Outline Lecture Twenty—The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s
Key Questions This Week:
1) What are the dangers of conforming to the status quo when that status quo is based on
injustice and inequality?
2) What social iniquities remain unresolved since the 1960’s?
Jonathan Kozol’s “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid”
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2005/American-Apartheid-Education1sep05.htm
I) The Paradoxes in “The American Dream”
a) America “The Affluent Society” in the 1950’s
i) The G.I. Bill Generation
ii) Aspects of a conformist middle-class culture
(1) Cultural addiction to material consumption
(2) Deferral of policy to politicians
(3) Debilitating sense of futility towards possibility of change
(4) Complacency justified and reinforced by material comforts
b) Exclusions from “The American Dream”
i) Global inequities
ii) Domestic disenfranchised groups
iii) Three catalysts that galvanized and mobilized groups in early 1960’s
II) The African-American Civil Rights Movement
a) Brown vs. Board of Education (1954)
i) The decision that “rocked the boat”
b) Momentum of the Civil Rights Movement
i) 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka
ii) 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott—Rosa Parks
iii) March on Washington 1963
iv) Civil Rights Act 1964
v) Voting Rights Act 1965
c) Opposition to Civil Rights Movement
i) The stumbling block of “Dixiecrats”
ii) Context of Malcolm X’s “I don’t consider myself an American”
iii) The “patience” argument of white moderates
(1) Race protests were “unwise and untimely”
iv) Law and order argument
d) King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” 1963
i) “Wait” means “Never”
ii) The problem with the white moderates
(1) “Appalling silence” of “good, respectable society” is a robe of complicity
iii) Unjust vs. just laws
e) The Methodology of Civil Protest—The Critique from Within
i) Legacy in both substance and strategy
ii) Four steps of non-violent protest
(1) Collection of facts concerning injustice
(a) “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”
(2) Negotiation
(3) Self-purification
(a) “Withstand blows without retaliation”
(4) Direct action
(a) “Privileged groups seldom give up privileges voluntarily”
iii) Malcolm X’s “the ballot or the bullet”
(1) “Never be nonviolent unless you run into non-violence”
(2) A struggle for “human rights” as opposed to “civil rights”