How far was the Civil Rights Movement in the United States a 'revolution from below'?

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How far was the Civil Rights Movement in the United States a ‘revolution from below’?

When slavery was abolished in the United States in 1863, one would assume that the most logical outcome of this would be for black people to have had the same rights as whites: the right to own land, receive a good education and so on. However, this was certainly far from the case, as especially in the southern areas, where black slavery had been an entrenched part of local white culture, black people found themselves constantly discriminated against, often in inhuman ways. Indeed, between 1890 and 1910, over two thousand mob murders of blacks occurred, largely in the rural ‘Black Belt’ counties stretching from Virginia to Texas. However, after the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War, it became clear that the so-called bastion of democracy was behaving rather undemocratically in denying voting rights (among many others) to most of its black citizens. That the racial situation in post-war America was unjust was realised by all black Americans, and in the ensuing civil rights movement voices were given to this cause. But to what extent was this campaign created by a social movement at grass roots level – there can be little doubt that the grass roots were in full support of the movement, but there remains the question of leading the movement. Social movements by their very nature thrust certain figures to the forefront, the best example in this case being Martin Luther King Jr. His role was, of course, fundamental to the movement, yet there is a mistake of seeing him as the prime instigator rather of the movement rather than the major national spokesman for it. A large degree of local initiative was displayed throughout the black struggle for freedom, certainly enough to suggest that the revolution was, in many respects, coming from below.

Post-World War II, a growing number of religious, civic, labour and intellectual spokesmen addressed the issue of segregation as a challenge to national values, a conviction only bolstered by the publication of such works as Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, which charted the gulf between America’s democratic ideals and the reality of discrimination. Afro-Americans had made some gains during the ‘Second New Deal’ of 1936 to 1940, such as the creation of a civil rights section in the Justice Department, and the president had made it clear that there were to be ‘no forgotten men and no forgotten races’ in his symbolic speech at Howard University – he had also increased the number of black federal employees from 50 000 in 1933 to 200 000 by 1946. Yet the United States’ collective mind had been deeply affected by the doctrinal depravity of Fascism, the solidarity of the war effort, and the trauma of the Holocaust, and the fact that after this conflict another began, the Cold War, made the conditions all the riper for attempts to change the way American blacks were treated. The US could not claim to be a truly democratic country when 10% of its population were denied voting rights, which gave the USSR a chance to attack its nemesis as ‘a consistent oppressor of under-privileged peoples.’ Thus, as Manning Marable states, ‘in a real sense, the watershed of Afro-American history occurred during the 1940s.’ Over three million black Americans had registered for the services, while at home, the war effort brought another million black men and women into factory lines of production. Returning home after having been prepared to lay down their lives for their country, it is no surprise that after the war the feelings of injustice on the part of the black population experienced a massive upsurge.

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Activities within the White House were slowly beginning to reflect these feelings. In 1947, a presidentially impanelled ‘Committee on Civil Rights’ was established, and in 1948, another presidential committee produced a searing expose of the social consequences of segregation, recommending that it should be brought to an end. Furthermore, the nation was becoming increasingly aware of a string of ‘exemplary’ African-Americans: Jackie Robinson joining the Dodgers in 1947, Gwendolyn Brooks winning a Pulitzer prize, and Ralph Bunche receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950. It was in this atmosphere that the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People ...

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