Movement of the civic rights to the United States of 1896 to 1954

The Movement of the civic rights to the United States ( " civilian rights movement" ) refers mainly to the fight of the Noirs American for obtaining and the Civic right pleasure of their . If one can consider, in a broad direction, that it refers to any fight for the civic rights to the United States, in particular since the end of the American Civil War (1861-1865) and today, and thus including/understanding the American Indian Movement, the Chicano Movement, the Black Panther Party, the Black Feminism, the Gay Release Face, etc, one usually understands by this expression the fights carried out between 1945 and 1970 in order to put a term at the racial segregation, in particular in the States of the South. It was a question mainly of a non-violent movement in order to obtain the equality of right of any American citizen, which passed by the abrogation of the racist laws into force in the States Southerners. However, certain components of the movement, especially after the First World War, challenged this method of pacifist inspiration while calling with the self-defense vis-a-vis the violence of the White (which included Lynchages, etc).

Symbolized by the emblematic figure of Martin Luther King, black Pasteur protesting and one of the large founders of the use of non-violent methods in policy, the movement of the civic rights had a durable influence on the company states-unienne, at the same time in the tactics employed by the social movements, the durable transformation of the statute of the American Blacks, and the exposure to the great day of a persistent Racisme within the company, in particular, but not only, in the South.

Composed of a great number of various groups, the movement was heterogeneous. During the first part of the 20th century, certain movements, the such Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) of Marcus Garvey, which preached the Séparatisme and the " return to the sources" , great success without however leaving obtained convincing heritage. Others, on the contrary, like the NAACP, founded in 1909, and which fought mainly on the legal ground by depositing complaints against the governmental segregation, reached only modest results at their beginnings, before off obtaining a major conquest by the judgment delivered by the Supreme court in 1954 at the time of Brown v. Board Education, which declared Anti-constitutionnelle the racial segregation in the public schools. The complementarity and the tension between these two poles of the fight for the civic rights, one insistent on the legal fight and the recognition by the company WASP of the civic rights of the black citizens of the United States, the other stressing the needs car-for organizing and for carrying the fight in the economic and cultural field, persisted throughout the existence of the movement. The question, crucial, of the use, or not, of non-violence, vis-a-vis the domination of the white company, also divided the movement of the civic rights, which upon the departure was supported by most of the American Jewish community before being joined, post-war period, by the liberals states-uniens.

The rebuilding (1865-1877)

After the American Civil War (1861-1865), one of the stakes was the abolition of the slavery in the States of the South, the federal government extended the statutory duties of the Blacks. The Congress voted in 1865 the thirteenth amendment with the Constitution, ratified by the States, which abolished slavery. This one, nevertheless, granted neither the Citoyenneté nor, a fortiori, of the rights equal to the Afro-Américains. The Fourteenth amendment, voted in 1868 and also ratified, granted the citizenship to them. The Blacks born in the United States enjoyed from now on the equality in front of the law, while the Fifteenth amendment, in 1870, granted the Right to vote with all the individuals of male sex, whatever them " race ". At the time of the rebuilding (1865-1877), the troops of North occupied the South and imposed this new legislation with the assistance of the Freedmen' S Bureau (Office of the Free men). Several freed Blacks occupied of the more important positions in the company, including electoral (election of George Washington Williams in Ohio).

The rebuilding ended with the Compromis of 1877 between the white elites of North and those of the South. The compromise called with the withdrawal of the federal troops, thus allowing the White South (as a majority of WASP S) to re-establish practices of racial discrimination. In exchange, they promised to support Rutherford B. Beam, candidate of the States of North, with the presidency, against its adversary Samuel J. Tilden. Many Blacks of the South answered in this new state of the things by leaving the South massively, in what was called the Exode of Kansas of 1879.

The Républicains radicals, which had been in load of the rebuilding, tried to eliminate, by means of the right, public and deprived racial discriminations. But the Supreme court put a final point at these initiatives, by judging at the time of the Civil Rights Cases (Case on the Civic rights), in 1883, that the 14th amendment did not authorize the Congress to put outlaw the racial discrimination operated by individuals or private companies.

The Racial segregation

The decision of the Supreme court at the time of the stop Plessy v. Ferguson, in 1896, officialized the racial segregation, by the government, in public transport. For this purpose, it worked out the doctrines " separate goal equal" ( separate but equal ) in order to yield with the Clause of protection (" equalizes; Equal Clause" Protection;) envisaged by the Fourteenth amendment. Although the Supreme court before broke discriminatory statutes of certain States, excluding the Blacks from the popular jurys, or deciding systematically in favor of their stamping from their statute of slaves, and that it continued has to do it in the years following Plessy v. Ferguson, it decided nevertheless in favor of the segregation in practically all the other public or deprived spheres. It thus legalized the school segregation in 1908 (stop Berrea College v. Kentucky). Many States, in particular in the South, regard these judgments as supporting, in fact, the whole of the Lois Jim Crow set up the shortly after the Rebuilding. Slaves, the American Blacks had become second-class citizens, who could not go to same schools as the White, travel by the bus with them, or drink in the same fountain. In much of cities, they could not divide one taxi with White more, or to enter a building consequently carries that the White. They were buried in distinct cemeteries, and could not swear on the same Bible. They were also excluded from the restaurants, the libraries, the public gardens (where one could read signs such as " Negroes and dogs not allowed" , " the Negros and the dogs are not admis"). The Blacks were to be systematically erased in front of the White, by leaving the passage in the street, while under no case a black man could look in the eyes a white woman. They were called " Tom" or " Jane" , but never Sir, Madam or Miss.

Although the Supreme court declared anticonstitutional the fact of depriving of civic rights the Blacks, those were in fact private of the right to vote, using " primary educations blanches" , of a system of Poll tax, examinations of Elimination of illiteracy, punishments economic, electoral handling of all kinds, and finally of a targeted use of violence in order to discourage from them being recorded on the electoral rolls.

Criminal law and lynchings

In spite of the stop of the Supreme court in Strauder v. West Virginia of 1880, which prohibited the exclusion of the American Blacks of the popular jurys, those were systematically isolated of these functions. They were consequently left at the thank you of the white legal system. In certain States, the such Alabama, the State used the penal system in order to restore a kind of Servage, by condemning the black men to years of imprisonment, lasting which they worked free for employers deprived such as the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, a subsidiary company of the United States Steel Corporation, which paid the State in exchange of their Forced labor.

The punishments imposed out of the legal system were even more brutal. Thousands of Blacks were victims of the Lynchage by White car-proclaiming " justiciers" , sometimes with the assistance clarifies official persons in charge, in the States of the South and beyond. These lynchings were transformed sometimes into true Pogrom S, thus at the time of the racial riots of Elaine in 1919 or of the racial riots of Tulsa in 1921. The culprits of such exactions felt at this point safe from any legal proceeding which they often took of the Photographie S of their victims, and made postcards of them.

The Ku Klux Klan, which had about disappeared after a short but brutal appearance at the beginning of the Rebuilding, was reformed in 1915, partly under the influence of film of David Griffith, Birth off has Nation , which exaltait first Klan. They combined racist rhetoric with the Xénophobie towards the immigrant , the Antisémitisme, anti-Catholicism and the anti Syndicalisme. To these speeches violent one, they added the systematic use of lynching and settings in spectacular scenes (crosses set fire to in the black districts, etc) aiming at founding a true climate of Terreur on the black population. The Lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, in 1930 in Indiana, inspired the song Strange Fruit composed by Abel Meeropol (under pseudonym), an artist and communist sympathizer who adopted the children of the husband Rosenberg after their execution in 1953. Begun again by the Afro-American Billie Holiday in 1939 in New York, the song, which constituted an indictment moving against the multiple cases by lynching in the South, became a popular hit during the Second world war.

Economic segregation

In addition to depriving the Blacks of very civic right and very possible participation in public space, company WASP maintained also the Blacks in a position subordinate at the economic level. The Noirs farmers were often related to the landowners, often confined with the statute of Tenancier S. In the Secondary industry, the employers and the trade unions their reserved the most painful tasks and the least best paid. Modest functions, as worked at the company of sleeping car Pullman To carry or be a gatekeeper of hotel, became enviable positions with the eyes of the majority of the Blacks, because they offered relative a Stabilité of employment and correct wages. The Lois Jim Crow excluded the Blacks from sectors number of the economic life, driving with the creation of true a " market noir" with the clean direction of the term: a black press emerges to North, while the black owners of insurance companies d' for blacks, or services of Croquemort for blacks, became the true notable ones within the black company.

The black Church

In the same way, the religious life was organized according to these new segregative data. The role of the black Churches went well beyond simple the religious worship: they were also useful like Community gathering place, of economic co-operatives, and popular courts in order to regulate the conflicts in an autonomous way. The majority of the black Churches, nevertheless, refused to confront the white domination frontally, and abstained from any policy officially. New religious movements, such as the " Holiness tradition" , or the movement Pentecôtisme which was divided according to new divisions of color, reinforced the apolitical attitude and the Quiétisme of the majority of the Blacks practitioners.

The Niagara Movement and the foundation of the NAACP

With the turning of the century, one considered, in particular within the white company, Booker T. Washington like the principal spokesperson of the American Blacks. Director of the Tuskegee Institute, Booker Washington preached a message of autonomy, encouraging the Blacks to improve their economic conditions rather than to fight for the social equality. They owed, according to him, initially " prouver" that they " méritaient" this one. Booker Washington publicly accepted the Jim Crow laws and the maintenance, in the short run, of the racial segregation. In deprived, it financially supported the lodged complaints in justice against these laws.

But the position of B. Washington did not make consensus. W.E.B. Wood and others were opposed to its moderate theses. One of its associated close relations, Monroe Trotter, was stopped by the police force after having dared to verbally defy Washington at the time of a public speech in Boston in 1905. The same year, Trotter and Of Wood organized a meeting of black militants in Canada, on the other side of the Chutes of the Niagara. The meeting concludes on the drafting from a Manifeste calling with the male Vote for all, the elimination of any form of racial segregation and with the extension of the state education to all, in a nondiscriminatory way (and not, like wanted it Washington, according to the " Vocation " or of the " mérite" individual).

Joined Wood of other black leaders, and Jewish militants, such as Henry Moskowitz, Julius Rosenthal, Lillian Wald, Rabbi Emil Gustav Hirsch then Stephen Wise to off create in 1909 the National Association for the Advancement Colored People (NAACP). He then becomes the editor association of the magazine of the NAACP, The Crisis . New association concentrated at the beginnings on the fight on the legal ground against the Jim Crow laws. She was opposed successfully to a Ordonnance of Louisville, Kentucky, which ordered the residential segregation (Buchanan v. Warley in 1917), like with the " law of large-père" in Oklahoma which allowed the majority white voters not to free their slaves (Guinn v. United States). Moreover, the NAACP undertook activities of Lobbying against the introduction, by the president Wilson, of the racial segregation in the federal civils servant (in 1913), and so that the Blacks can reach the functions of officers in the army at the time of the First World War. It organized a protest with the national scales against the projection of racist film of David Griffith, Birth off has Nation , in 1915.

American Jewish community and the movement of the civic rights

The majority of the community American Juive supported the fight for the civic rights of the Blacks. Many people of the movement were of Jewish origin, the majority not-monk, Juifs liberals or " Jews conservateurs" (of the Movement Massorti). Many a Philanthrope S Jews financially supported the NAACP and the whole of the black movement, as well as the black schools. One of them, Julius Rosenwald, financed the creation of dozen elementary schools, secondaries and of universities for émancipée black youth. It contributed personally to the creation of 2.000 schools, of which Howard University, Dillard University and Fisk University. At one time, 40% of the Blacks of the South studied in such schools. The American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League supported actively the movement of the civic rights.

According to the emission From Swatiska to Jim Crow , diffused by PBS:

" Thus, in the years 1930 and 1940, when Jewish professors taken refuge of [[Nazi Germany]] arrived in black Universities of the South, there was a history of empathy open between the Blacks and the Jews, and the possibility of a truly effective collaboration. The professor Ernst Borinski organized dinners during which Blacks and White sat down side by side — a simple but revolutionary act. Black students sympathized with the cruelty with which these scientists had been confronted in Europe, and trusted them more than with any other White. In fact, black students — as well as other members of the white company of the South — regarded these refugees as " kinds of people of couleur." "

The " New Negro"

The First World War upset the experiment of the American Blacks, of which much had fought in Europe in the name of the democracy. They met there other practices concerning the differences in color, which reinforced their levelling claims at the time of the return to the country. In the United States, the black veterans however were not well accommodated. Some were attacked for the simple fact of daring to carry their uniforms. This new experiment leads to a new generation of militants, much more combative than the preceding one, and which asserted the self-defense vis-a-vis the violence of the White. In 1917, A. Philip Randolph introduces the term of " New Negro " (" New Nègre") to describe this existential and political experiment, which becomes a commonplace to describe the new spirit of militancy and impatience to obtain the equal rights.

The African Blood Brotherhood (Brotherhood of African Blood) was organized around a great number of emigrants Jamaïcains in the years 1920. This group Socialiste asserted the Auto-détermination American Blacks, while resting on the Déclaration of the Fourteen points made by president Wilson and his call to the respect of the " right of the peuples". Inspired moreover by the Russian Revolution, much of leaders of African Blood Brotherhood joined the Communist party thereafter.

Moreover, one great number of Blacks had left the States of the South during the war. Industrial effort of war necessary to the news " saving in war " , and it shortage of manpower in industries of armament, offered stable employment appropriatenesses indeed to them, while the economic crisis which touched the agricultural economics of the South in the years 1920 completed to push them with the " exode". Expanding fast, the black communities of North were confronted with new problems, sometimes similar (racism, misery, the Police violence and open hostility of the administration), but they also profited from other political conditions allowing a much better organization.

Marcus Garvey and the UNIA

See also: Universal Negro Improvement Association, Marcus Garvey

In North, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) of Marcus Garvey took a big part in the organization of these new communities, like in the movement internationalist " New Negro" beginning of the year 1920 (the " Roaring Twenties " ). The movement directed by Garvey was opposed to the theses Assimilation ists supported by the majority of the organizations of the movement of the civic rights, with the first chief of which the NAACP. Garvey formulated on the contrary a program of " black Nationalism in the USA " ( " Black nationalism" ) which encouraged the economic independence of the Blacks within the segregationist system states-unien, the creation of a African orthodoxe Church, with a black Jesus and a black Virgin instead of the white Jesus of the black Churches, and a campaign in favor of a " return in Afrique." In this direction, it can be regarded as one of the founders of the Afro-Americanism, which insists on the African roots of the American Blacks, downward slaves victims of the Traite blacks — this point is disputed inside the black movement states-unien for varied reasons, of which the difficulty of any " return… " and of the possibilities of finding roots, in given people, in Africa, because of the historical Interbreeding which took place thereafter. The popularity of Marcus Garvey became enormous, this attracting last of the thousands of sympathizers, as well in the United States as in the the Caribbean. The UNIA, established very well in the black communities of the North of the United States, could assert eleven million members.

Marcus Garvey mixed heterogeneous topics, a utopian call to the return to the sources, the construction of an Afro-américaine identity, and the realistic report of the existence, in fact, racial segregation, which led it to separatism. It mixed elements of the speech of Booker Washington, in favor of the autonomy and the meaning of the de facto situation, with the " Gospel off success" (" gospels of success) so popular in white America of the years 1920, without forgetting a component Anticolonialist and the abandonment of any hope in possible reforms of the white company states-unienne. Its movement attracted at the beginning much radicals born abroad, often associated to the Socialists and with the African Blood Brotherhood. But much of them were excluded or simply far away from the movement when Garvey suspected them of wanting to take control of it.

The movement crumbled finally as quickly as it was creates. In 1922, the federal government successful to make condemn Garvey for postal fraud related to the financial management of the " Black Line" Star;. Its sentence was modified, and Garvey was finally off-set in Jamaica, from where it was originating, in 1927. Although its movement did not survive its distance, it will inspire by other similar movements, preaching autonomy and the separatism, among which Father Divine and the Nation off Islam, founded in 1930 by Wallace Fard Muhammad. This last would have been a member of the Moorish Science Temple off America, a sect Moslem woman, created in 1913, which allotted origins Moor S to the American Blacks, and one of the first organizations of the Black Muslims .

The labor movement and civic rights

With some exceptions, the Labor movement American had excluded the Blacks. Although the radical leaders who had organized the movement at the time of the strikes with Chicago and Kansas City during the First World War, as well as the steel industry during the strike of 1919, endeavoured to make there take part the black workmen, they did not manage to convince the remainder of the workmen of the importance of the unit of the movement. With the failure of these two attempts, the labor movement and the black community are turned over to their usual reciprocal mistrust.

This pit between the two worlds was filled little by little in the years 1920 and 1930. A. Philip Randolph, for a long time member of the Socialist party of America (Socialist Party off America), took the head of the new Brotherhood of the Sleeping cars Porters (Brotherhood off Sleeping Because Porters, BSPC) to her foundation in 1925. Randolph had to face not only with the opposition of the Pullman firm, but also of the press and the black Churches, which received funds of the company of trains. It is finally by uniting its political program with the interests of the specifically black community that Randolph could gain at its side many voices in the black company. The trade union successful to be recognized by Pullman in 1935, after ten years of fights, and obtained a contract négotiations with the firm in 1937.

The BSPC of Randolph was the only trade union directed by a Black within the American Federation off Labor (AFL), the trade-union confederation states-unienne, in 1935. After the scission of the Congress off Industrial Organizations (CIO), Randolph decided to remain inside the AFL, although the CIO made him insistent calls and opened to the black workmen more. But Randolph thought that it was better, for the cause of the black railwaymen, to remain inside the AFL which gathered the other railway worker trade-unions. He became the insistent lawyer of the black cause within the AFL, criticizing on each occasion the Jim Crow laws. Other members of the BSPC, such as Edgar Nixon, played thereafter of the crucial roles within the movement of the civic rights.

Side of the CIO, much of unions, in particular the packers (Packinghouse Workers), the United Auto Workers in automobile industry, or the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (metallurgists) made fight for the civic rights an important component of their strategy and their priorities during the social négotiations. The Transport Workers Union off America, trade union of the truck-drivers which then had close links with the Communist party, took part in a coalition with Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the NAACP and the National Negro Congress to attack the Discrimination of employment in public transport in New York with the beginning of the year 1940.

During the Second world war, the CIO raised the voice in favor of the Blacks, being opposed to any racial discrimination in the industry of the armament. At the same time, they were to fight racism in their own rows, while putting an end to strikes entâmées by white workmen who refused to work with black colleagues. Although majority of these " strikes haineuses" were short, a wild Grève in Philadelphia, in 1944, which started when the federal government ordered the private company of transport to put an end to the racial segregation, lasted two weeks. It ended only with the armed intervention, decided by the president Roosevelt, who made stop the leaders of the strike.

Randolph and the BSPC went even further, by threatening a walk on Washington in 1942 if the government did not make illegal racial discrimination in the industry of the armament. He wanted to limit walk to the Blacks in order to preserve a black direction at the movement, and was heavily criticized by the left for his insistence about the rights for the Blacks to the right in the middle of the war. Succeeding in obtaining substantial concessions on behalf of the Administration Roosevelt, it decided to cancel walk.

Servant boys of Scottsboro

With the Communist party the USA, the NAACP organized the support campaign for the " Servant boys of Scottsboro " , nine Blacks stopped in 1931 after a brawl, in a train, with White. Shown to have raped two white women equipped as men, the nine had been condemned to died thereafter. The NAACP and the Communist party were opposed in the name of the strategy of defense to adopt; that of the Communist party and the International Labor Defense prevailed. The legal campaign conducted by the IDL ends in two major decisions of the Supreme court extending the right to defense of the defendants. None of the Last nines made finally condemned to death, and the majority even succeeded in being discharged.

The defense of the Servant boys of Scottsboro was only one of the cases among those which the ILD defended in the South. Until the middle of the years 1930, the ILD was the most energetic defender of the rights of the Blacks called to appear before a court, and the organization related to the most popular party among the American Blacks. Its campaigns in favor of the rights of defense of the black citizens made much to draw the attention of the Public opinion to the extreme conditions to which were to confront the black population in the legal system in force in the States Southerners.

The NAACP

References

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