Citizenship and Self-Respect: The Experience of Politics in the Civil Rights Movement
1988; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1017/s0021875800032989
ISSN1469-5154
Autores Tópico(s)American Constitutional Law and Politics
ResumoIt once seemed that the civil rights movement resulted from a kind of historical immaculate conception and signalled an historical “break” of major proportions. Now, however, we have historical studies tracing a long tradition of “core values” at work in black American culture and sociological studies that reconstruct the dense institutional matrix from which the civil rights movement emerged and drew sustenance. We can now identify historical developments – the great migration of southern blacks to the North, the increasing prosperity enjoyed by the South after World War II, and, most crucially, the Supreme Court decision of 1954 – that set the stage for the movement. Nor could the movement have come into existence without the nexus of black churches and colleges, the early work of the NAACP or the emergence of action-oriented organizations such as SCLC, SNCC and CORE. Even before Montgomery, we now learn, there were mass action campaigns by southern blacks that provided both information and inspiration for the fledgling movement in the capital of the Confederacy.
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