U.S. Politics And Society: African American Social Movements Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

In the early twentieth century, African American social movements emerged in response to the nineteenth-century conditions—de jure segregation, disfranchisement, lynching, and widespread poverty—in black communities in the North and South. In the late nineteenth century, African American journalist Ida Bell Wells-Barnett both nationalized and internationalized the ant lynching movement, while the black women’s club movement, exemplified by the National Association of Colored Women (1896), built schools, settlement houses, and other needed community institutions. In 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League (NUL) expanded the antilynching campaign and the social welfare work initiated late in the previous century.

The experience of World War I (1914–1918), both at home and abroad, radicalized African American social movements. This radicalism, effectuated in part by black disenchantment with the leadership styles of both Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Dubois, was known as the new Negro movement. Its most notable leader was Jamaica’s Marcus Mosiah Garvey. Garvey advanced the idea of black pride and the slogan “Africa for Africans,” attracting the attention of oppressed blacks worldwide. Although these earlier movements produced minor victories, they established a national network of organizations and raised blacks’ racial and political consciousness, which would play a significant role in civil and human rights and anticolonial struggles during the 1930s and 1940s.

During the Great Depression and World War II (1939–1945) eras, organizations like the NAACP and NUL united with the Communist Party to challenge American racism and imperialism abroad. In the 1930s, in cities like Chicago, New York, and Cleveland, blacks started campaigns against discriminatory hiring practices to force white proprietors in black neighborhoods to employ black workers. These campaigns reflected a shift from the courts to the streets, from civil suits to civil disobedience. In 1937, Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Dubois, Max Yergan, and Alphaeus Hunton Jr. founded the Council of African Affairs, the most significant anticolonial organization in the United States. In 1941, civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph used the threat of a march on Washington, D.C. to pressure President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802, banning discrimination in defense industries and creating the Fair Employment Act.

In the postwar era, the Northern civil rights movement fought for legislation directed at police brutality, fair employment, and housing practices. In New York City, black activists lobbied for fair housing and employment practices as well as criminal justice reform and a law to end police brutality. U.S.– cold war imperatives, however, subdued the anticolonial and leftist politics of the civil rights movements. In 1950, the U.S.

State Department revoked Robeson’s passport after he refused to sign an affidavit concerning his past membership in the Communist Party.

In the cold war era, the United States attempted to refashion its image from a nation that lynched black people to one that protected their civil rights. In the eyes of newly independent African, Asian, and Latin American nations, U.S. racism tarnished its global image. To improve this, the U.S. government filed an amicus brief in support of the NAACP’s position that segregated public education was inherently unequal in the historic Brown v. Board of Education of 1954. This was further improved as the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations became more open to working with the Southern civil rights movement.

Voter registration and desegregation campaigns by local people and organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and others in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, Alabama, and especially the freedom summer of 1964, not only mobilized local and national support for blacks’ rights but also broadcast the severity of racial violence in the United States to the world. By 1964, with the strong support of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and a year later, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But despite momentum gained in the South, conditions in the North worsened. In the 1960s, black Northerners were still as prey to police brutality, and racism in the labor market, as they were two decades before. In response to this situation, the Black Panther Party was formed in 1966 to promote black self-defense and political action. The broader black power movement voiced African Americans’s sense of political and economic powerlessness at the local level, despite the passage of national civil rights legislation.

In the post–civil rights era, the need for local empowerment encouraged blacks, especially women, to participate in organizations that address issues often neglected by national civil rights organizations. During the late 1960s and 1970s, black women led local branches of the National Welfare Rights Organization in the fight for cost of living–adjusted stipends for welfare recipients, while in 2006 black women of Biloxi, Mississippi founded Coastal Women for Change, which aids neighborhoods devastated and people dislocated by Hurricane Katrina. The aggregate of these local and national social movements have bore fruit. The African American community celebrated a major milestone in 2009 with the inauguration of Barack H. Obama, who began his career as a community organizer in Chicago. Notwithstanding this achievement, African American activists have found it difficult to attack entrenched poverty and the resegregation of public schools.

Bibliography:

Biondi, Martha. To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Cha-Jua, Sundiata Keita, and Clarence Long. “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies.” Journal of African American History 92, no. 2 (2007): 265–288.
Dudziak, Mary L. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.
Frankenberg, Erica, and Chungmei Lee. Race in American Public Schools: Rapidly Resegregating School Districts. Cambridge, Mass.: Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, 2002.
Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd. “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past.” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (2005): 1233–1263.
Hine, Darlene Clark,William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold. The African American Odyssey. Vol. 4. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2008.
Joseph, Peniel. Waiting Til The Midnight Hour: A Narrative of Black Power in America. New York: Henry Holt, 2008.
Kelley, Robin D. G., and Earl Lewis. To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Schneider, Mark Robert. “We Return Fighting”: The Civil Rights Movement in the Jazz Age. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002.
Sugrue,Thomas. Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. New York: Random House, 2008.
Theoharis, Jeanne F., and Komozi Woodard. Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
White, Deborah G. Too Heavy A Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999.
Williams, Rhonda Y. Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

This example U.S. Politics And Society: African American Social Movements Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.