The Civil Rights Movement

The first clue that the civil rights movement has been characterized more by conflict than cooperation might be its inauspicious beginnings. Slavery was officially tolerated in the Constitution to secure support of the southern states. The opponents of slavery hoped that over time the practice would gradually and naturally fade away. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Ultimately, the practice was formally abolished only after the northern states prevailed in the Civil War.

After the War, the Congress proposed and the states ratified three amendments to the Constitution. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed “equal protection before the law” for all American citizens, including those who had been slaves. The Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed all citizens the right to vote. It wasn't until almost a century after the Civil War and the passage of these amendments for real progress to be made in the extension of rights to black Americans. This was because of publicly sanctioned (or at least ignored) discrimination, abuse, and violence. Many outside the South were either ignorant or indifferent to the abuses that were occurring. Attitudes in the South were often less benign — racism and prejudice still ran deep in the 1960s. While the civil rights movement has been characterized by both frequent violence as well as by poignant moments of peaceful confrontation, significant progress was finally made when Americans began seeing images of speeches, marches, and violence against peaceful demonstrators on television in their living rooms. In response to these powerful images, public opinion quickly turned against southern political leaders and police officers, and broad support emerged for action to be taken to secure the rights of blacks in the South.

The crowning event of the civil rights movement was the March on Washington in 1963. The single most influential civil rights leader in American history, Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech to a crowd numbering in the hundreds of thousands on the Mall in Washington. The speech addressed a widesweeping range of race and discrimination issues. Together with the other events of the civil rights movement, the speech contributed to some significant developments. The following year, the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, prohibiting the use of poll taxes. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, or national origin in public accommodations, was also passed by the Congress and signed by President Johnson. The year after that, the Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, prohibiting any procedure that denied the voting rights of individuals because of their race.

What made the civil rights movement so conflictual?

1. Long-standing, deeply-held racial attitudes stood in the way of significant changes in the South, even after the Civil War. After the War, many northerners, exhausted from the costly conflict, had neither the energy nor the inclination to press beyond the victory they had won with the abolition of slavery.
2. The issues in question were at once simple, yet complicated. Some people persisted in the belief that blacks, although freed from slavery, were inferior to whites. Others argued that the Constitution allowed states the authority to deal with racial issues as they saw fit, supporting states’ rights over human rights in this case. These opinions stood in stark contrast to proponents of civil rights who argued that the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments ought to be taken at face value.
3. While prominent political leaders eventually emerged in the civil rights movement, there was no single, prominent voice for the cause for several decades. Indeed, even when powerful individuals promoted civil rights, others spoke out against them. There was a vacuum of leadership on the issue that, together with the lack of public consensus on the issue, led to conflict and stalemate for decades.