SNCC, the Federal Government & the Road to Black Power

The Historian, 1993

History: Reviews of New Books, 2013

2013

The goal of this study is to determine the applicability of pluralist, elitist, plural-elitist, Marxist class analysis and protest theory for explaining African-American political participation from 1940 to 2000. The significance of this study lay in the need to associate African-American politics with a major theoretical model. For theory has a great effect on the society at large, as it can influence public policy and the perceptions that policy makers have of target populations. A sociohistorical qualitative analysis was conducted by analyzing African-American political participation from the perspective of the tenets of each of the five competing models. A time series analysis was conducted to determine the impact of violent and nonviolent protests, the percentage of Democrats in congress, the percentage of African- Americans in the total voter population, the percentage of former Asian and African colonies gaining independence, the percentage of African-American in congress and the African-American poverty rate on the enactment of civil and social rights legislation from 1940 to 2000. The qualitative findings showed that pluralist theory had the greatest explanatory power when confined to the nature of state and group interaction, and the efficacy of democracy, while the other theories had some limited utility. In the areas of economics Marxist theory was of limited utility, whereas the other theories lacked significant explanatory power. Protest theory was at its strongest when explaining social change and social movements with regards to African-American political participation during the time period under investigation. None of the theories provided and adequate explanation of race relations or succinctly delineated the contours of the African-American historical political participation. The time series analysis found nonviolent protest, violent protest and Asian and African decolonization to have the greatest impact on the enactment of civil and social rights policies and showed that the control of congress for the majority of the period by the democratic party was not statistically nor substantively significant in accounting for the development of civil and social rights policies.

Dissertation , 2003

The American civil rights movement was part of a broad historic pattern of struggles for democracy, modernization, and national liberation that swept the world in the mid-twentieth century. The civil rights movement also forged political alliances across racial and ideological barriers. Within the black community the alliances meant that nationalists and integrationists agreed on the need for fundamental human and political rights such as the right to vote and an end to JIm Crow laws. The nationalists, however, also articulated a message of political autonomy that caused the civil rights movement to assume a dual character. The Black Panther was originally a part of the nationalist movement and its initial ideology was based on Malcolm X's vision of allying African-Americans with third world national liberation movements to bolster domestic civil rights struggles. The passage of the 1964 civil rights act and the 1965 voting rights act was the successful culmination of decades of struggle against Plessy vs. Ferguson. Many African-Americans, however, became frustrated when they discovered these victories did not solve all of their socio-economic problems. The urban rebellions which swept the United States in the late nineteen-sixties convinced the BPP and other nationalists that African-Americans were engaged in a struggle for political independence from the United States. They were mistaken because the overwhelming majority of blacks refused to support eh Panther Party's call for armed struggle. Consequently, the Panthers were beginning to be isolated from the black community as early as 1968. The Panthers began to institute a breakfast program for school children, and other community services to end their political isolation. The BPP also built alliances with white allies and espoused socialism to bring additional resources to their organization. Ideological alliances on the international level were designed to publicize the Panther struggle against the U.S. government in the hope of securing better treatment for the Party. From 1966 to 1982 the Panther Party's ideology and alliances traveled the full spectrum of the civil rights movement from demands for full citizenship rights to political autonomy. In the the final analysis the Party's ideology was pragmatic and changed to accommodate the prevailing political situation. The Party also struggled with financial, political, and ethical scandals throughout its history. Therefore, despite the community programs, the BPP has a mixed and complicated legacy.

The Civil Rights Movement, 2020

African Americans became increasingly restive in the postwar years. During the war they had challenged discrimination in the military services and in the work force, and they had made limited gains. Millions of African Americans had left Southern farms for Northern cities, where they hoped to find better jobs. They found instead crowded conditions in urban slums. Now, African-American servicemen returned home, many intent on rejecting second-class citizenship. Jackie Robinson dramatized the racial question in 1947 when he broke baseball's color line and began playing in the major leagues. A member of the Brooklyn Dodgers, he often faced trouble with opponents and teammates as well. But an outstanding first season led to his acceptance and eased the way for other African-American players, who now left the Negro leagues to which they had been confined. Government officials, and many other Americans, discovered the connection between racial problems and Cold War politics. As the leader of the free world, the United States sought support in Africa and Asia. Discrimination at home impeded the effort to win friends in other parts of the world. Harry Truman supported the early civil rights movement. He personally believed in political equality, though not in social equality, and recognized the growing importance of the African-American urban vote. When apprised in 1946 of a spate of lynchings and anti-black violence in the South, he appointed a committee on civil rights to investigate discrimination. Its report, To Secure These Rights, issued the next year, documented African Americans' second-class status in American life and recommended numerous federal measures to secure the rights guaranteed to all citizens. Truman responded by sending a 10-point civil rights program to Congress. Southern Democrats in Congress were able to block its enactment. A number of the angriest, led by Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, formed a States Rights Party to oppose the president in 1948. Truman thereupon issued an executive order barring discrimination in federal employment, ordered equal treatment in the armed forces, and appointed a committee to work toward an end to military segregation, which was largely ended during the Korean War. African Americans in the South in the 1950s still enjoyed few, if any, civil and political rights. In general, they could not vote. Those who tried to register faced the likelihood of beatings, loss of job, loss of credit, or eviction from their land. Occasional lynchings still occurred. Jim Crow laws enforced segregation of the races in streetcars, trains, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, recreational facilities, and employment.