Identity Politics & Liberation Ideologies

MLK Jr. and the

Black Civil Rights Movement

Background

• Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)

• Attended and graduated from racially segregated school high school and colleges in Atlanta

• Received doctorate from Boston U in 1955

• Executive Board of NAACP in 1953

• Began pastoral work in Montgomery, Alabama in 1954

Background

• Elected leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Council in 1957

• Led the March on Washington, 1963

Background

• In 1964, became the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize

• Assassinated 4 April 1968

Overview

• Historical Background to the Civil Rights Movement

• Liberalism and Liberation• King’s Arguments

Civil War & Reconstruction

• Union army occupies south

• 14th Amendment (1868)

• 15th Amendment (1870)

• Civil Rights Enforcement Act (1870)

• Civil Rights Act (1872)

• Civil Rights Act (1875)

Reconstruction

• First black political leaders elected to Congress

• Hiram Revels (MS) first black senator

• 6 blacks elected to serve in House in 41st and 42nd Congress

Reconstruction

• 1876 Presidential Election

• Rutherford B. Hayes (R)

• Samuel Tilden (D)

1876 Presidential Election

Reconstruction

• In exchange for Hayes winning electoral college vote, Republicans agree to end occupation of the South

• 1877 Reconstruction essentially ends with end of occupation

• Southern governments and vigilante groups move to disenfranchise black voters

Rise of Segregation

• Voter intimidation (e.g., KKK activity)• Change voting requirements

– poll tax, literacy test, “white” primaries, grandfather clause

• Civil Rights cases (1883)– Supreme Court invalidates the 1875 Civil

Rights Act

• Plessy vs Ferguson (1896)

Plessy vs Ferguson

“The object of the [Fourteenth] Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.” -- Justice Henry Billings Brown

Homer Plessy

Plessy v. Ferguson

"We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”

Justice Henry Billings Brown

Jim Crow

Jim Crow

Jim Crow statutes by state

Jim Crow

• For black civil rights leaders, segregation posed difficult questions of strategy and how to combat legal (de jure) inequality

Response to Segregation

• Booker T. Washington and “Accomodationism”

• Take whatever opportunities white America provides and do best you can until conditions change

Response to Segregation

• W.E.B. Dubois and the founding of the NAACP

• Legal strategy of challenging of “separate but equal” provision

Separate, but Equal?

Classroom in black school

Seat Pleasant, Maryland

Separate, but Equal?

Black school,Camden, MS

Separate, but Equal?

Black school, Louisa County, VA

Response to Segregation

• Key desegregation cases:

• Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938)

• Sweatt v. Painter (1950)

Response to Segregation

• McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education (1950)

Response to Segregation

• 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, KN

Response to Segregation

Little Rock, ArkansasSeptember 1957

Federal troops protected 9 blackstudents going to Central Highin Little Rock throughout 1957academic year

Response to Segregation

Little Rock opted to close all 3 public high schools for 1958 academic year rather than integrate

Modern Civil Rights

• Emergence of Modern Civil Rights Movement

Modern Civil Rights

• Emergence of Modern Civil Rights Movement

Modern Civil Rights

• In wake of Brown v. Board of Education, combination of further legal challenges, political mobilization, civil disobedience (peaceful and other)

Modern Civil Rights

• In wake of Brown v. Board of Education, combination of further legal challenges, political mobilization, civil disobedience (peaceful and other)

Liberalism Revisited

• Liberalism focuses on the primacy of the individual

• The liberation and identity movements we will be examining make two types of claims:– Some groups have been treated as “individuals”

legally, and that’s neither fair nor just– Because of this historical treatment, government

policy should be used to advance the collective group well being

King and Strategy

• King takes on those within the black civil rights movement who would argue that he was pushing too aggressively for equal rights

• “You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations.”

King and Strategy

He then identifies 4 steps to any campaign of direct action:

1. collection of the facts

2. negotiation

3. self-purification

4. direct action

King and Strategy

“We know from painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed...We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights.”

King and Strategy

• The aim of the direct action, according to King, is to

“create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.”

• Question then becomes “what sort of direct action”?

King and Strategy

“I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the ‘do-nothingism’ of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest.”