Civil Rights Movement Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Civil rights is a broad phrase that is used in several different contexts. Its most common usage refers to race discrimination, but in its broadest sense, a civil right is a power, privilege, or protection granted or recognized by a legitimate authority, law, or usage. Civil rights protect individual people and groups of people from discrimination or mistreatment. Civil rights, in modern times, also include, but are not limited to, protection against gender discrimination, disability discrimination, and religious discrimination. Civil rights can be contrasted with human rights, which are asserted to belong to individuals independent of legal recognition. Human rights imply that individuals deserve certain protections; civil rights are delineated in law so that individuals or groups actually receive these protections.

The Advent Of The Civil Rights Movement

The civil rights movement is typically the term used in the United States to refer to the struggle of African Americans to obtain equal protection under the law. However, the term can also be used generally for any struggle for legal protection that has occurred since one group of people was first subjected to the rule of another.

Nevertheless, at the end of the eighteenth century, the American Revolution (1776–1783) and French Revolution (1789–1799)—influenced by Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Montesquieu—essentially marked the beginning of the modern civil rights movement. The U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights and the French National Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, both issued in 1789, were watersheds in turning Enlightenment ideas of individual rights into law. (The French Declaration only came into force in a revised version in 1793, following the Revolution.) With these revolutions, the concept of civil rights was formally recognized and placed into practice, albeit incompletely, as illustrated by the struggles that followed in the United States.

Extending Civil Rights

Despite the high ideals of such documents as the Bill of Rights, civil rights were not available to many sectors of society, especially for African Americans and women. During the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865), in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, proclaiming the freedom of slaves, but only in rebellious territories. Despite the Emancipation Proclamation’s limited scope, it tolled the death knell for slavery in the United States, but not for racial discrimination.

After the war, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were enacted to the U.S. Constitution, prohibiting slavery, guaranteeing equal rights and due process under state laws, and guaranteeing the right to vote for African American males (women would not receive the vote until the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920). Regardless, through nonenforcement and selective interpretation of these rights, problems of racial discrimination persisted, as illustrated by the infamous case of Plessey v. Ferguson (1896), which approved a “separate but equal” doctrine despite the manifest inequality in society.

The Flowering Of The Civil Rights Movement

The early 1900s saw the founding of African American rights organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909. Still, not until 1954, following Brown v. Board of Education (banning segregation in public schools) were significant inroads made against racial discrimination. In the late 1950s, resistance to racial discrimination increased, headlined by the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, as the African American community showed that they had power and demanded change. Subsequently, the 1960s witnessed the flowering of the civil rights movement in America. In response to the movement, African Americans were granted significant civil rights with the 1964 Civil Rights Act (mandating desegregation), the 1965 Equal Voting Rights Act (eliminating hindrances to voting), and the 1968 Civil Rights Act (banning discrimination in housing).

After these public policy victories and Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 assassination, the African American civil rights movement splintered into a sometimes violent black power movement and more prosaic legal and individual struggles to consolidate the gains of the 1960s. Political scientists continue to analyze the factors which contributed to the success of the civil rights movement from a variety of perspectives (critical race theory, social movement theory, etc.), but one main factor is undeniable: the broader civil rights movement began with the U.S. Constitution, to which the African American civil rights movement was able to appeal to draw support from the country. If the American civil rights movement is considered by many a completed period in U.S. history, the broader civil rights movement is an ongoing struggle throughout the world, as other minorities vie for the powers, privileges, and protections they believe are due them.

Bibliography:

McAdam, Doug. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Morris, Aldon D. The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Free Press, 1984.
Robnett, Belinda. How Long, How Long: African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Weisbrot, Robert. Freedom Bound: A History of America’s Civil Rights Movement. New York: Norton, 1990.