigger than their original sizes in almost all major
cities of the United States.16
Death has become an accepted, even expected result of life in the ghetto.
In North Richmond and other places like it, children live a life of want, of
deeply segregated and ill equipped schools, of gang violence and limited hope.
Young men, some as young as 11 and 12, accept with shrugging shoulders that
reaching adulthood is not a guarantee. Violent expiration is the swift
undercurrent of poverty and hopelessness: it has become an inartistic trait
absorbed seamlessly into the weave of culture.17
Killing or being killed are the ultimate signs of status. Those who kill
command the most respect. Those who die are revered and memorialized beyond
anything they could hope for in life, which isn’t much, considering only a small
group of people will treasure their short lives; they truly become ‘just another
statistic’. In the slum a pager beacons the message of death: three numbers- 187
those three numbers are self explanatory, their appearance chilling. They
represent the penal code designation for murder as well as who is marked for
assassination on the street. It is written on the walls. It gives the music its
beat. In the ghetto; death is life.
Poverty, oppression, and colonization all produce violence and
oppression. According to Munoz the only difference between external and internal
colonization is the legal status of the colony. A colony can be considered ?
internal? if the colonized people has the same formal legal status as any other
group of citizens, and external if it is placed in a separate legal category.18
According to this definition, African Americans are an internally colonized
people while Northern Ireland is an external colony. Both are oppressed people
living under exploited conditions maintained by maintained by discriminatory
legislation, exclusion from the political system, segregation and violence.
Neither has control over the institutions which affect their lives. The result
is a community that find itself unhappy, powerless and it people are regarded as
second class citizens.
From Ireland to America the movements failed to resolve most of the
problems they faced. The question is, why? Both movements had the same goal of
freedom and equality. Both movements used nonviolent as well as violence to
achieve their goals. The nonviolence worked better then the violence in both
countries, but the results still fell short of what the people need. Both
protesters had internal ideological differences which weakened their sprit and
results. Both groups were ‘lead to the far left’ and back again with a group of
former participants fighting it all the time. Their communist ideas where not
supported by the rest of the populous and this stifled their results. The people
of the western world have a very negative view of socialism and without the
populations support the movement would die. Both organizations gave up on
communism and went back to just plain violence and rioting. All their many
protests failed because the effectiveness of protests depended on the good faith
of the government. That good faith was not there then, it is still not there
today. Laws might of been past to stop the unrest, but laws do not always mean
change in a colonial system.
To contrast the two movements, besides the obvious religion vs. race,
external vs. internal colonization and Britain vs. the United States. The
outside views of the movements were probably the main difference that had any
affects on the movements. The IRA has always been seen as a terrorist
organization rather than a revolutionary one while the most radical Civil Rights
organizations in America were always seen as just radical groups. Another
important difference to note is the Irish have had very little help from the
outside while the American movement had many financial supporters. The cultural
differences of both of the oppressing countries also affected the treatment of
the people that were incarcerated during the movements. The British government
was more open in its outright assassination of movement leader than the US was.
The FBI and its CIONTEL program was much more secretive in its sabotage of Civil
Right s organizations than the British Army. Both Civil Rights Movements showed
that social change could be made by a mass of unskilled, resource-less, people.
Even if the changes were small, at least it allowed associations to see that a
transformation could be accomplished.
You will not find a ’solution’ in the past; maybe the beginning of a
path, but everyone must be willing to walk down it . Only the people of today
can change things for the better. History simply shows us how the problem(s)
came into being and how the people became what they are. Other disciplines such
as psychology, sociology, economics, and even plain common sense may help but in
the end human beings in society, as in their private lives, have to work thing
out for themselves. We all have a measure choice when it comes to altering
their own personal lives.
If blame is to be appointed for today’s situation in Ireland as well as
America, it should be laid not on the heads of men of today but of history. If a
personal villain is sought then perhaps it should be placed on the successive
governments of Britain and America who, racked by past events, aborted their
responsibilities in Northern Ireland and the ghettos of America. We are all
prisoners of history and the views we have learned from it.
History is a difficult prison to escape from and the history of America
and Ireland are as difficult as any. The Civil Rights Movements were a brief
moment of looking past prison walls and coming to the realization of change. But
it didn’t last long. As the ‘black rage’ and “white backlash” increased in