The World Sings with Meaning: Civil Rights

are Human RightsUniversity of Iowa Center for Human Rights

January 21, 2013

"Starving inmate of Camp Gusen, Austria.” T4c. Sam Gilbert, May 12, 1945. 111-SC-264918. National Archives and Records Administration

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights grew from a global commitment to prevent future atrocities experienced during World War II.

"Persons of Japanese ancestry arrive at the Santa Anita Assembly Center from San Pedro. Evacuees lived at this center at the former Santa Anita race track before being moved inland to relocation centers." Clem Albers, Arcadia, CA, April 5, 1942. 210-G-3B-414. National Archives and Records Administration

The Japanese American relocation and imprisonment provides an important historical example of local human rights violations during World War II

NAACP and The UDHR

§ In 1945 over 5,000 participants attended the conference in San Francisco.

§ Eleanor Roosevelt elected Chairperson because of her international stature and commitment to social justice.

§ NAACP actively involved.§ On December 10, 1948, The Universal

Declaration of Human Rights was adopted unanimously by members of the United Nations.

Cold War Controversies“Civil Rights Movement”

The International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights

(ICCPR)

International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR)

� The ICCPR focuses on such rights as the freedom of speech, right to vote, and the freedom of religion.

� This treaty is similar to the rights within the US Bill of Rights.

� The US signed the ICCPR in 1977 and ratified in 1992

� The ICESCR contains the right to employment, shelter, healthcare and education among others.

� The former Soviet Union supported the ICESCR.

� The US signed the ICESCR in 1977 but as of January of 2013, the Senate has not ratified the treaty.

CH Parish, FA Patterson and Rosa Parks at a school desegregation workshop at Highlander, Monteagle, TN. July 1955. Photo courtesy of Highlander Research and Education Center.

Rosa Parks studied the UDHR at Highlander in July of 1955. On December 1st 1955 Parks refused to give up her seat to a White passenger on a Montgomery city bus.

March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

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Malcolm X, 1964Appeal to African Heads of State

The American black man is the world’s most

shameful case of minority oppression…How is a black man going to get “civil rights” before he first wins his human rights? If the American black man will start thinking about his human rights, and then start thinking of himself as part of one of the world’s greatest people, he will see he has a case for the United Nations.

Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize

How could all of the blood, all of the courage, and all of the martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement still leave in its wake a nation where schools are more segregated than ever, where more than half of all black children live in poverty, and where the life expectancy of African Americans has actually declined? The answer lies, I believe, not so much in the well-documented struggle for civil rights, but in the little known, but infinitely more important, struggle for human rights.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world.

Martin Luther King, Jr