1 jan 1939 ano - Background info

Descrição:

Rights liberalism: The idea that individuals are entitled to state protection from discrimination. This version of liberalism focused on identities — such as race or gender, and eventually sexuality — and was joined to the social welfare liberalism of the New Deal.

In June 1945, even as African American troops fought with distinction in the last months of World War II, Senator James O. Eastland, Democrat of Mississippi, took to the floor of the U.S. Senate and brashly asserted that “the Negro race is an inferior race.” A lifetime after the Fourteenth Amendment promised “equal protection of the laws” and the Fifteenth guaranteed the right to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” most white Americans held beliefs similar to Eastland’s and refused to accept racial equality as a legal or social fact.

Much of the Deep South, like Eastland’s Mississippi, was a “closed society”: black people had no political rights and lived on the margins of white society, impoverished and exploited. While African Americans outside the South could vote and found a measure of freedom, their lives were still constrained: schools, neighborhoods, public amenities like swimming pools, and many businesses remained segregated and unequal in the North and West as well. Segregationists such as Eastland were united in their opposition to reform, and numerous and powerful enough in the U.S. Congress to block proposed civil rights legislation.

Across the nation, however, winds of change were gathering. Between World War II and the 1970s, slowly at first, and then with greater urgency in the 1960s, a civil rights movement swept aside the legal foundation of racial segregation. This wave of black activism could not sweep away racial inequality in its entirety, but the movement forged a “second Reconstruction.” Civil rights became the defining social movement of the twentieth century, its model of nonviolent protest and calls for self-determination inspiring countless others to remake America. The black-led civil rights movement, joined at key moments by Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans, also remade American liberalism. In the 1930s, New Deal liberalism had established a welfare state to protect citizens from economic hardship. The civil rights movement forged a new rights liberalism: the idea that individuals are entitled to state protection from discrimination. This version of liberalism focused on identities — such as race or gender, and eventually sexuality — and was joined to the social welfare liberalism of the New Deal. Rights liberalism proved to be both a necessary expansion of the nation’s ideals and a wellspring of political backlash. Indeed, the quest for racial justice would contribute to a crisis of liberalism itself.



The civil rights movement was comprised of a diverse set of initiatives, united by their pursuit of legal rights, a fuller participation in economic and political life, and self-determination for communities of color. African Americans waged their fight for equality both in the South, where segregation and disenfranchisement were law, and in the country as a whole, where discrimination in jobs, housing, and opportunity was pervasive. In the Southwest and West, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans waged similar campaigns against unfair laws and social practices that marginalized them as second-class citizens.

The African American civil rights movement attacked racial inequality in three ways. First, activists sought equality under the law for all Americans, regardless of race. This required a deliberate, decades-long legal assault on the idea of “separate but equal” and the more arduous task of passing congressional legislation, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 against a committed blockage of segregationist politicians. Second, grassroots activists, using nonviolent protest, pushed all levels of government to honor constitutionally guaranteed rights and abide by Supreme Court decisions (such as Brown v. Board of Education). Third, the movement worked to open economic opportunity for nonwhite populations — as illustrated by the very name of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Although the civil rights movement succeeded in establishing equality before the law, its efforts to lift communities out of poverty proved difficult. The limitations of the civil rights model led black activists — along with Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and others — to adopt more nationalist stances in the late 1960s. Nationalism stressed the creation of political and economic power in communities of color, the celebration of racial heritage, and the rejection of white cultural standards.

Adicionado na linha do tempo:

Data: