NANO-ck

Mise-à-jour le 25 March 2024, 3 minutes de lecture

USA : Domestic Challenges Overview 50s-90s

Context

• Jim Crow Laws in the South : Segregated facilities, poll taxes and literacy tests
• CORE - congress of racial equality is extablished

African Americans Struggle for civil rights

• Personal Courage : Emmett Till

Direct Non-Violent Action

• Rosa Park : Refuses to give up her seat : Montgomery bus boycott
• NAACP elects Martin Luther King Jr. Cripples the local economy
• SCLC

Sit-Ins by the SNCC student NonViolent Coordinating Committee (SNIK)

• College students received nonviolence training
• Students sat at whites only lunch counters and refused to leave
• When they were arrested, others would take their place
• They faced violence by white patrons
• Extreme reactions such as using fire hoses against them, or police dogs

Brown V Board of Education (1954)

• NAACP Lawyer, Thurgood Marshall and future SCOTUS Chief Justice
• One Strategy was to use the federal court system

March on Washington and the Civil Rights Act of 1964

• March on Washington - 08/1963 for jobs and freedom; a push for civil rights legislation
  • 150 000 people on the mall

Freedom Summer 1964 and the voting Rights Act of 1965

• Freedom Summer : SCLC, SNCC, CORE, & the NAACP worked to register voters in Mississippi
• Southern white supremacists were violent & murdered activists
• A protest march from Selma to Montgomery was met by state troopers with tear gas and beatings.
  • “Bloody Sunday”
• Filmed & Televised

Changing tactics and challenges to nonviolence

• Black Power : Stokely Carmichael SNCC leader

Focus on Vietnam

• MLK pivoted to poverty and the Vietnam war; “millions of dollars can be spent every day to hold troops in South Vietnam and our country cannot protect the rights of Negros”

Turmoil in 1968

• Tet offensice : Vietnamese launch the attack; creates the credibility gap for Johnson
• MLK was assacinated
• Presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy was assassinated
• Democratic convention in Chicago : Vietnam War protests, police brutality
• Richard Nixon won the presidency

Kent State - May 1970

• Students were protesting the expansion of the war into Cambodia
• Protests escalated and the National Guard was called in order to establish peace

Women Call for expanded civil rights

• 1950s Cult of domesticity
• Betty Friedan wrote __The Feminine Mystique__ 1963 women are unhappy and have more potential
• National Organization for Women (NOW) organized like the NAACP
• Equal Pay Act 1963 aimed at stopping discrimination based on sex
• Title IX 1972 prohibits sex-based discrimination in education that receives public funds
• Equal Rights Amendment ERA defeated by STOP ERA led by Phyllis Schlaflyn

Birth Control & Reproductive Rights

• 1960 : FDA approves the birth control pill

LGBTQ+

Aids & direct action

• AIDS in the US in the 1980s
• 1000 000 people died in the US of AIDS in the 1980s
• ACT UP : AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power : direct nonviolent political action to fight for resources for AIDS treatment

Conclusion

• Requires work to organize a group
• Use of nonviolent direct action
• Pressure on the government to take legislative action