Civil rights movement

Civil rights movement
Date June 25, 1941 – April 11, 1968 Location United States

The Civil Rights Movement was a vast and uneven mass struggle against the Jim Crow segregation laws and the disenfranchisement of African Americans in the United States. It combined nonviolent protests, legal action, organizing, and rebellions, with multiple political parties being born from this, some with revolutionary tendencies and others with reactionary ones. The movement expressed the oppressed material conditions of Black working-class people within the contradictions of how capitalism within the U.S. expresses itself.

The Civil Rights Movement took place between the 1950s and 1960s, though its origin is rooted in World War II, as the Black soldiers who fought in the war returned only to be met with continued dehumanization. This occurred alongside Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and industrialization that triggered the Great Migration that concentrated freed slaves from the rural south into northern cities. All of these conditions placed Black working-class people at the center of labor struggle and capitalist social crisis.

History

March on Washington Movement

It could be said that the Civil Rights Movement was formally started in 1941, when labor unionist A. Philip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters organized a massive, nationwide movement threatening to bring 100,000 Black workers to march on the Capital to protest segregation, which forced Franklin D. Roosevelt to ban discriminatory employment practices under Executive Order 8802. It is important to understand that Roosevelt only signed Executive Order 8802 due to his fear of a massive wartime protest that could cause massive logistical and economic damage.

The March on Washington Movement emerged because the contradiction of the rapid expansion of the U.S. military-industrial complex on the eve of World War II created a demand for labor, combined with the racially segregated labor market, which allowed Black workers to press for access to higher-skill employment, higher wages, and equal treatment. A. Philip Randolph recognized this, which is why he used this mass protest as the threat of social unrest during wartime was enough pressure to force Roosevelt to sign Executive Order 8802 as a concession.

Executive Order 9981

After the end of World War II, African Americans who had fought in the war had to return to a country that still subjected them to lynchings and Jim Crow laws alongside being segregated in the military. Continued heavy pressure and threats of protests from Black veterans and civil rights activists forced Harry Truman to end segregation within the U.S. military. Both of these executive orders were the foundation of the Civil Rights Movement between the 1950s and 1960s, as they showed that when the working class organizes and threatens the ruling class, concessions are made.

Executive Order 9981 only happened due to the mobilization of the Black working-class veterans, whose expectations of equality couldn't be contained, with millions of Black and non-white veterans who, after World War II, demanded fair treatment and equality, equipped with wartime experience and organizational skills. This, alongside the USSR's constant attacks on the U.S.'s racism and the rise of the Soviet Union as a superpower, empowered the workers of the world, including these Black veterans.

All of this pressure forced Harry Truman to sign Executive Order 9981, though it is vital to recognize that these were solely legal changes and did not equate to social equality. Black soldiers were still facing discrimination and institutional resistance, and when they came home, they were faced with discrimination in housing, employment, trade unions, and state institutions.

Brown v. Board of Education

In 1954, the Supreme Court under pressure ruled that state-enforced racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, they declared that separate educational facilities based on race are unequal, the reactionary southern states reacted with strong opposition and On February 25, 1956, Senator Harry Flood Byrd stated in a written paper called the Southern Manifesto.

"If we can organize the Southern States for massive resistance to this order I think that, in time, the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South.”

Rather than allowing for black students to integrate within the public schools, the southern states closed their public schools as a form of protesting this ruling.

We have to recognize that the ruling class uses partial democratic concessions when pressured domestically or internationally, but these concessions do not abolish capitalist property relations. The Great Migration, in which millions of newly freed slaves transitioned into becoming wage workers from the rural South to the urban centers of the Northern U.S., created a force capable of organizing and exerting pressure on the state and their employers.

The presence and the emerging Civil Rights Movement  were a threat to the state and so they tried to defuse it by making these minor concessions and tried to channel the revolutionary energy into small legal reforms to prevent the budding Civil Rights Movement from challenging the structure of capitalism. The closing of public schools, slow and uneven desegregation, and the later rollback of public school funding are evidence that legal victories without the mobilization and threat of the working class cannot achieve structural change.

Lynching of Emmett Till

A year after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago visiting family in Mississippi was kidnapped, tortured, and brutally lynched by two white men after he was falsely accused by a racist white woman of whistling at her in a grocery store. When his mutilated body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River, his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, made the agonizing decision to insist on an open-casket funeral in Chicago. "Let the world see what they did to my boy," she stated. Photographs of his ruined face were published in Jet magazine, forcing white Americans to confront the reality of Jim Crow. One of his eyes was missing, his skull was crushed, he had a bullet wound in his right ear, his nose was severed, and they tied a thick 75-pound gin fan around his neck with barbed wire to make his body sink in the river. An all-white jury absolved the killers in barely an hour, which radicalized the young Black Americans who were exposed to this sham trial in their newspapers.

Emmet Till’s murder happened at a time of rising U.S. industrial capitalism, the deepening of Jim Crow alongside the Northern American bourgeoisie consolidating their alliance with the Southern interests. White supremacy and segregation were used as tools to ensure the black workers remained cheap i.e Jim Crow was not an random instance of racial hatred, it was a social weapon that reproduces, property relations and class rule.

Specifically lynching was used as a tool to police black workers, enforcing the social hierarchy and to subordinate and ensure the black workers didn’t dare to fight for equality as their status as cheap labor was of great interest by both the Northern and Southern bourgeoise.

Montgomery Bus Boycott

Between December 1955 and December 1956, Rosa Parks, a Black woman who worked as a seamstress but was also a deeply involved NAACP investigator, while on a segregated bus, refused to give her seat up to a white man who demanded a seat as the white side of the bus was full. This led to her arrest, which sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott. This boycott was spread and maintained by the Women's Political Council, who worked overnight in secret to spread 52,000 leaflets to every Black church and community center in the city of Montgomery.

This led to a total boycott in one day. It was in this instance that Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as the minister of the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association. In order to still live and get work during this 381-day boycott, the Black community built a massive, entirely independent transit system to ensure they could still get to work, through a web of 300 private cars, church station wagons, and Black-owned cabs, all operating on 10-cent fares, with a designated pickup and drop-off system alongside maneuvering police harassment and KKK bombings. All of this was locally funded by the Black community until the Supreme Court was forced to rule on Browder v. Gayle, which ended the practice of segregated buses.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott as impressive as it was had limitations, as it was a mass movement led by reformist organizations e.g local civil rights organizations like the Black Church and organizers like Edgar Nixon and Martin Luther King Jr provided the black working class crucial organization and rallied them to participate in the struggle though it was steered towards a legal and reformist path which won concessions while leaving the structure untouched.

Little Rock Nine

On September 4th of 1957, Nine black teenagers attempted to integrate into the Central High School of Arkansas so as to test the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, with the help of the NAACP who had trained and guided them psychologically. As they attempted to enter the school, Governor of Arkansas Orval Faubus called in the National Guard to block the teenagers from entering, one of the teenagers Elizabeth Eckford was separated from the group and was surrounded by a white violent screaming mob, this forced Dwight D. Eisenhower to federalize the Arkansas National Guard and send in a 1000 paratroopers to escort the students from class to class for that whole year.

Brown v. Board of Education declared segregation unconstitutional though legal ruling cannot actually abolish the structural oppression rooted in class relations. It is important to understand that the state is not neutral but had to performatively send the 101st Airborne to Little Rock to make it seem like they are not what the USSR is exposing them for being.

Greensboro Sit-ins

After this event, young Black activists were frustrated with the slow pace of change and the legal stalling of the Southern States, who had to start letting their presence be known. In February 1960, four Black college students walked into a segregated Woolworth's restaurant in North Carolina, purchased some small items, and sat down at the whites-only lunch counter.

This was not a random act, but rather young Black activists across the South had been practicing for these through role-playing being attacked, in which they actually got harmed, screamed at, covered in food, and burnt by cigarettes. After Woolworth's action, these sit-ins spread to 54 cities in nine states, which continued for between two to five months straight.

These sit-ins spread so rapidly due to expressing the working-class suffering of African Americans while at the same time being practical for solidarity between shop workers, Black churches, and small Black businesses, which reinforced these actions. They were also effective due to the spontaneity of sitting down, but this was solidified with the help of bail funds, legal defense, and political backing, as without these supporting them, they would never have been as effective as they were.

Creation of SNCC

After realizing the power of sit-ins, Ella Baker, an SCLC organizer, called a conference in which she proposed to the students that they ought not to become a youth wing of MLK's organization but rather form their own independent organization, which they named the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This acted as decentralized shock troops alongside the more passive MLK's organization.

The SNCC was formed as the expansion of literacy and growth of the black workers and students with increased mobility and political expectations, though within the SNCC there were two contradictory sides the one side of the organic radical students and workers who engaged in sit-ins and freedom rides who were challenging the status quo and the other side of liberal ngos and civil rights bureaucracies who were vying for reactionary nationalism and reformism.

Freedom Rides

In May 1961, in order to test the new ruling banning segregation on buses, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized groups that rode buses into the Deep South, knowing they were in danger. Once one group reached Anniston, Alabama, a white mob firebombed the bus and tried to trap the group inside.

In Birmingham, Alabama, Police Commissioner Bull Connor gave the KKK fifteen minutes of uninterrupted assault with baseball bats and lead pipes. Another group from Nashville wrote down their wills beforehand and drove down South despite all the news of white racial terrorism.

The Freedom Rides, with their rides and sit-ins, displayed to the world the depravity of Jim Crow. They succeeded in forcing the state apparatus to rule out segregation of interstate travel, though these concessions were made so as not to threaten capitalist property relations and the ruling class.

Albany Movement

A union between MLK's SCLC, the NAACP, and SNCC was formed in Albany on November 17, 1961 and lasted until the summer of 1962. Georgia started a mass movement, though it failed. The police, through surveillance of MLK's strategies, instead of displaying their natural violent tendencies on camera, ensured their officers calmly arrested the activists but dispersed them to multiple different rural counties in order to prevent overflowing the prison. They also arranged it so an anonymous person bailed Martin Luther King Jr. out so as to stunt his media momentum and to weaken their cause.

SNCC’s using grassroots direct and confrontational methods with their organization being composed of the youth and radical poor black working class people alongside the SCLC bureaucratic church-ran leadership brought static priorities relative to the SNCC. It failed due to a combination of police surveillance, the union lacking a clear political program and not simple reformism, the fusion of organizations created confusion and allowed the police to isolate and demobilize the protests.

James Meredith and the Ole Miss Riot

In October 1962, James Meredith waged a legal campaign to become the first Black student at the University of Mississippi, which was notoriously segregated. After his legal victory, when he arrived at the campus, a white mob numbering in the thousands surrounded it with firearms and Molotov cocktails, which they used to attack journalists and the federal marshals sent to protect James Meredith.

President John F. Kennedy had to deploy 31,000 federal and state troops to quell this white mob.

Despite the legal victories of the Civil Rights Movement up to this point, these formal concessions did not alter the foundational structure or abolish the social power of capital, which is why, with enough pressure, John F. Kennedy had to act, since their interests were being threatened.

Project Confrontation in Birmingham

In the spring of 1963, MLK's SCLC targeted Birmingham, Alabama, following the incident in which Police Commissioner Bull Connor allowed the KKK to beat Black activists with baseball bats and pipes for fifteen uninterrupted minutes.

The SCLC enacted Project Confrontation, which was a series of sit-ins, boycotts, and marches to provoke Police Commissioner Bull Connor. Eventually, as the number of activists willing to go to jail ran out, organizer James Bevel brought thousands of Black elementary, middle school, and high school children who intentionally skipped school in order to join these marches. Bull Connor unleashed police attack dogs and high-pressure firehoses that ripped bark off trees on the marching children. As these images of racial violence spread internationally, it caused a global reaction to the South's reactionary tendencies.

Birmingham in 1963 was an industrial city in which the black workers were overwhelmingly proletarianised and were still excluded from skilled professions as the white people in Birmingham, Albama were the labor aristocrats in the racial labour-market hierarchy. Project C forged new solidarities, politicized the black working-class masses and built organizational experience.

Assassination of Medgar Evers

In the June of 1963, Medgar Evers who was a respected NAACP field secretary who spent years investigating the death of Emmet Till’s alongside registering black votes in the most reactionary parts of Mississippi was shot in front of his wife and young children in his driveway by a white supremacist sniper.

Medgar Evers was an organizer whose work posed a threat to the racially structured labour hierarchy, through voter registration drives, challenging segregation in public spaces and schools and exposing the interests of the local bourgeoisie and the complicity of the nation's ruling class in atrocities pertaining to African Americans.

He was politically murdered in order to protect class interests and to put fear into the working class African Americans who were beginning to organize and put forth resistance.

March on Washington

In August 1963, Bayard Rustin orchestrated the March on Washington, in which he coordinated thousands of buses, trains, sound systems, and hundreds of portable toilets to bring 250,000 people to Washington. It was in this march that MLK delivered the "I Have a Dream" speech, in which he combined civil rights with demands for a higher minimum wage and fair employment. The Kennedy administration secretly and heavily pressured MLK to censor his original speech, in which he criticized the federal government's deliberate inaction. The March achieved shifting public opinion and helped creature pressure for Civil Rights Act & Voting Rights Act but the reformist path avoided challenging the property relations the march did advance rights through concessions but ultimately didn’t change class relations as we see today despite the many achievements of civil rights movement today’ struggles over police brutality, mass incarceration are the continuations of the same structural class and property relations.  

Freedom Summer

In the summer of 1964, Bob Moses and the SNCC, aware of the Black activists being murdered in Mississippi with no media coverage, launched a strategy of inviting hundreds of white Northern college students to help register Black voters. By subjecting the white students to the same violence that Black people dealt with, it caused a national uproar.

Three activists were killed by the white mob, two of them being white students: James Chaney, who was Black, and Andrew Goodman alongside Michael Schwerner, who were white. This event was in the newspapers for months, during which local activists were building "Freedom Schools" where they taught the locals, who were denied an education, literacy and Black history.

The Freedom Summer activists confronted the repressive apparatus of the state of Mississippi, and this event showed the importance of not relying on the bourgeois state but rather constructing an independent organization.

Civil Rights Act

Following John F. Kennedy's assassination by the CIA around February of 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, though it is important to understand that the Civil Rights Movement was at its peak at the moment, exerting immense pressure and threats. It was not done by Lyndon out of the goodness of his heart, but rather out of fear of the actions that could be taken by the Civil Rights Movement.

The act banned segregation in theaters, restaurants, and hotels, alongside banning discrimination in employment and the workplace. It also banned discrimination and segregation in public places like swimming pools, libraries, and public schools, which dismantled the Jim Crow framework.

The Civil Rights Act did not abolish the class structures that produce racial inequality, though it did allow a minority of Black people into managerial and professional positions, which served both to legitimize the reforms and to deepen class stratification within oppressed communities.

Assassination of Malcolm X

A year after this, after Malcolm X had broken off his connection to the Nation of Islam (NOI), he changed as he became a deeper Muslim following his pilgrimage to Mecca, by changing his name from Malcolm Little to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, and expanded Black liberation to an internationalist view by opposing all forms of imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism.

He intended to charge the U.S. with human rights violations at the United Nations. His rhetoric during this period of internationalism and self-defense laid the foundations for the Black Power movement.

He was assassinated on February 21st, 1965, when a smoke bomb filled the crowd and made it hard to see. A group of men, including Talmadge Hayer and Ray Wood, shot and killed Malik/Malcolm during a speech at the Audubon Ballroom on Broadway in New York City.

The state, including FBI counter-intelligence and local police, had a long documented history of monitoring, infiltrating, and undermining Black movements and their leaders. The assassination of Malcolm X served to decapitate a potential bridge between radical Black rank-andfile activism and international anti-imperialist currents.

Selma to Montgomery Marches

In March 1965, after the police murdered the young Black activist Jimmie Lee Jackson, the SCLC and the SNCC marched to Dallas County, Alabama to demand voting rights for African Americans in the county. As these marchers peacefully crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were encircled by state troopers and a white mob on horseback with clubs wrapped in barbed wire. The state troopers and white mob fractured the skull of John Lewis while brutally injuring the peaceful activists. This was televised nationally, which caused even greater pressure on the Southern States and the inaction of the federal government.

After 5 months, the pressure of the Civil Rights Movement forced President Lyndon B. Johnson to introduce the Voting Rights Act, which banned any discriminatory voting practices including literacy tests, alongside ensuring Southern states had to get federal clearance before changing any voting laws. This caused a massive surge of registered Black voters across the South.

With the Voting Rights Acts, the state and ruling class subsequently integrated a layer of black politicians and middle‑class beneficiaries into the institutions of capital, using them to help manage and legitimize austerity and the social counter‑revolution that followed in the 1970s and 80s.

Watts Uprising

Five days after the Voting Rights Act, a routine police traffic stop in Los Angeles which for decades subjugated the people in the Watts neighbourhood to LAPD police brutality, redlining and systematic poverty created a massive rebellion in the neighbourhood lasting for six days straight. Which resulted in thirty-four deaths and thousands of arrests which was a surprise to white liberals who had assumed racism was over with the Voting Rights Act.

Selma was both a vindication of mass struggle and a demonstration of the limits of reform under capitalism. The marches compelled concessions but those concessions were absorbed and subordinated to capitalist restructuring.later on.

Black Panther Party

In 1966, during the March Against Fear in Mississippi, Stokely Carmichael who was a chairman of the SNCC popularized the rally of ‘’Black Power’’ alongside ‘’Black is Beautiful’’, this new generation of activists were demanding self-determination and liberation of their communities, this alongside Malcolm X laid the foundation for The Black Panthers. Originally called Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. A revolutionary socialist party founded by college students, the name and logo were also inspired by Stokely Carmichael who at the time of popularizing the Black Power rally also was promoting the Lowndes County Freedom Organization who were originally using the Black Panther as their logo.

Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the founders of the Black Panther Party (BPP) initially bought guns by selling Chairman Mao's Quotations to leftists and liberals on their campus for three times the price in order to purchase two shotguns which they used to cop-watch which was them legally carrying their shotguns and law books while observing police traffic stops to prevent the cops from murdering innocent black people.  However they are most famous for their mutual aid programs like the Free Breakfast for Children program which fed tens of thousands of black children before the federal government introduced school breakfasts. Alongside free sickle-cell anemia testing, medical clinics and ambulance services.

Loving v. Virginia

Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple who had been arrested in the middle of the night in their own bedroom and were banished from Virginia simply due to being married, as this marriage broke the Virginia Racial Integrity Act which was a state law banning any forms of interracial marriage in Virginia. The Supreme Court struck it down and all states with any law banning interracial marriages.

Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

During Martin Luther King’s final years of life he underwent a serious radicalization in which he spoke out against the Vietnam War and advocated for democratic socialism which is just attempting to advance socialism within bourgeois democracy, which will eventually be overthrown by reactionaries.  He organized the Poor People’s Campaign in which he attempted to build a multiracial union of Black, white, Indigenous American and Hispanics.

This took him to Memphis, Tennessee to support a strike by Black janitors demanding living wages and safe working conditions, it is in this event that he made the ‘’I am a man’’ quote and his Mountaintop speech. It was in this event that Martin Luther King was assassinated by a white supremacist sniper on a balcony. His death sparked big uprisings in over 100 cities. With fires being set in these cities.  These fires across the U.S forced Congress to act and pass the Fair Housing Act which banned discrimination concerning the sale, rent and financing of housing based on race, religion, nationality and sex.  Which banned redlining that trapped African Americans in impoverished urban centers.