What are civil rights?
You civil rights understand all the fundamental guarantees that a state Democratic offer to your citizens. These rights include access to health care, education and quality public transport, freedom to come and go, freedom of expression, among others. To understand the reason for something like "Fight for Civil Rights of Blacks in the United States”, it is necessary for us to know that these rights were not fully guaranteed to the majority of the black population of that country.
Why the struggle for black civil rights in the United States?
It is known that the South of the United States was marked by an agrarian economic model based on large land ownership, known as plantation, which generally produced only one crop, especially cotton. In the cotton plantations African black slave labor was employed. This model lasted until 1865, when the American Civil War, which opposed the southern model to the industrial model, of small property and of free and wage labor that prevailed in the North. As the North won the war, slavery ended.
However, the end of slavery did not mean the end of the mentality of southern whites averse to blacks, that is, which considered them inferior as a race and unworthy of the same rights as whites. As the states of the United States always had significant legislative autonomy, the ex-slavery southern states, from the 1870s onwards, began to institutionalize laws of segregationracial(to learn more about it, clickon here).
For decades, in states like Mississippi, alabama, Tennessee and Georgia, these segregationist laws existed, separating blacks from whites in public places, prohibiting marriage between members of "color" groups (as was the racist expression to designate blacks) and whites, limiting blacks' access to basic benefits, etc. In addition, there was still the performance of violent groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, that promoted attacks against the black population and, not infrequently, were acquitted by the state courts of the South.
Faced with this situation, some leaders of the black community in the southern states began to form organizations aimed at fighting racism and segregationism. The height of these struggles took place from the 1950s to the 1970s.
Main movements
Among the organizations dedicated to the fight for the civil rights of blacks in the US was the Southern Christian Freedom Conference (SCLC - Southern Christian Leadership Conference), formed in 1957, in Montgomery, capital of the state of alabama, by Martin Luther King Jr., a Protestant Baptist minister who became the great symbol of peaceful protest against racism and segregationism. King became famous for his speech "I have a dream...", delivered in Washington, in August 1963, to an audience of about 250,000 people.
In addition to King's organization, others became well-known in the 1960s and 1970s, such as that of Malcolm-X, who was linked to the Islamic community in the US, but who also advocated the creation of a Black State separate from the United States. Another example is the movement Blackpower, a term that derives from a book by the black writer Richardwright, but whose roots go back to the beginning of the 20th century. O Black Panther Party also became notorious. It was born as a resistance organization against police violence in California, but ended up becoming radicalized and adopting elements of urban guerrilla and ideology. communist.
GRADES
[1] KARNAL, Leandro [et al.]. US History: From Origins to the 21st Century. São Paulo: Context, 2007. P. 245.
* Image credits:ShutterstockandEverett Historical
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
