The New Civil Rights Movement

Weekend Edition January 2-4, 2015

Something's Happening Here

The New Civil Rights Movement

by JOSHUA ZELESNICK


It’s no surprise that something some white male minor celebrity said about a grassroots 21st century civil rights movement went viral. I’m referring to Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe’s December 30th comments on Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The equivalent of this happened during Martin Luther King’s era too. Who can forget the white Alabama clergymen calling King and other demonstrators “outsiders” for participating in desegregation protests in Birmingham? After quoting a black, “hardworking” friend who says he’s a “pawn in someone else’s agenda, Rowe says, “looters and arsonists run amok, and Black America suffers the association.” My intention isn’t to pick on Mr. Rowe here. It’s to point out another complicated way racism exists in this country and to use him as an example of how mainstream media is failing to see the Black Lives Matter protests as a larger dynamic civil rights movement.

The police have always existed to protect the interests of the power-elite; in fact, the law functions in the same way. This Black Lives Matter movement has been brewing for some time now due to the mass incarceration of blacks and the Police State that exists in many black communities across the United States.

The Civil Rights era that we’re all familiar with began, as history textbooks would say, after Brown vs. the Board of Education in 1954. Others may say it was sparked by the brutal slaying of a 14-year old black boy, Emmett Till for allegedly whistling at a white girl in 1955. Movements don’t just begin out of nowhere, or all of a sudden, but often people reach a breaking point where they are willing to risk emotional and bodily harm to make their lives better. The slaying of Emmett Till may have been the breaking point, but civil rights organizing was always happening. For example, the NAACP spent years building a court case to challenge the legal segregation of schools. In 1952, the Legal Council of Negro Leadership organized a successful boycott of Mississippi gas stations that refused to provide bathrooms for blacks.[ii]

Movements take all types of forms with various different groups and tactics to reach an end goal. King was the proclaimed leader of the non-violent movement that holds the most legitimacy in our country. But, let’s not forget about Robert F. Williams, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Malcolm X and then later the Black Panther Party—all of whom advocated for violent retaliation, scaring their oppressors, and therefore opening up space for non-violent demonstrators to protest under safer conditions. The partial success of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Immigration and National Services Act, and the Fair Housing Act—and I say partial because these Acts don’t go far enough—owe a tremendous debt to more radical movements occurring within, alongside, and outside of King and company’s movement.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/02/the-new-civil-rights-movement/