Civil Rights Organizations and The Missing Agenda

The Civil Rights Movement in the United States has been a long, primarily nonviolent struggle to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to all Americans. The movement has had a lasting impact on United States society, in its tactics, the increased social and legal acceptance of civil rights, and in its exposure of the prevalence and cost of racism.

Many people who were active in the Civil Rights Movement, with organizations such as NAACP, SNCC, CORE, and SCLC, prefer the term “Southern Freedom Movement” because the struggle was about more than just civil rights under law; it was also about fundamental issues of freedom, respect, dignity, and economic and social equality.

The NAACP was formed in 1909 in response to the 1908 race riot in Springfield, capital of Illinois and birthplace of President Abraham Lincoln. Appalled at the violence that was committed against blacks, a group of white liberals that included Mary White Ovington and Oswald Garrison Villard, both the descendants of abolitionists, issued a call for a meeting to discuss racial justice. There were some 60 people, only 7 of whom were African American (including W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell), signed the call, which was released on the centennial of Lincoln’s birth. Following Du Bois’s Niagara Movement, the NAACP’s goal was to secure for all people the rights guaranteed in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution, which promised an end to slavery, the equal protection of the law, and universal adult male suffrage, respectively.

Combining the white philanthropic support that characterized Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist organizations with the call for racial justice delivered by W. E. B. Du Bois’s militant Niagara Movement, the NAACP forged a middle road of interracial cooperation. Throughout its existence it has worked primarily through the American legal system to fulfill its goals of full suffrage and other civil rights, and an end to segregation and racial violence.

In 1910 African Americans were just over a generation out of enslavement, but the number of successful black enterprises, social and civic organizations, and educational institutions in cities such as Atlanta was already impressive. Among the most remarkable were strings of barbershops and insurance companies owned by former slaves. Black institutions of higher learning such as Atlanta and Clark Universities, Morris Brown, Morehouse, and Spelman Colleges-became incubators for black leadership.

When the 60′s began, two main groups, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had already been hard at work on a variety of desegregation efforts in public facilities, transportation, and schools. The decision by students of North Carolina A&T to desegregate the lunch counter at the local Greensboro Woolworth’s store precipitated a new form of student protest in the South which highlighted local official compliance in the violence of an outraged southern white population. Attacks on segregation continued to spread through the efforts of new groups such as the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

A landmark year-long black boycott of public transportation in Montgomery Alabama was victorious after Rosa Parks refused to move to the rear of the bus, but full equality under the law has yet to be universally recognized in the United States. Even after such landmark cases as Brown vs. the Board of Education produced a legal basis for ending school segregation, and school integration became the official law of the land, the process still was far from complete. The 50′s, 60′s, and 70′s did, however, see the struggle for black civil rights reemerge publicly as the most significant social issue the country ever faced. Now, in the early years of the 21st Century, while continuing progress toward common decency is increasingly visible, prejudices still fester.

In past years civil rights organizations showed and expressed an interested in addressing the concerns and needs of African Americans at all levels of the socio-economic ladder. They even held yearly conferences that were often free and affordable for those who needed assistance. The views and voices of the poor and dis-enfranchised could be heard from Selma to Birmingham, New York City to Philadelphia, Chicago to Detroit to Washington DC.

This type of advocacy and care has slowly decreased or ceased, with many mainstream civil rights organizations placing more emphasis on the middle class and upper middle class African Americans as well as money to fund their programs, dinners and fashion shows. This has occurred at the same time that more and more African Americans are homeless, living in poverty, unemployed, in prisons, and with HIV/Aids. It is obvious to me that when our churches, civil rights, political and grassroots organizations had less, our care, and advocacy was greater.

Brothers and Sisters, with willing hearts and social concernment, its time to set a civil and human rights agenda in 2010 to address poverty and its side effects. Those that speak with a hidden agenda or forked tongue will continue to cause hardship on disproportionate numbers of African American and poor people.

I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men and women, in prisons, on street corners, and homeless camps. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through education. I allow them to know that drugs, guns and violence will not solve their problems. It’s a new year and a new season.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Martin Luther King’s Legacy (psychedelichippiemusic.blogspot.com)

Share on Facebook

Jermyn Shannon- El

View all posts by Jermyn Shannon- El (37)