Product Code Database
Civil rights movements are a worldwide series of political movements for equality before the law, that peaked in the 1960s. In many situations they have been characterized by nonviolence, or have taken the form of campaigns of civil resistance aimed at achieving change through nonviolent forms of resistance. In some situations, they have been accompanied, or followed, by civil unrest and armed rebellion. The process has been long and tenuous in many countries, and many of these movements did not, or have yet to, fully achieve their goals, although the efforts of these movements have led to improvements in the legal rights of some previously oppressed groups of people, in some places.
The main aim of the successful civil rights movement and other social movements for civil rights included ensuring that the rights of all people were and are equally protected by the law. These include but are not limited to the Minority rights, women's rights, disability rights and LGBT rights.
The civil rights struggle in Northern Ireland can be traced to activists in Dungannon, led by Austin Currie, who were fighting for equal access to public housing for the members of the Catholic community. This domestic issue would not have led to a fight for civil rights were it not for the fact that being a registered householder was a qualification for local government suffrage in Northern Ireland.
In January 1964, the Campaign for Social Justice (CSJ) was launched in Belfast. This organisation joined the struggle for better housing and committed itself to ending discrimination in employment. The CSJ promised the Catholic community that their cries would be heard. They challenged the government and promised that they would take their case to the Commission for Human Rights in Strasbourg and to the United Nations.Dooley, Brian. "Second Class citizens", in Black and Green: The Fight for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland and Black America. (London:Pluto Press, 1998), 28–48.
Having started with basic domestic issues, the civil rights struggle in Northern Ireland escalated to a full-scale movement that found its embodiment in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. NICRA campaigned in the late sixties and early seventies, consciously modelling itself on the American civil rights movement and using similar methods of civil resistance. NICRA organised marches and protests to demand equal rights and an end to discrimination.
NICRA originally had five main demands:
All of these specific demands were aimed at an ultimate goal that had been the one of women at the very beginning: the end of discrimination.
Civil rights activists all over Northern Ireland soon launched a campaign of civil resistance. There was opposition from Loyalists, who were aided by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), Northern Ireland's police force. At this point, the RUC was over 90% Protestant. Violence escalated, resulting in the rise of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) from the Catholic community, a group reminiscent of those from the War of Independence and the Civil War that occurred in the 1920s that had launched a campaign of violence to end British rule in Northern Ireland. Loyalist paramilitaries countered this with a defensive campaign of violence and the British government responded with a policy of internment without trial of suspected IRA members. For more than 300 people, the internment lasted several years. The huge majority of those interned by the British forces were Catholic. In 1978, in a case brought by the government of the Republic of Ireland against the government of the United Kingdom, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the Five techniques approved for use by British interrogators on internees in Northern Ireland amounted to "inhuman and degrading" treatment.
The IRA encouraged Republicans to join in the movement for civil rights but never controlled NICRA. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association fought for the end of discrimination toward Catholics and did not take a position on the legitimacy of the state.Dooley, Brian. "Second Class citizens", in Black and Green: The Fight for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland and Black America. (London:Pluto Press, 1998), 28–48 Republican leader Gerry Adams explained subsequently that Catholics saw that it was possible for them to have their demands heard. He wrote that "we were able to see an example of the fact that you didn't just have to take it, you could fight back". For an account and critique of the movements for civil rights in Northern Ireland, reflecting on the ambiguous link between the causes of civil rights and opposition to the union with the United Kingdom, see the work of Richard English.Richard English, "The Interplay of Non-violent and Violent Action in Northern Ireland, 1967–72", in Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash (eds.), Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present, Oxford University Press, 2009, , pp. 75–90. [1]
One of the most important events in the era of civil rights in Northern Ireland took place in Derry, which escalated the conflict from peaceful civil disobedience to armed conflict. The Battle of the Bogside started on 12 August when an Apprentice Boys, a Protestant order, parade passed through Waterloo Place, where a large crowd was gathered at the mouth of William Street, on the edge of the Bogside. Different accounts describe the first outbreak of violence, with reports stating that it was either an attack by youth from the Bogside on the RUC, or fighting broke out between Protestants and Catholics. The violence escalated and barricades were erected. Proclaiming this district to be the Free Derry, Bogsiders carried on fights with the RUC for days using stones and petrol bombs. The government finally withdrew the RUC and Operation Banner with the British Army, which disbanded the crowds of Catholics who were barricaded in the Bogside.O'Dochartaigh, Niall. From Civil Rights to Armalites: Derry and the Birth of the Irish Troubles (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997), 1–18 and 111–152.
Bloody Sunday, 30 January 1972, in Derry is seen by some as a turning point in the movement for civil rights. Fourteen unarmed Catholic civil rights marchers protesting against internment were shot and killed by soldiers from the Parachute Regiment.
The peace process has made significant gains in recent years. Through open dialogue from all parties, a state of ceasefire by all major paramilitary groups has lasted. A stronger economy improved Northern Ireland's standard of living. Civil rights issues have become less of a concern for many in Northern Ireland over the past 20 years as laws and policies protecting their rights, and forms of affirmative action, have been implemented for all government offices and many private businesses. Tensions still exist, but the vast majority of citizens are no longer affected by violence.
The social and economic changes of the Quiet Revolution gave life to the Quebec sovereignty movement, as more and more Québécois saw themselves as a distinctly culturally different from the rest of Canada. The segregationist Parti Québécois was created in 1968 and won the 1976 Quebec general election. They enacted legislation meant to enshrine French language as the language of business in the province, while also controversially restricting the usage of English language on signs and restricting the eligibility of students to be taught in English.
A radical strand of French Canadian nationalism produced the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), which since 1963 has been using terrorism to make Quebec a sovereign nation. In October 1970, in response to the arrest of some of its members earlier in the year, the FLQ kidnapped British diplomat James Cross and Quebec's Minister of Labour Pierre Laporte, whom they later killed. The then Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, himself a French Canadian, invoked the War Measures Act, declared martial law in Quebec, and arrested the kidnappers by the end of the year.
By 1955, blacks became frustrated by gradual approaches to implement desegregation by federal and state governments and the "massive resistance" by whites. The black leadership adopted a combined strategy of direct action with nonviolence, sometimes resulting in nonviolence and civil disobedience. Some of the acts of nonviolence and civil disobedience produced crisis situations between practitioners and government authorities. The authorities of federal, state, and local governments often acted with an immediate response to end the crisis situations – sometimes in the practitioners' favor. Some of the different forms of protests and/or civil disobedience employed included boycott, as successfully practiced by the Montgomery bus boycott (1955–1956) in Alabama which gave the movement one of its more famous icons in Rosa Parks; "sit-ins", as demonstrated by two influential events, the Greensboro Four (1960) in North Carolina and the Nashville sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee; the influential 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade, in which children were set upon by the local authorities with fire hoses and attack dogs, and longer marches, as exhibited by the Selma to Montgomery marches (1965) in Alabama which at first was resisted and attacked by the state and local authorities, and resulted in the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The evidence of changing attitudes could also be seen around the country, where small businesses sprang up supporting the Civil Rights Movement, such as New Jersey's Everybody's Luncheonette.
Besides the Children's Crusade and the Selma to Montgomery marches, another illustrious event of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August, 1963. It is best remembered for the "I Have a Dream" speech by Martin Luther King Jr. in which the speech turned into a national text and eclipsed the troubles the organizers had to bring to march forward. It had been a fairly complicated affair to bring together various leaders of civil rights, religious and labor groups. As the name of the march implies, many compromises had to be made in order to unite the followers of so many different causes. The "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom" emphasized the combined purposes of the march and the goals that each of the leaders aimed at. The 1963 March on Washington organizers and organizational leaders, informally named the "Big Six", were A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney Young, James Farmer and John Lewis. Although they came from different backgrounds and political interests, these organizers and leaders were intent on the peacefulness of the march, which had its own marshal to ensure that the event would be peaceful and respectful of the law.Barber, Lucy. "In the Great Tradition: The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963," in Marching on Washington: The Forging of an American Political Tradition. (Berkeley: U of California Press, 2002), 141–178. The success of the march is still being debated, but one aspect which has been raised was the misrepresentation of women. A lot of feminine civil rights groups had participated in the organization of the march, but when it came to actual activity women were denied the right to speak and were relegated to figurative roles in the back of the stage. As some female participants noticed, the March can be remembered for the "I Have a Dream" speech but for some female activists it was a new awakening, forcing black women not only to fight for civil rights but also to engage in the Feminist movement.Height,Dorothy. "We wanted the voice of a woman to be heard": Black women and the 1963 March on Washington", in Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement. Eds. Collier. Thomas, Bettye and V.P. Franklin. (New York: NYU press, 2001), 83–91.
Noted achievements of the Civil Rights Movement include the judicial victory in the Brown v. Board of Education case that nullified the legal article of "separate but equal" and made segregation legally impermissible, and the passages of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, . that banned discrimination in employment practices and public accommodations, passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that restored voting rights, and passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 that banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.
Today, most Black Power advocates have not changed their self-sufficiency argument. Racism still exists worldwide, and some believe that blacks in the United States, on the whole, did not assimilate into U.S. "mainstream" culture. Blacks arguably became even more oppressed, this time partially by "their own" people in a new black stratum of the middle class and the ruling class. Black Power's advocates generally argue that the reason for this stalemate and further oppression of the vast majority of U.S. blacks is because Black Power's objectives have not had the opportunity to be fully carried through.
One of the most public manifestations of the Black Power movement took place in the 1968 Olympics, when two African-Americans, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, stood on the podium doing a Black Power salute. This act is still remembered today as the 1968 Olympics Black Power salute.
The early heroes of the movement—Rodolfo Gonzales in Denver and Reies Tijerina in New Mexico—adopted a historical account of the preceding hundred and twenty-five years that had obscured much of Mexican-American history. Gonzales and Tijerina embraced a nationalism that identified the failure of the United States government to live up to its promises in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In that account, Mexican Americans were a conquered people who simply needed to reclaim their birthright and cultural heritage as part of a new nation, which later became known as Aztlán.
That version of the past did not, but take into account the history of those Mexicans who had immigrated to the United States. It also gave little attention to the rights of undocumented immigrants in the United States in the 1960s— which is not surprising, since immigration did not have the political significance it later acquired. It was a decade later when activists, such as Bert Corona in California, embraced the rights of undocumented workers and helped broaden the movement to include their issues.
When the movement dealt with practical problems in the 1960s, most activists focused on the most immediate issues confronting Mexican Americans; unequal educational and employment opportunities, political disfranchisement, and police brutality. In the heady days of the late 1960s, when the student movement was active around the globe, the Chicano movement brought about more or less spontaneous actions, such as the mass walkouts by high school students in Denver and East Los Angeles in 1968 and the Chicano Moratorium in Los Angeles in 1970.
The movement was particularly strong at the college level, where activists formed MEChA, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, which promoted Chicano Studies programs and a generalized ethno-nationalist agenda.
The Alcatraz Island occupation of 1969, although commonly associated with NAM, pre-dated the organization, but was a catalyst for its formation.
In 1970, AIM occupied abandoned property at the Naval Air Station near Minneapolis. In July 1971, it assisted in a takeover of the Winter Dam, Lac Courte Oreilles, and Wisconsin. When activists took over the Bureau of Indian Affairs Headquarters in Washington, D.C. in November 1972, they sacked the building and 24 people were arrested. Activists occupied the Custer County Courthouse in 1973, though police routed the occupation after a riot took place.
In 1973 activists and military forces confronted each other in the Wounded Knee incident. The standoff lasted 71 days, and two men died in the violence.
The words "Gay Liberation" echoed "Women's Liberation"; the Gay Liberation Front consciously took its name from the "National Liberation Fronts" of Vietnam and Algeria, and the slogan "Gay Power", as a defiant answer to the rights-oriented homophile movement, was inspired by Black Power and Chicano Power. The GLF's statement of purpose explained:
GLF activist Martha Shelley wrote,
Gay Liberationists aimed at transforming fundamental concepts and institutions of society, such as gender and the family. In order to achieve such Liberty, consciousness raising and direct action were employed. Specifically, the word 'gay' was preferred to previous designations such as homosexual or homophile; some saw 'gay' as a rejection of the false dichotomy heterosexual/homosexual. Lesbians and gays were urged to "coming out" and publicly reveal their sexuality to family, friends and colleagues as a form of activism, and to counter shame with gay pride. "Gay Lib" groups were formed in Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, the UK, the US, Italy and elsewhere. The lesbian group Lavender Menace was also formed in the U.S. in response to both the male domination of other Gay Lib groups and the anti-lesbian sentiment in the Women's Movement. Lesbianism was advocated as a feminist choice for women, and the first currents of lesbian separatism began to emerge.
By the late 1970s, the radicalism of Gay Liberation was eclipsed by a return to a more formal movement that became known as the Gay and Lesbian Rights Movement.
Significantly, Soviet dissidents of the 1960s introduced the "legalist" approach of avoiding moral and political commentary in favor of close attention to legal and procedural issues. Following several landmark trials of writers (Sinyavsky-Daniel trial, the trials of Alexander Ginzburg and Yuri Galanskov) and an associated crackdown on dissidents by the KGB, coverage of arrests and trials in samizdat (unsanctioned press) became more common. This activity eventually led to the founding of the Chronicle of Current Events in April 1968. The unofficial newsletter reported violations of civil rights and judicial procedure by the Soviet government and responses to those violations by citizens across the USSR.
Throughout the 1960s–1980s, dissidents in the civil and human rights movement engaged in a variety of activities: The documentation of political repression and rights violations in samizdat (unsanctioned press); individual and collective protest letters and petitions; unsanctioned demonstrations; an informal network of mutual aid for prisoners of conscience; and, most prominently, civic watch groups appealing to the international community. All of these activities came at great personal risk and with repercussions ranging from dismissal from work and studies to many years of imprisonment in and being subjected to punitive psychiatry.
The rights-based strategy of dissent merged with the idea of human rights. The human rights movement included figures such as Valery Chalidze, Yuri Orlov, and Lyudmila Alexeyeva. Special groups were founded such as the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR (1969) and the Committee on Human Rights in the USSR (1970). Though faced with the loss of many members to prisons, labor camps, psychiatric institutions and exile, they documented abuses, wrote appeals to international human rights bodies, collected signatures for petitions, and attended trials.
The signing of the Helsinki Accords (1975) containing human rights clauses provided civil rights campaigners with a new hope to use international instruments. This led to the creation of dedicated Helsinki Watch Groups in Moscow (Moscow Helsinki Group), Kiev (Ukrainian Helsinki Group), Vilnius (Lithuanian Helsinki Group), Tbilisi, and Erevan (1976–77).
During World War II, Czechoslovakia fell into the Soviet sphere of influence, the Eastern Bloc. Since 1948 there were no parties other than the Communist Party in the country and it was indirectly managed by the Soviet Union. Unlike other countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the communist take-over in Czechoslovakia in 1948 was, although as brutal as elsewhere, a genuine popular movement. Reform in the country did not lead to the convulsions seen in Hungary.
Towards the end of World War II Joseph Stalin wanted Czechoslovakia, and signed an agreement with Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt that Prague would be liberated by the Red Army, despite the fact that the United States Army under General George S. Patton could have liberated the city earlier. This was important for the spread of pro-Russian (and pro-communist) propaganda that came right after the war. People still remembered what they felt as Czechoslovakia's betrayal by the West at the Munich Agreement. For these reasons, the people voted for communists in the 1948 elections, the last democratic poll to take place there for a long time.
From the middle of the 1960s, Czechs and Slovaks showed increasing signs of rejection of the existing regime. This change was reflected by reformist elements within the communist party by installing Alexander Dubček as party leader. Dubček's reforms of the political process inside Czechoslovakia, which he referred to as Socialism with a human face, did not represent a complete overthrow of the old regime, as was the case in Hungary in 1956. Dubček's changes had broad support from the society, including the working class, but was seen by the Soviet leadership as a threat to their hegemony over other states of the Eastern Bloc and to the very safety of the Soviet Union. Czechoslovakia was in the middle of the defensive line of the Warsaw Pact and its possible defection to the enemy was unacceptable during the Cold War.
However, a sizeable minority in the ruling party, especially at higher leadership levels, was opposed to any lessening of the party's grip on society and actively plotted with the leadership of the Soviet Union to overthrow the reformers. This group watched in horror as calls for multi-party elections and other reforms began echoing throughout the country.
Between the nights of August 20 and August 21, 1968, Eastern Bloc armies from five Warsaw Pact countries invaded Czechoslovakia. During the invasion, Soviet tanks ranging in numbers from 5,000 to 7,000 occupied the streets. They were followed by a large number of Warsaw Pact troops ranging from 200,000 to 600,000.
The Soviets insisted that they had been invited to invade the country, stating that loyal Czechoslovak Communists had told them that they were in need of "fraternal assistance against the counter-revolution". A letter which was found in 1989 proved an invitation to invade did indeed exist. During the attack of the Warsaw Pact armies, 72 Czechs and Slovaks were killed (19 of those in Slovakia) and hundreds were wounded (up to September 3, 1968). Alexander Dubček called upon his people not to resist. He was arrested and taken to Moscow, along with several of his colleagues.
While there has been significant progress in redressing discriminatory laws, Indigenous Australians continue to be at a disadvantage compared to their non-Indigenous counterparts, on key measures such as: life expectancy; infant mortality; health; imprisonment; and levels of education and employment. An ongoing government strategy called Closing the Gap is in place in an attempt to remedy this.
|
|
