The Politics of Protest [week 5]

The Civil Rights Movement in the USA

Non-violent protest

Violent protest

Working within the system

Identity politics and cultural change

Words and their meaning

Black Power can be clearly defined for those who do not attach the fears of white America to their

questions about it.

Stokely Carmichael

Reasons for the civil rights movement from the 1940s

-Post-Civil War United States- North/South divide

- Apathy of federal and state institutions

- Limitations of political reform- Limitations of legal decisions

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954)

Key organisations

- Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)

- Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC)

- National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP)

- Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)

To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In

our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience. We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany

was ‘legal’.

Martin Luther King jr, Letter From a Birmingham Jail

Key events

-Rosa Parks and the bus boycotts- The Freedom Rides

- The Greensboro Sit-in- ‘I Have a Dream’ and the March on

Washington- Mississippi Freedom Summer

The ‘Second Wave’

-Moves towards Black Power- Black Panther Movement

- King’s assassination- Government crackdown

The Civil Rights Movement and The Politics of Protest

-Methods of protest- Response of the state- Legitimacy of protest

- Solidarity- ‘Old’ and ‘new’ social movements- Links to other social movements