 In our last lecture we talked about the origins of the modern civil rights movement in the United States and we really looked at the major events between 1954 when the Brown decision is announced by the Supreme Court and 1964-65 when the Civil Rights Act and then the Voting Rights Act and the 24th Amendment are passed by US Congress and signed by the president Lyndon Johnson. And so we looked at this groundswell and this huge impact of civil rights movement on the United States during that decade. In this lecture we're going to talk more about what happened beyond 1964-65 and we're going to look at how the three aspects of this post-1964-65 movement. One of the things we're going to talk about is white resistance, white reactions against the civil rights movement. We're also going to talk more about the two approaches that those in the civil rights movement maintained. The integrationist approach largely personified by Martin Luther King here seen in this image on the left and a separatist approach for African Americans. In other words, an approach to separate from white society and sort of live a parallel existence, personified at least initially in some ways by Malcolm X here seen on the right side of this photograph. And so we're going to talk more about sort of these, about King, about Malcolm X and the different approaches that they had towards the civil rights movement, especially beyond 1964 and contrast this with, as I said, the white reaction against the civil rights movement both in the South as well as other parts of the United States. White reaction to the civil rights movement is certainly very mixed and I don't want to give the impression that whites as a whole were against it because there in fact were plenty of whites. There were many, many whites who were very much in favor of the civil rights movement who were participated and were involved in the civil rights movement in a variety of ways. But there certainly was a very perhaps conservative response, especially in the southern states against the civil rights movement. We already talked about massive resistance in the efforts by states and localities to challenge desegregation within the public schools as well as desegregation in various public institutions and private businesses and so forth. So this conservative reaction is a very important outgrowth of the civil rights movement. Now of course the South had, there had been sort of conservative movements since the 40s who were beginning to go frustrated with Democrats at the national level, Franklin Roosevelt and then Harry Truman who were the Democratic presidents during and then at the very end of World War II. And there were a lot of southern Democrats who were beginning to grow frustrated with Roosevelt and Truman's support of liberal institutions like the New Deal, their support of large government programs that had helped the United States get out of the Great Depression. And we began to see the growth of sort of a southern separatist, perhaps is not the best way of putting it, but a southern kind of separation movement, not in the sense of during the Civil War or a secession, but more of a sense of southern rights. In other words, the southern states demanded their rights and they felt that they were being trampled upon by the national government trying to impose desegregation or trying to impose these other institutions. And so as I said in the 40s, the first of these sort of efforts by southern states to sort of challenge the broader national agenda, especially in the Democratic Party, is the Dixie Crat Party where we have Strom Thurmond and Fielding Wright who run a separate campaign for the presidency because they don't agree with the National Democratic Party. We also see as the 60s go on and as civil rights become a very important part of the national kind of political agenda, growing conservative anti-civil rights movement, especially in the American South. Part of the argument for this is that many people felt that the U.S. was moving too quickly and too dramatically towards civil rights reforms, that the U.S. was just out of control and it needed to slow down because people couldn't change as fast as institutions. People's ideas and thoughts about civil rights, you know, took longer to change and this was the argument that many in this sort of conservative southern movement made. You also see a growing support for ideas of states' rights and a fear of an oppressive national government. This is something you see definitely in the South is the growth of these people's arguments about states' rights and how states should have more power to resist what the federal government wanted them to do. If states didn't want to integrate states as quickly as the federal government wanted them to integrate, well, they shouldn't have to. Someone who personifies this in the 1960s in the South is George Wallace, who runs for president. Wallace initially as a Democrat and then sort of becoming more of a third party candidate and Wallace really personifies this sort of states' rights, anti-civil rights movement policy of many people in the South. Law and order becomes a phrase that's commonly used to sort of associate with these people. They argue that they were the law and order candidates that civil rights was bringing about lawlessness and disorder and they were going to be the law and order candidate who would help bring about reform. And so in the 1968 election, Wallace ultimately runs his own campaign as opposed to the national democratic campaign. And this helps bring about a gradual shift in white vote in the South. In this election, 1960 election map, we can see here showing which states were won and which states were lost. Blue states would be Democratic states, red states, Republican states, and these are the states here in the South that vote for Wallace and kind of divide the Democratic vote. But this just anticipates a larger gradual shift in voting in the South, from the South being a very solidly Democratic region, which it had been since the Civil War, to a gradual shift to Republican voting in the South. And this certainly benefits Richard Nixon, who runs as a Republican for President in 1968, and pursues the so-called Southern strategy, trying to win votes from Republican voters in the South. And Nixon's very successful in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and other parts of the Upper South in winning these states and helping to win this general election from the Democrats. So this broader sort of frustration with civil rights reform, a sense that things were going too quickly, and this gradual shift of whites in the South from being solidly Democratic to being more in favor of the Republican Party, helps kind of reflect this broader uneasiness among some whites, and certainly, again, not all whites by any means, but among some whites to what was going on within the Civil Rights Movement, and helps really contrast what's going on in this particular period. So this is sort of the white reaction against the movement, as I said. Of course, as the movement continues, it's important to discuss how these two kind of wings of the Civil Rights Movement, I talked about Martin Luther King's integrationist wing and the separatist wing kind of personified by Malcolm X and others within the African American community came about. The Civil Rights legislation of the mid 1960s, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, were important because they addressed very basic and fundamental problems, legal segregation, discrimination, voting rights discrimination. The problem with these laws is that for African Americans in the North and urban areas of the North and parts of urban areas of the Midwest and the West, they felt that they didn't go far enough because they didn't address something that we would call de facto discrimination. These civil rights laws addressed de jure discrimination, in other words, legal discrimination, but they didn't address de facto discrimination. De facto does means the way it is. And so you have many Northern African Americans and many Middle Western and Western African Americans who said, well, these are nice. You know, they're great for the South, for African Americans in the South, but they don't help any of us in the North. We were never discriminated against in terms of voting rights. We were never discriminated against in terms of Jim Crow institutions, but we are discriminated against because we can't get good jobs. We are living in economically and socially run down areas, the so-called ghettos. We are living in areas where we can't get jobs with our own community and stores that are owned by whites. And they said, you know, these are great laws, but they're not helping us. And so there's a growing frustration among African Americans, especially in the North and the Midwest, that they're not their problems are not being addressed by the broader civil rights cause or the broader civil rights movement. As I said, basic things, housing discrimination or poor quality housing, having to live in housing projects funded by the government that were that were really run down, that weren't being well maintained. Employment discrimination, lack of basic services in many communities, many of these cities, as we talked about in a previous lecture, a lot of the whites had left the city for the suburbs. And so the cities were running out of money and they couldn't afford to maintain good policing in the cities. They couldn't afford to maintain good fire services. And so as a result, cities are getting more dangerous. They're getting more run down. Fires are breaking out all over the place and cities are becoming a very unpleasant place to live. And this is where the majority of African Americans in the North were living. We're in these areas like Harlem or in the Bronx or in the South side of Chicago, areas like Watson, Los Angeles that were essentially becoming these sort of urban ghettos. And African Americans were very upset and frustrated about this. They were also upset because educational systems were lacking for African American students living in these neighborhoods. The local public schools were no good. They were dangerous. They were they just didn't have good teachers. The educational curriculums were not very good. And while there was no official discrimination in these schools, there was a de facto sense of discrimination of less opportunity than higher quality white schools. And so this becomes a growing frustration within Northern and Midwestern and Western African American communities. And we begin to see the emergence of a more radical, separatist civil rights movement that embraces a notion that largely becomes defined as Black power. The idea that African Americans needed to empower themselves, needed to be proud of being Black, and needed to stop letting whites run the agenda. Letting whites kind of dominate what was going on. And instead, African Americans needed to be more assertive in what they wanted within American society. Well, we see this sense of Black power in a number of ways. And one of the first of these is the emergence in California of the Black Panther Party. The Black Panther Party is founded in Oakland, California in 1966. And it's founded to do a number of things. It's not just a protest organization. It was really an organization that was a community building organization or a community kind of sponsored organization to help run free clinics and free schools and other programs for inner city people, both children and adults. And the Black Panthers helped to run all these organizations because they felt that the white public wasn't doing their job. And so they said, you know, the white, you know, white people who run the government in Oakland aren't going to help us. We're going to have to do things ourselves. The other thing that this is what got them in a lot of trouble is they advocated for armed self-defense against people who would do them harm. And mainly the police in the region who were largely staffed by white officers. And there was a sense of discrimination between the white police force and the African American community. So the Black Panthers, well, one hand they argued for basic self-sufficiency that African Americans, you know, should be helping themselves within their own communities. Also argue for armed self-defense against outsiders, namely the white police. And this is a thing that causes a lot of tensions within the community, causes a lot of violence between the Black Panther organization and whites in the government. Black Panthers, of course, are also arguing, here's a poster that they wrote, arguing that drug use, for instance, was essentially letting the whites win if African Americans were using drugs and were basically killing themselves, that this benefited the white community. And therefore drug use shouldn't be condoned, should be condemned because it was essentially part of this sort of broader white agenda against African Americans. So, you know, you're arguing that in some respects, the Black Panther Party are doing a lot of good things. They're helping bring it educational and healthcare to local communities, helping fight against drugs. But at the same time, this platform of armed separation and armed self-defense gets them in a lot of trouble within the broader California, Northern California society. And another organization that was also sort of on the same track with this notion of separatism, of being separate from the broader society in the United States was the Nation of Islam. And the Nation of Islam is an organization that predates the 1960s and actually been founded far well before that. But in the late 50s, it becomes closely associated with Malcolm X, who becomes the leader of the organization in the late 50s. And Malcolm X is an extremely charismatic individual and he does a very effective job of publicizing the problems of the African American community and trying to bring attention to ways that African Americans could improve their lives. He vilifies it certainly in his early years, the white community. And he really argues that African Americans, in order to be productive, healthy, otherwise, need to enforce a sense of discipline on themselves and need to isolate themselves from the broader white community and create essentially a parallel society. And he argued that was the only way that the African Americans could get advance in white society was to create their own social and economic system. I argued also, and this is an argument that not only Malcolm X, but others make as well, that the African culture needed to be embraced. And African Americans had given up their cultural heritage and adopted white European ways and so had needed to go and accept African culture and embrace African culture and be proud of the fact that they were of African heritage. This is really the time period where this name African American comes from. Before that, often the term Negro was used by African Americans to describe themselves. And African Americans is a new way of phrasing an identity that plays off of African origins and shows a certain sense of pride in African origins. So Malcolm X and his supporters really argue that again, African Americans need to separate themselves. If they want to be free, they have to be willing to not be a part of dominant white European society. But again, like Black Panthers, argue that well, that blacks need to be willing to use force if necessary to defend themselves against whites who would discriminate against them. And again, this doesn't go over well with the white community who see Malcolm X as being a radical, as being very dangerous, somebody who wants to cause violence for whites. And this is really a misunderstanding of Malcolm X's arguments. And his arguments is simply that African Americans deserve to be free, they deserve to be safe. And they, if necessarily, need to use force to protect themselves, not use force to attack whites, but use force to defend themselves against whites, white police, white government, et cetera, et cetera, that we're impressing them. So this idea of separatism, of separation from white society and of essentially defense against white society becomes part of the broader civil rights critique by the mid-1950s. And Malcolm X's case is certainly predated even in the mid-1960s. But it definitely becomes part of a broader agenda within the civil rights movement and also serves as a source of separation within the civil rights movement because those like people like Martin Luther King saw what Malcolm X was doing as dangerous, as dividing the civil rights movement as potentially offending or scaring whites who King felt should be encouraged to be part of the civil rights movement. So while King was embracing integration, encouraging whites and other minorities to join African-Americans fighting for civil rights, Malcolm X is arguing for the opposite, that blacks need to do it themselves, that whites are a problem and that whites cannot in any way contribute positively to the civil rights movement. So these are sort of the two strains of the movement that began to develop by the mid-1960s. Well, of course, there's other things going on in the mid-60s as well that reflect this growing sense of frustration, especially in the North and parts of even the West by African-Americans against this de facto discrimination. And beginning in 1964 and continuing until the late 1960s, the urban ghettos of the North erupt in violence during the summers. The first of these major riots is in Harlem in 1964. Here you see white police officers attempting to subdue perhaps an African-American who is involved in these riots or just maybe even just a passer by who happens to be witnessing these riots. Then following year in Watson in Los Angeles, another riot breaks out, then a riot breaks out in Detroit, eventually Newark, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. and National Guard troops are actually, Army troops and National Guard troops have to be called out to maintain law and order. And so there was this growing sense of, for whites, this great growing fear that African-Americans were causing lots of violence within the cities. But from African-American perspective, this was a reaction against these limited economic opportunities, sense of racial discrimination, violence perpetrated by white police officers against black urban residents. And much of this was borne out in the facts. Black unemployment was twice that of white unemployment and the average black family at the time made half of what the average white family made. Blacks living in cities were far more likely to face death due to violence through crime or violence due to white police officers. And so there was certainly very legitimate reasons for African-Americans in this time period to be angry and upset. And of course rioting and destroying neighborhoods wasn't ultimately a productive solution to these sources of anger and tension, but they did serve as sort of a release valve for a lot of the anger and frustration that was felt within the urban African-American communities. And of course, for both African-Americans and whites, created this strong sense of crisis within the United States in the late 1960s. And this is a crisis that's not only to do with civil rights and race, has to do with war. The Vietnam War, as we'll talk about in the next lecture, creates a sense of crisis in the United States. So by the late 1960s, there was a strong sense of crisis in the US for all these reasons that we've talked about. Well, to get back a little bit, just briefly to Martin Luther King and his sort of position within this broader movement. As I told you, King initially takes a very strong integration to stand, doesn't want African-Americans to be separating themselves or offending the white majority in the United States. And in fact, argues that whites and blacks need to work together to solve the problems that were caused by a lack of civil rights. But by the last, by 1966, 1967, King is beginning to shift his position a little bit on civil rights and moving in some ways more towards the position held by Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, but by no means not as radical as these two organizations. All this violence in the North, all these riots that take place in Harlem and in Detroit and places like Watts, begin to sort of change King's perspective on the civil rights movement. And he begins to recognize that the civil rights movement is not just about voting rights. It's not just about the equal rights to go for public facilities like restrooms or libraries or things like that. But that civil rights is as much about economic rights as it is about anything else. And that poor whites and poor blacks have a lot in common. They're both economically disadvantaged. And King begins to shift his arguments less from voting rights, which had been basically secured by 1965 and discrimination and Jim Crow, which had largely been dealt with by 65 to economic disadvantage for African-Americans and for poor whites. And so in 1964, King launches the beginning of a movement to argue that the United States has to do more to equal the playing field for poor whites, poor blacks and those in the middle in the upper classes. Because if not, poverty is a self-reinforcing cycle. And I argued that those who were poor would stay poor and would be miserable and would be a source of great problems for the broader American society if something didn't happen about this. And so beginning in 64, and by certainly 1966, King launches a more radical movement to challenge poverty and to argue for employment opportunities for African-Americans as well as for whites. And faces a lot more objection. A lot of whites who liked King when he was talking about voting rights and giving his I Have a Dream speech became frustrated and concerned with him when he gets angry about the rights of the poor versus the rights of the middle class and the wealthy. And so King finds it much harder to make progress with this campaign against economic discrimination. King also begins to challenge the Vietnam War, which we're gonna talk about more in the next lecture and argues in fact that the Vietnam War is wrong. He argues that it's hurtful for America's image abroad. He argues that it hurt what black communities. In fact, the Vietnam War was doing as much as anything to destroy black communities, to impoverish blacks because many blacks were being drafted and going to serve and it was destroying families and it was making all sorts of other problems. And really he argues the war is serving as a distraction from the bigger problems with poverty in American society. And well, this just like his turn for economic equality really starts to make whites in the United States a little more skeptical of King. In 1968, King begins organizing the poor people's march. In other words, another march on Washington much like the 1963 march, but again highlighting the concerns of those who were poor in the United States. And unfortunately before he was able to bring about the campaign, King is assassinated in April of 1968 and well, of course his legacy continues to the present. He's no longer present in the late 60s as a unifying and as an organizing force behind this growing conception of the civil rights movement. And so King is dead by 1968, Malcolm X is assassinated before 1968 and the movement loses some of its sort of initial steam as it continued forward after that. By way of conclusion, I just want to offer just a few comments. Of course the civil rights movement does continue after the death of Martin Luther King. But after 1968, it begins to lose some of its kind of really strong national character. For one reason, many of the changes that have been advocated early in the movement have been made by 1965. And so these other changes, these things such as anti-poverty, these are much harder changes to implement by signing a piece of legislation or implement by basic changes in political systems. So there were much harder, more complicated issues to be dealt with. The movement also begins to splinter a little bit. Again, because some of the more radical members of the civil rights movement take very strong positions against the white community and want to be separate rather than integrated within that community. But at the same time, the movement is an inspiration for other rights movements in the United States. And we see the origins in the civil rights movement in the 1960s of Latino and Hispanic rights movements in the United States, Native American rights movements, rights movements for the gay and lesbian communities in the United States and other minority groups as well. So the civil rights movement in the 60s certainly helps bring about other rights movements in the 60s and beyond. It also helps bring about a renewal of the feminist movement. And women see inspiration within the civil rights movement especially African American women, and begin to do more to championing women's rights within American society. So gradually, of course, as time goes on, some of the de facto discrimination becomes less so in the North and things begin to improve. But of course, civil rights continue to be a major source of tension in the United States well into the present period. So while the civil rights movement does a lot to meet its goals in the 1960s and early 70s, the issues that become a source of tension within the United States, relating to civil rights, are still a source of tension and still continue to be matters that have to be hashed out by Americans of all nationalities and races.