african american civil rights essay

After the 1960s the civil rights movement confronted new issues and forged new alliances. The new stage of struggle also saw more active coalition-building with other groups affected by discrimination and inequality. Blacks and Jews had worked together in the early postwar decades to secure anti-discrimination measures. After 1968, Blacks and Latinos and Asian Americans sometimes joined together in campaigns for substantive equal treatment and better life chances. Campuses saw “Third World Coalitions” surge in the 1970s over shared demands for ethnic studies programs and affirmative action or open admissions, for example. Mainstream civil rights groups and feminist groups supported one another’s lawsuits to end discriminatory employment and open institutions to all. Black and Puerto Rican activists built coalitions with white feminists to end the practice of sterilization abuse, which targeted women of color, and to seek a broad range of reproductive rights, including quality child care and maternal and child health care. Poor black women in the welfare rights movement, for their part, sometimes found stronger allies among liberal white women and progressive Catholics than among mainstream male-led civil rights groups fearful of being associated with unmarried mothers seeking better public assistance.

Even with the legislative victories of the 1960s, many obstacles to equality remained, especially in employment and housing. Still, efforts to promote equity and inclusion throughout American society faced daunting road blocks, and it was clear as early as the mid-1960s that they would not be removed easily. Two and a half centuries of slavery and another hundred years of pervasive discrimination had left deep imprints on all American institutions. Every industry that employed African Americans had developed its own variant of entrenched occupational segregation. The housing markets of every major metropolitan area bore the marks of decades of restrictive covenants and real estate red-lining, and of postwar white flight to homogenous suburbs. School systems, honoring those dividing lines and funded by unequal property taxes, systematically underserved black children. In the North as well as the South, they left black youth ill-prepared for an emerging labor market that demanded ever-higher levels of education to achieve economic security. Rather, as the mechanization of southern cotton picking and demise of sharecropping led millions of migrants to head to the cities of the North and West from the 1940s through the 1960s, hopes of good jobs met the reality of vast structural unemployment due to automation and later de-industrialization, and declining urban tax bases due to suburbanization.

Economic equality lagged behind social and political equality, especially in the nation's cities. All these influences conspired, by the late twentieth century, to produce unprecedented levels of concentrated poverty in the nation’s inner cities, poverty from which escape was well-nigh impossible for most residents. The cumulative result caught the notice of growing numbers of social scientists by centuries end, who documented a vast “wealth gap” between blacks and whites. Afflicting higher earners along with the poor, it came from having been systematically cut off over generations from being able to buy homes in neighborhoods where home values appreciated. That “asset poverty,” as it came to be called, made “ self-help ,” strong as that tradition was in black history, a steep and slippery climb. Combined with harsh drug laws passed after the 1970s, all these forms of structural inequality contributed to After the 1960s a rising movement mounted a political challenge to efforts aimed at expanding equality. surging black incarceration rates that put the United States on par with some of the most repressive nations of the world in the proportion of its citizenry that lived behind bars.

The cultural impact of the civil rights movement was not fully realized until after the 1960s. The quest for self-determination and communal development that followed the legislative victories of the mid-1960s sparked tremendous cultural and intellectual creativity. The Black Arts movement produced a renaissance in literature, theater, art, music and dance. Black history became one of the most dynamic fields of U.S. history, led by scholars such as John Hope Franklin (1915-2009). Self-fashioning changed as natural “Afro” hair styles came into vogue, along with African-derived dress styles such as the dashiki and Kente cloth. In countless cities around the country, community organizers set to work, often with initial funding from Great Society programs, to alleviate poverty, fight hopelessness, and generate the power and resources for community development.

Seen in the light of all this activity, the 2008 presidential election, which surprised so many in both the U.S. and the wider world, becomes more explicable. The ongoing, if usually unheralded, activism after the mid-1960s altered American institutions and culture profoundly, even if the outcomes fell far short of the egalitarian visions those who worked so hard to produce change. Their efforts to open and transform workplaces, schools, politics, and communities had, bit by bit, opened a pathway for Barack Obama to reach the pinnacle of power, even as it was his own prodigious talent that carried him up that path to the Oval Office. His candidacy stirred deep wells of black pride and aspiration and elicited unprecedented turnout from millions of hitherto discouraged first-time voters. At the same time, tens of millions of white Americans were by then yearning for the “change” and “hope” that candidate Obama promised. They, too, worried about their and their children’s prospects in the new low-wage service-based economy, struggled to get decent health care, and sought better relations between the U.S. and the wider world. The inauguration seemed a time of widely shared national elation. Yet, when the new President set to work to bring the promised change in the form of policies such as national health care reform, he met determined resistance from the conservative movement, which now dominated the Republican Party. Indeed, by 2010, the nation faced stormy clashes as the two streams of post-1968 civil rights history met in Washington: an accomplished and enduring civil rights struggle, now joined to a wider reinvigorated liberalism, and a potent conservative power base determined to fight any equalization of the nation’s racial practices and economic policies.

Guiding Student Discussion

The post-1968 civil rights story is one of the most important—and therefore sometimes the most difficult—discussions to have with students. It involves core values and lived experience about which many adults, let alone teenagers, are not especially reflective. White students can get defensive, while black students sometimes assume they know more than they actually do about how we got to where we are. Abstract assertion on the instructor’s part (like what I’ve just done, due to space limitations) is least likely to work well in conveying the issues. Fortunately, there are excellent materials easily available for experiential learning, the kind most likely to succeed and leave a lasting imprint. There are powerful primary sources , for example, with which to bring these themes to life and enable students to engage in activities such as role play debates that build empathy and circumvent defensiveness. Films also work well. Try, for example, segments of the Eyes on the Prize II series; or At the River I Stand , about the Memphis strike; An Unlikely Friendship , about class, schooling, and community power; or Chisholm ‘72: Unbought and Unbossed , about Shirley Chisholm’s race for the presidency.

Help students see that racism is not simply a matter of individual behavior or belief. The biggest challenge is to get beyond the notion that racism is simply an individual attitudinal or ethical failing. This notion is promoted by popular culture and official ideology alike, and a big barrier to understanding. Students cannot make sense of the post-1968 history if they remain stuck in this conceptual rut. So the trick is to find ways to get them thinking in social-structural and situational terms, without losing sight of human agency. Encountering a dramatic fight over northern segregation can help, such as Dr. King’s experience in Cicero, Illinois , or exploring the housing sub plot of Lorraine Hansberry’s widely assigned Raisin in the Sun . The core conceptual task is to understand the difference between formal legal equality and substantive equal treatment. You can make a start on this by exposing the fiction that the racial divide of the North resulted from innocent de facto , as opposed to de jure , segregation. In fact, northern segregation was also created and sustained by Help students understand that racial inequality in both the North and the South was deliberately instigated and maintained. intentional policy, if in a less in-your-face manner than its southern sibling, as you can show with exercises to help students understand practices such as real estate steering , bank red-lining of black communities, school boundary gerrymandering, and white flight from racially changing neighborhoods. Once students grasp the intentional agency that produced racial inequality, they can better appreciate why the civil rights movement saw race-conscious remedies as vital, among them metropolitan busing and taxation plans, affirmative action in employment and education, and scatter-site public housing.

The achievements of the civil rights movement allowed differences among African Americans to be more freely expressed. As students reckon with the structural determinants of racial inequality, they will be better equipped to recognize the diversity among African Americans that has been such a driving feature of post-1968 history. Differences derived from class position, gender, color , political orientation and more always existed, but the civil rights victories of the 1960s freed them to be expressed more openly than ever before. Since then, we’ve seen many kinds of public clashes: black radicals arguing against black liberals; black mayors opposing strikes of city workers; black feminists challenging male domination in movement organizations; black conservatives challenging black civil rights figures; black female employees charging black male supervisors with sexual harassment; and black lesbians and gays confronting black ministers who promote homophobia.

Help students understand that the "black community" is as diverse and complex as the "white community." All students need to appreciate such intra-group differences to make sense of their world. When they speak of blacks or whites in unitary terms (as presumably all sharing the experiences and views), challenge them with contrary cases from the more complex reality until it becomes second nature to specify who exactly they are talking about when they venture generalizations. At the same time, exercises that help to explain why it is that race remains the prime determinant in how Americans vote will help students balance diversity and change with how much “race [still] matters,” in the apt phrase of Princeton philosopher Cornell West .

Scholars Debate

Because of the relative recency of these events, the books that first set the terms of debate were heavily influenced by media representations. Scholars took their cues from press coverage and from their own political inclinations, while few of the early cohort were African Americans themselves because blacks were still so poorly represented in research institutions. Accounts in this mode by Allen Matusow and Todd Gitlin established the conventional wisdom still found in most textbooks. They tell a tale of decline after the mid-1960s with Black Power—sometimes rendered as an “identity politics” break from “universalism”—featured as the culprit. It seems almost willful in its alleged destruction of a purported liberal coalition.

Over the last two decades especially, a rich literature has emerged that has undermined this interpretation among most scholars of this history, if not in the general public. First, the declension story misses the vast extent of ongoing activism after the late 1960s. It thus understates the great advances that came from black nationalism , among them the explosion of black history and African American studies. But above all, the declension story misreads the sources and dynamics of radicalization because it all but ignores the ways in which New Deal policies and labor movement practices, which benefitted many blacks along with most whites, also entrenched racial inequality in America in ways that snowballed over the decades after the 1930s. Both historians and social scientists have together revealed what has come to be called America’s “two-track welfare state”: a bifurcated structure that from the outset disproportionately benefitted white men and disadvantaged most people of color and women of all backgrounds. Ostensibly neutral policies such as wage and hour laws and Social Security thus excluded agricultural workers and domestic servants, while Federal Housing Administration mortgage insurance was unavailable in predominantly black or transitional neighborhoods. So-called “identity politics,” then, have their roots in these structures: prompted by the inequities they created, such organizing has aimed to promote, ultimately, a genuinely inclusive universalism.

One school of interpretation that synthesizes well these varied discoveries of recent scholarship is “the long civil rights movement” framework, summarized by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall in a presidential address under that title to the Organization of American Historians. As the phrase suggests, this framework draws attention to the deep earlier roots of the struggles of the 1960s in the civil rights unionism and expansive black activism of the New Deal era and World War II, as it also carries the story up to the present, well beyond the mid-1960s closure of conventional wisdom. The long movement literature draws attention to how racial inequality was built into the workings of the U.S. labor market and social policy, and highlights enduring conservative resistance to social democracy and racial inclusion alike. Two historians, Sundiata Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, have criticized the long civil rights movement framework, arguing that it understates rupture over time, the distinctiveness of the South, and the clashes among different streams of black politics. Yet at the time of this writing, growing numbers of scholars seem to be embracing and refining the long civil rights movement approach, because they find in it a strong conceptual handle for the complex story of an evolving and internally varied movement that stretches back at least until the late 1930s and far beyond the 1960s. Indeed, that framework, better than any other, explains both the election of Barack Obama and the tough challenges he faced in governing a starkly polarized nation that had yet to take to heart Dr. King’s admonition that “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.”

Nancy MacLean was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2008-09. She holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is currently Peter B. Ritzma Professor of History and African American Studies at Northwestern University. MacLean is the author of Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (1994); Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (2006); The American Women’s Movement, 1945-2000: A Brief History with Documents (2008); and, with Donald T. Critchlow, Debating the Conservative Movement: 1945 to the Present (2009).

Illustration credits

To cite this essay: MacLean, Nancy. “The Civil Rights Movement: 1968—2008.” Freedom’s Story, TeacherServe©. National Humanities Center. DATE YOU ACCESSED ESSAY. <https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/freedom/1917beyond/essays/crm2008.htm>

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Intro Essay: The Lost Promise of Reconstruction

To what extent did founding principles of liberty, equality, and justice become a reality for african americans from reconstruction to the end of the nineteenth century.

• I can explain how the Reconstruction Amendments and federal laws sought to protect the rights of African Americans after the Civil War.
• I can identify examples of Jim Crow laws and explain how these laws undermined the rights of African Americans.
• I can explain how violence and intimidation were used to threaten African Americans from exercising their political and civil rights.
• I can analyze Reconstruction’s effectiveness in ensuring the faithful application of Founding principles of liberty, equality, and justice to African Americans.
• I can explain the various ways that African American leaders and intellectuals supported their communities and worked to end segregation and racism.

Essential Vocabulary

The lost promise of reconstruction and rise of jim crow, 1860-1896.

After more than two centuries, race-based chattel slavery was abolished during the Civil War. The long struggle for emancipation finally ended thanks to constitutional reform and the joint efforts of Black and white Americans fighting for Black freedom. The next 30 years, however, were a constant struggle to preserve the freedom achieved through emancipation and to ensure for Blacks the equality and justice of U.S. citizens in the face of opposition, violence, and various forms of discrimination.

The Civil War created conditions for the demise of slavery. Early in the war, Congress passed two Confiscation Acts that allowed the federal government to seize and later free enslaved persons in conquered Confederate territory. On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln used his wartime executive powers to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Enslaved persons ran away from their owners and joined free Blacks enlisting in the Union Army to fight for freedom and human equality. The 54th Massachusetts Regiment was the most famous Black unit to fight in the war, but almost 200,000 Black soldiers fought for the Union. Black abolitionists joined the cause, with Harriet Tubman joining Union raids that helped liberate enslaved persons and Frederick Douglass recruiting Black troops. By the end of 1865, the requisite number of states had ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to confirm the end of slavery.

Slavery may have been banned, but Black Americans faced an uncertain future during the process of restoring the Union, called Reconstruction . The Civil Rights Act of 1866 protected basic rights of citizenship, and the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) provided for Black U.S. citizenship and equal protection under the law. Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau as a federal agency in order to give practical help to freed people in the form of immediate aid and economic and educational opportunities. The efforts of the Freedmen’s Bureau to grant Blacks confiscated land and open Black schools in the South were frustrated by President Andrew Johnson’s vetoes of the Bureau bill and by the opposition of white supremacists.

Storming Fort Wagner by Kurz & Allison, 1890

This print shows soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment attacking the walls of Fort Wagner on Morris Island, South Carolina. The Massachusetts 54th was one of the first African American Union regiments formed in the Civil War. The regiment fought valiantly during the attack on Fort Wagner while suffering nearly 40 percent casualties. The bravery and sacrifice of the 54th became one of the most famous and inspirational parts of the Civil War.

Johnson succeeded Lincoln, and while he supported the restoration of the national union, he impeded the protection of equal rights for Black Americans. He vetoed numerous laws intended to promote Black equality, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the extension of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Reconstruction Acts, and the Tenure of Office Act, among several others. While Congress overrode most of his vetoes, Johnson proved himself a consistent opponent of Black rights. In his third annual message in December 1867, he asserted, “Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands.” When he fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton for resisting his policies, Congress impeached President Johnson, but the vote to remove him from office failed by one vote.

Initial protections for Blacks were also weakened by restrictions and opposition to equal civil rights. The new constitutions of former Confederate states did not protect Black citizenship or suffrage. Indeed, the states passed Black Codes that severely curtailed the legal and economic rights of Black citizens. Moreover, the codes penalized Blacks unfairly for committing the same crimes as whites.

The Union As It Was by Thomas Nast, 1874

Klan violence was documented in the press. “The Union as It Was,” an 1874 Harper’s Weekly cartoon by Thomas Nast, shows a Klan member and a White League member shaking hands over an African American family huddled together in fear. A schoolhouse burns and a man is lynched in the background.

Black Americans were also the victims of horrific violence perpetrated by white mobs and local authorities. White supremacists killed thousands of Blacks to intimidate them, prevent them from voting, and stop them from exercising their rights. The Ku Klux Klan and other groups such as the White League were organized to terrorize Blacks and keep them in a constant state of fear. The Colfax Massacre of 1873 and mass killings in places like Memphis and New Orleans were only a few examples of the wave of violence Black Americans suffered. Black and white leaders wrote to state and national officials about the violence in their communities. Congress, with the support of President Ulysses S. Grant, passed several acts aimed at protecting freed people from politically motivated violence. Such enforcement legislation was quickly challenged in the courts, and the withdrawal of all federal troops from the South in 1876 effectively ended federal intervention on behalf of the rights of freed people.

The first Black senator and representatives – in the 41st and 42nd Congress of the United States by Currier and Ives, 1872

This 1872 lithograph by Currier and Ives depicts several of the African American men who served in Congress.

Left to right: Senator Hiram Revels (MS), Representatives Benjamin Turner (AL), Robert DeLarge (SC), Josiah Walls (FL), Jefferson Long (GA), Joseph Rainey (SC), and Robert Elliott (SC).

In 1870, the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment protected the right of Black male suffrage when it banned states from denying voting rights on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Despite violence and intimidation, Blacks exercised their right to vote and served in local offices, state legislatures, and Congress. During Reconstruction, 14 African Americans served in the House of Representatives and 2 in the Senate. Nine of these leaders had been born enslaved. Local governments, however, increasingly found ways to subvert the exercise of the constitutional right to vote. Grandfather clauses , poll taxes , and literacy tests were applied to prevent Blacks from voting.

Many southern Blacks were farmers who lived under the crushing economic burdens of the sharecropping system, which forced them into a state of peonage in which they had little control over their economic destinies. In this system, white landowners rented land, tools, seed, livestock, and housing to laborers in exchange for a significant portion of the crop. As a result, Blacks barely earned a living and suffered perpetual debt that limited their economic prospects for the future.

In the later decades of the nineteenth century, Blacks also lived under confining social constraints that effectively made them second-class citizens. Segregation laws legally separated the races in public facilities, including trains, schools, churches, and hotels. These “ Jim Crow ” laws humiliated Blacks with a public badge of inferiority. Black members of Congress Robert B. Elliott and James T. Rapier made eloquent speeches in support of legislation to protect African Americans’ civil rights. Congress passed a Civil Rights Act in 1875 that protected equal access to public facilities, but the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), arguing that while states could not engage in discriminatory actions, the law incorrectly tried to regulate private acts. Frederick Douglass called the decision an “utter and flagrant disregard of the objects and intentions of the National legislature by which it was enacted, and of the rights plainly secured by the Constitution.” In 1896, however, the Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation laws were constitutional if local and state governments provided Blacks with “separate but equal” facilities. Separate was never equal, particularly in the eyes of Black Americans.

Watch this BRI Homework Help video for a review of the Plessy v. Ferguson case.

Blacks endured escalating violence in the Jim Crow era of the 1890s. White mobs of the time lynched more than 100 Blacks a year. Lynching was summary execution by angry mobs in which the victim was tortured and killed and the body mutilated. Ida B. Wells was a courageous Black journalist who cataloged the horrors of almost 250 lynchings in two pamphlets, A Red Record: Lynchings in the United States and Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases . Despite her efforts, lynching of Black Americans continued into the twentieth century.

The shackle broken by the genius of freedom by E. Sachse & Co., 1874

This 1874 lithograph, “The shackle broken by the genius of freedom,” memorialized Congressional representative Robert B. Elliott’s famous speech in favor of the 1875 Civil Rights Act. Elliott is shown in the center of the image, while the banner at the top contains a quotation from his speech: “What you give to one class you must give to all. What you deny to one you deny to all.”

Black leaders and intellectuals like Wells, Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois advocated for education as the means to achieve advancement and equality. Black newspapers and citizens’ groups supported their communities and fought back against segregation and racism. Though their strategies differed, their goal was the same: a fuller realization of the Founding principles of equality and justice for all.

W. E. B. Du Bois summed up the Black experience after the Civil War when he stated, “The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun; and then moved back again toward slavery.” Du Bois points to the fact that whatever constitutional amendments were intended to protect the natural and civil rights of Blacks, and however determined Blacks were to fight to preserve those rights, they struggled to overcome the numerous legal, political, economic, and social obstacles that white supremacists erected to keep them in a subordinate position. Slavery had distorted republicanism and American ideals before the Civil War, and segregation continued to undermine republican government and equal rights after the conflict had ended.

Black leaders such as Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois worked for Black rights in a variety of ways.

Reading Comprehension Questions

• How did the Reconstruction Amendments and federal laws protect the natural and civil rights of African Americans during the Civil War and Reconstruction?
• Despite constitutional and legal protections, how were Blacks’ constitutional rights restricted during Reconstruction?
• Reflecting on Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois stated: “The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun; and then moved back again toward slavery.” In what ways do you think this conclusion was accurate? In what ways might have Du Bois been wrong?

Lessons from the Civil Rights Movement: Reflections on the Long Movement for Black Liberation from Atlanta to Amsterdam

Publish Date: October 2016

Contributors

Mitchell Esajas

2016 John Lewis Fellowship

Civil Rights , Justice , Racism

The Netherlands

“The home of the brave and land of the free” was built on the genocide of Indigenous people and centuries of enslavement, dehumanization and racialized violence on African people.

The Tradition of Destroying the Black Body

In the first week of the program many people in the US, and many people around the world, were shook by the murders of two black men by the police, their names were Alton Sterling and Philando Castille. Castille was held up for an alleged broken taillight and Sterling for selling cd’s in front of a store, both men were brutally shot by policemen. The murders were caught on camera, the horrific images sparked nationwide and global protest against the murder of young black men. Although it was heartbreaking and shocking to see the videos of these men getting shot I could not be surprised. In his seminal book ‘Between the World and Me” Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote:

“In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labour – it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest.” (1)

Indeed, “the home of the brave and land of the free” was built on the genocide of Indigenous people and centuries of enslavement, dehumanization and racialized violence on African people. In a speech given at the Democratic National Convention, the First Lady Michelle Obama confirmed that even the White House was built by enslaved Africans. (2) During the program we learned how the US became an economic power house based on the profits of slave labor and how a system of white supremacy was developed to legitimize and maintain a social, cultural, political order which privileged people racialized as white whilst dehumanizing millions of people racialized as black, brown and native-American people. The system of white supremacy consisted of an ideology based on the belief that people racialized as white were superior to other “races” on the one hand. On the other hand it consisted of social, cultural, political structures to enforce this ideologies in the everyday lives of people and government of the country. During the era of slavery, so called Black Codes limited the freedom of enslaved Africans, after emancipation African-Americans people were considered only 3/5ths a human being and after Reconstruction the Jim Crow system was introduced which trapped masses African-Americans in a position of second class citizenship and lower levels of the societal ladder.

Whiteness in Europe

In Europe, especially in the Netherlands, people often tend to deflect debates about racism by stating “we don’t do race, that is something they do in the United States or South Africa”

When discussing white supremacy and racism the focus often tends to stay stuck on the African-American experience. In the Fellowship the focus was on the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of Atlanta. Being a black European, born and bred in Amsterdam from parents who migrated from the former Dutch colony Surinam and roots in the African continent I’d like to broaden the scope. In fact, I’d argue that white supremacy and racism were invented in Europe, yet subsequently refined and implemented in the United States. In Europe, especially in the Netherlands, people often tend to deflect debates about racism by stating “we don’t do race, that is something they do in the United States or South Africa”. A fellow Anthropology graduate student even told me once: “the concept of race has been rejected for a long time in the Dutch scholarly society” after telling me to stop whining or move because I questioned the racist Dutch Saint Nicolas tradition. The Dutch tend to deny or downplay the existence of racism and forget their own history of colonialism and slavery. (3) In her seminal book “White Innocence”, Gloria Wekker, the only black professor in the Netherlands, described the dominant self-image of the Dutch as follows:

“With the title White Innocence, I am invoking an important and apparently satisfying way in which the Dutch think of themselves, as being a small, but just, ethical nation; color-blind, thus free of racism; as being inherently on the moral and ethical high ground, thus a guiding light to other folks and nations.”

Several reports by organizations such as the Dutch Institute for Human Rights and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) confirmed that racism continues to reproduce structural inequality in the Netherlands, especially in the case of people of African descent

Indeed, “race” and racism have been a taboo for a long time in the Dutch public discourse, although it’s starting to change due to activism of black and brown communities. The Dutch were major players in the trans-Atlantic human traffic in enslaved Africans and the colonized several parts of the world including New York, major parts of Brazil, several islands in the Carribbean, several coastal parts of Southern and Western Africa and several territories in Asia such as Indonesia. In fact, the first 20 Africans who were ever brought to the United States crossed the ocean on a Dutch warship in 1619 and set foot in Jamestown, Virginia. (4) Just like the United States, the Dutch abolished slavery in 1863, however, they maintained many of their colonial territories such as Indonesia until 1947 and 1975 after periods of decolonial struggle. Although slavery was abolished a long time ago and most colonial gained independence “racism” continued to be an issue, but it became a taboo because of the atrocities of the Second World War which were legitimized by the white supremacist and racist ideology of the nazi’s. Did this mean that racism and white supremacy immediately disappear? No, several reports by organizations such as the Dutch Institute for Human Rights and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) confirmed that racism continues to reproduce structural inequality in the Netherlands, especially in the case of people of African descent:

“The Committee is concerned about the increase in discrimination, including racial profiling and stigmatization, faced by people of African descent.” (5)

The Birth of a Movement for Black Lives in the Netherlands

At the beginning of the Fellowship I thought a social movement had been born in the Netherlands against racism and the national Dutch blackface tradition Saint Nicolas in which millions of white Dutch people dress up in blackface. (6) However, after the program I question whether this can already be called a real “movement”. Throughout the years myself and many of my friends and fellow activists have participated in actions and advocacy to change the tradition. Some of us have been arrested, some of us have been prosecuted, jailed and physically, verbally and digitally violated. We have been inspired by the Civil Rights Movement and organized several nonviolent direct actions such as the “Freedom Ride to Meppel” where hundreds of people demonstrated against the national blackface tradition during the annual national Saint Nicolas parade (see video). (7) Much like the Civil Rights Movement we have been able to bring attention to race related injustices in Dutch society by getting into “good trouble, as John Lewis calls it. This has created space to break the taboo and the silence around racism in Dutch society and placed it on the political agenda. Much work still needs to be done, the spirit of resistance has grown but I learned that we need to organize, mobilize and strategize seriously before we can called it a real “movement”.

A Tradition of Resistance: The Struggle for Freedom

The Civil Rights Movement did not operate and arise in a vacuum, it was the result of decades of organized resistance, strategic planning and social, political and cultural developments

In an archive in Amsterdam I found evidence of correspondence between a Surinamese anti- colonial organizer Otto Huiswoud, W.E.B. duBois and Langston Hughes who were part of the movements in the United States.

In 2012 every 28 hours a black man, woman or child was killed by someone employed by the US government including the police.

The New Jim Crow and the #BlackLivesMatter Movement

African-American males are sentenced an average of 20 to 50 times higher longer prison than white males of the same drug crime.

#BlackLivesMatter was co-founded was created by three black women, of whom two are queer, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman who murdered the 17 year old Trayvon Martin in 2013.

Marching with #BlackLivesMatter Atlanta

The violent deaths of many young black man and women have sparked the birth a 21st century movement in the United States. It is commonly known as the #BlackLivesMatter movement. #BlackLivesMatter was co-founded was created by three black women, of whom two are queer, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman who murdered the 17 year old Trayvon Martin in 2013. (16) It is important to note that they do not claim to be a movement yet:

“Black Lives Matter is a chapter-based national organization working for the validity of Black life. We are working to (re)build the Black liberation movement.” (17)

I marched and protested in the same streets Dr. King and hundreds of thousands of other people have marched for four days in a row.

#BlackLivesMatter is part of a larger liberation movement which is still in its infancy but can and must be seen in the context of a long history of resistance and struggle for black liberation.

After days of protest the mayor of Atlanta and the police chief agreed to meet with leaders of the movement. (19) This is where a few point of improvement of the #BlackLivesMatter movement became visible. During the Fellowship several lecturers raised some critical point about #BlackLivesMatter. John Eaves, chair of the Fulton Country Board of Commissioners, for example stated it became clear that the protestors did not fully understand how to turn their protest into concrete demands for policy changes and at which level of government to advocate for these changes. (20) To other the concrete goals and objectives weren’t clear and they raised the question how #BlackLivesMatter wanted to achieve change without a solid structure. (21) This was reflected in a situation in which it was unclear who the spokesperson of the Atlanta chapter of #BlackLivesMatter was. After days of protest the mayor met with several local “leaders” and representatives of activist organizations, one person claimed to be the leader of “#BlackLivesMatter of Greater Atlanta” but he was denounced by the national #BlackLivesMatter network as another grassroots network called “#BlackLivesMatter Atlanta” was the official chapter of the national network. A week after the Fellowship, however, the movement for Black Lives, a collective of 50 organizations representing black communities around the US, launched an expansive and coherent vision and agenda which echoes many of the objectives and vision of previous movements including the modern Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panther Party and other organizations who have been part of the long struggle for black freedom. This shows that #BlackLivesMatter is part of a larger liberation movement which is still in its infancy but can and must be seen in the context of a long history of resistance and struggle for black liberation.

Lessons from the Modern Civil Rights Movement For the #BlackLivesMatter Movement

The oppression of black communities face today are intimately tied to a global system of neoliberal capitalism and white supremacy

One of the criticisms on #BlackLivesMatter was that it seemed to be focused on police brutality which is extremely important but sis not the “root cause” of the problem.

1. From protest to policy transformation

One of the major strengths of the Civil Rights Movement was that its goals and objectives were concrete, they strived to achieve equality and justice for black people through the establishment of Civil Rights such as the right to vote, the desegregation of schools, public transport and other public facilities and equal access to jobs and housing. Based on these demand they developed strategies and tactics to realize these objectives through the organizational structures and networks which they had built up. #BlackLivesMatter and the movement for Black Lives, recently launched its vision and agenda with concrete objectives and policy changes. One of the criticisms on #BlackLivesMatter was that it seemed to be focused on police brutality which is extremely important but sis not the “root cause” of the problem. Police brutality is merely a manifestation of the systems of white supremacy, neoliberal capitalism and other intersecting systems of oppression. Fighting police brutality alone will not absolve the underlying systems and structures which continue to devalue and dehumanize black people, people of color and (white) working class people. To achieve black liberation and for our basic human rights to be respected the organizing principles of the neoliberal capitalist system which inherently feeds of a global and national “racial caste” of black and non-white people must be addressed. Similarly, the upcoming “movement” in the Netherlands seems to be focused on the blackface tradition. To truly achieve change and transformation we need to broaden our perspective and develop a comprehensive vision and agenda focused on the root causes of the problem and not just one of its manifestations.

2. Education is the passport to the future

Inspired by this Fellowship and the Martin Luther King Jr. archive at Morehouse college specifically I aim to set up the first black archive in Amsterdam which can function as a center of exchange and learning for black grassroots activists and scholar- activists.

3. International Solidarity

The third lesson we can learn from the Civil Rights Movement is the international solidarity they build with other oppressed people across the world. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of the movement realized that the struggle for freedom of African-Americans was related to the struggle for freedom of black people and other oppressed people who suffered from the systems of white supremacy, colonialism and capitalism across the world. Martin Luther King Jr. visited the inauguration of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, the first African country to gain political independence from the British empire in 1957 and connected the Civil Rights Movement to the struggle for independence in Africa in his “A birth of a new nation” speech.23 A few years later he wrote in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”:

“I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea.”

On the same day that the judge ruled that all charges against police officers in the Freddy Gray case in Baltimore were dropped, a Dutch judge ruled that the police officer who shot an unarmed 21 year old black youth in the Hague in June 2016 would not face charges either.

Malcolm X visited several African countries and became an outspoken advocate for pan-Africanism, realizing that the system of oppression of African-Americans was connected to the oppression of Africans worldwide. Just like the movements of resistance and decolonization were connected worldwide. As Dr. Livingstone argued during his presentation on #BlackLivesMatter in a global perspective, white supremacy is a global system and is not just about police brutality. In the US hundreds of black people die at the hands of the police annually in the United States. In Brazil every 23 minutes a black youth is killed, over the past decade 8 000 people, mostly black people, were murdered by the police according to research of Human Rights Watch. (24) Although it happens on a smaller scale racial profiling is a problem in Europe as well. Amnesty International published a report about ethnic profiling in the Netherlands and the European Network Against Racism (ENAR) stated in its report on Afrophobia in the European Union that racial profiling affects black communities across Europe. (25) (26) On the same day that the judge ruled that all charges against police officers in the Freddy Gray case in Baltimore were dropped, a Dutch judge ruled that the police officer who shot an unarmed 21 year old black youth in the Hague in June 2016 would not face charges either. His name was Mitchel Winters. A year earlier the police choked a black man to death on video, this led to a massive uprising in the Hague. His name was Mitch Henriquez. (27)

Besides police brutality, many people of African descent are faced with poverty, environmental racism, a lack of quality education and other human rights violations based on the global system of neoliberal capitalism and white supremacy. Do the lives matter of black miners who risk their lives digging for Coltan which are necessary for the smartphones which allow us to tweet #BlackLivesMatter? Do the lives of black children and poor peasants who farm cocoa for the chocolate we eat? (28) Do the lives matter of black youth in the favelas who face similar state violence by militarized police as the militarized police squads who took over protesters after the uprising in Baltimore after the killing of Freddie Gray? All of these black lives should matter. Many people across the world realize that. After the killing of Sterling and Castille there were massive demonstrations in Amsterdam, Berlin, London, Cape Town and Johannesburg. On the question why he participated in the demonstration in Cape Town, Mone, A South African student said: “ We are lamenting the same pain we are feeling with them. We are here to send the message that black lives matter everywhere in the world. ”(29) (30)

Gladly, the movement for Black Lives seem to realize this as well in their recently launched vision. To complicate our thinking even further, many other communities of color and even working class whites face similar issues of oppression albeit in different ways. During the program we learned how Native-American and Latinx communities face similar and related issues within the US and over the past years the international community has been shook by the large number of refugees, mostly black and brown people, who die anonymously or live in inhumane conditions, after fleeing their homes in the “global Soith”. By gaining more understanding of the complex ways in which these systems of oppression operate globally, nationally and locally we should be able to mobilize and strategize on global, national and local levels as well to formulate substantial concrete demands and mobilize people around the world to transform these systems so all people can live their lives and realize their full potential.

References:

• http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/tanehisiRcoatesRbetweenRtheRworldRandRme/397619/
• http://www.politifact.com/truthRoRmeter/statements/2016/jul/25/michelleRobama/michelleRobamaRcorrectR whiteRhouseRwasRbuiltRslave/
• Gloria Wekker, White Innocence: paradoxes of colonialism and race. Duke University press 2016
• http://www.history.com/topics/blackRhistory/slavery
• CERD (2015), Concluding observations on the nineteenth to twenty-first periodic reports of the Netherlands. Adopted by the Committee at its eighty-seventh session (3-28 August 2015).
• http://stopblackface.com/beyondRblackfaceRemancipationRthroughRtheRstruggleRagainstRblackRpeteRandRdutchRracism/
• Several video’s of the Freedom Ride to Meppel and other demonstrations are on the website StopBlackface.com: http://stopblackface.com/stopblackfaceRtv/
• Dr. SimsRAlvarado K. Lecture “The Quest for Freedom: From the American RevolutionRPost Reconstruction”, John Lewis Fellowship on Thursday July 7th 2016
• Littleton, L.M. (2016) Lecture “Malcolm X, Human Rights and Coalition Building, John Lewis Fellowship on Thursday July 14th 2016
• https://socialhistory.org/en/today/11R05/blackRbolshevik
• Due to limitations in the number of words for this essay I have not explained every element of the overview and limited the explanation of three lessons from the overview.
• https://mxgm.org/operationRghettoRstormR2012RannualRreportRonRtheRextrajudicialRkillingRofR313RblackR people/
• https://www.theguardian.com/usRnews/2015/dec/31/theRcountedRpoliceRkillingsR2015RyoungRblackRmen
• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steveRmariotti/theRnewRjimRcrowRaRmustre_b_3679076.html
• Taylor, K. Y. (2016). From# BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Haymarket Books. P.11R12
• http://www.politico.com/magazine/politico50/2015/aliciaRgarzaRpatrisseRcullorsRopalRtometi
• http://blacklivesmatter.com/about/
• I have written about my experiences in a blog on the website of StopBlackface.com: http://stopblackface.com/mitchellsRhumanityRinRactionRjohnRlewisRfellowshipRblog/
• http://www.vibe.com/2016/07/mayorRkasimRreedRmeetsRwithRblackRlivesRmatterRleaders/
• http://www.atlisready.black/demands/
• http://news.wabe.org/post/blackRlivesRmatterRdisavowsRatlantaRpresidentRsirRmaejor
• http://www.thekingcenter.org/kingRphilosophy
• http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentsentry/the_birth_of_a_new_nation/index.html
• https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/07/07/goodRcopsRareRafraid/tollRuncheckedRpoliceRviolenceRrioRdeR janeiro
• https://www.amnesty.nl/etnischprofileren
• http://www.enarReu.org/LaunchRofRENARRsR2014R15RShadowRReportRonRAfrophobiaRinRtheREuropeanRUnion
• http://www.amnestyusa.org/research/reports/profitsRandRlossRminingRandRhumanRrightsRinRkatangaR democraticRrepublicRofRtheRcongo?page=2
• http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/16/chocolateRexplainer/
• http://www.parool.nl/amsterdam/400RmensenRbijRblackRlivesRmatterRprotestRopRdeRdam~a4337084/

This essay was written as part of the

2016 john lewis fellows' reflective essays.