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Summary Civil Society protests
These notes provide bullet-pointed in-depth summaries of Civil Society Protests and the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s to 1970s
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Chloë van Beukering Grade 12 History SyllabusCivil Society Protests
What is Civil Society?
- Refers to the area of un-coerced collective action around shared interests, purposes
and values
- A group of individuals working together, unforced, around an issue the members
have in common
- In nature these organisations: are separate from government, the family or economy.
May have things in common with these and may work with them from time to time
which can make it hard to tell the difference
- May differ from each other in that they: follow different structures, have different
members and are concerned with different issues
- This means that: not all are equally powerful, not all are equally free to work on their
own, not all last equally well
- Examples include: charities, non-governmental organisations, community groups,
women’s organisations etc.
- South African Human Rights Commission, World Wildlife Fund, Institute for Security
Studies etc.
What Does Civil Society Do?
- Develop around a vast number of different interests and often represent people whose
voices may not be heard otherwise
- Develop around issues other groups, particularly those in positions of authority (such as
the State) are unaware of, or disinterested in
- Attempt to use their collective voice to mobilise support for these issues, from both the
public and official bodies
- Most common forms of protest: strikes, marches, petitions, sit-ins, stay-aways and
boycotts
Why the 1960s?
- Began in the USA in the 1960’s and led to an American society which seemed to be
changing at breakneck speed, fuelled by activism and protest
- Continuing protest for civil rights for African Americans were joined by a push for equal
rights for women, efforts to end poverty and war, battle on university campuses over
free speech, the beginnings of a gay rights movement and arguments at home over the
Vietnam War
- The 1950s were a conservative period in Western Europe and North America
- Young people accepted the values of their parents
- WW2 had brought tremendous change to the lives of those living in the West and
the Post-War period saw a return to a greater conservatism
- The shock of the War coupled with the need to reconstruct society after the conflict
resulted in a deep psychological need to return to what they knew
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,Chloë van Beukering Grade 12 History Syllabus
- The result: the 1950s became, if anything, more conservative than the decade that
had preceded it
- Changed rapidly in the 1960s
- Prompted by a number of factors:
- The West had become prosperous as economies recovered after the war
- Social Welfare systems had been introduced to address poverty
- As a result of both of these factors, there were increasing levels of education
- The Rock and Roll Revolution which led to the establishing of a youth subculture to
challenge the orthodoxy of their parents
- New ideas were spread more rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s by developments in
media technology (e.g. TV in every home in USA from the 1950s)
- Cold War tension also contributed to these changes
The Civil Rights Movement
- The American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968) refers to the movements in the
United States aimed at outlawing racial discrimination against African Americans
- Between 1955 and 1968, acts of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience highlighted
the inequities faced by African Americans
Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Racism in America
- From the 17th century, millions of Africans were captured, packed into ships and taken
to the USA to be sold as slaves
- Majority of slaves lived and worked on large farms or plantations, in the American
South
- The Northern States wanted to end slavery, but the South did not
- The Southern States tried to break away from the North
- This led to the outbreak of the American Civil War
- The North won the war in 1865, and slavery was abolished
- Although slavery ended in 1865, racial segregation did not
- African Americans, or black Americans, were denied basic civil rights in the South
- For about 100 years after the end of the Civil War, the legacy of African American
slavery in the South was a segregated society in which black people and white people
lived side-by-side but virtually in separate worlds
- Public facilities such as drinking fountains, bathrooms, restaurants, motels and
schools were designated for either blacks or whites, and the facilities for blacks were
invariably poorer in quality
- “Jim Crow” was the nickname given to the laws introduced into the South during
the 19th and 20th centuries to enforce this racial segregation
- “Jim Crow” was a minstrel character from the 1830s
- Portrayed as an elderly, crippled and clumsy African American slave and his
portrayal showed all the negative stereotypes for African Americans
- As a result: black Americans faced considerable challenges:
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, Chloë van Beukering Grade 12 History Syllabus
- While the Civil Rights Act of 1875 outlawed segregation, 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson
ruled that separate but equal facilities were constitutional
- Racial segregation resulted in separate facilities
- The Ku Klux Klan, a racist organisation set up after the civil war to stop blacks
gaining rights, terrorised African Americans
- Committed acts of violence against black people and intimidated them
- Although African Americans had the right to vote, this sort of intimidation
prevented any of them from registering to do so
- Government officials and police in the south were white and did little to stop attacks
on African Americans
- White juries almost always acquitted whites accused of killing African Americans
(clearly seen in cases such as that of the murder of Emmet Till)
- Southerners weren’t prepared to treat black people as equals
- Although segregation was not legal in the North, racism was common and African
Americans were usually given menial, low paid jobs
- African Americans in the Northern States lived in ghettos where there was slum
housing, high unemployment, poor schools and inadequate health care
Challenging Segregation
- Black intellectuals had been arguing for civil rights since the beginning of the 20th
century
- The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) for
instance, first met on the 12th February, 1909
- In the 1930s this organisation began to challenge segregation on legal grounds
- Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall began a campaign to attack the
concept of “separate but equal”
- Slowly the NAACP began to chip away at the 1896 court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson
- Most important success in this regard came in the 1950s
- Thurgood Marshall began to focus on desegregating the nation’s elementary and high
schools at this time
- His most significant case was that of Linda Brown of Topeka, Kansas
- The Supreme Court heard arguments over a two-year period
- The Court also considered research about segregation’s effects on African American
children
- In 1954, all nine judges of the Supreme Court ruled, in the case known as Brown v.
Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that public schools could no longer be
segregated
- White racists didn’t accept this ruling without a fight, and some turned out to jeer
and threaten black students who attended schools that had formerly been for whites
only
- The most famous and extreme confrontation broke out at Central High School in
Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957
- On September 4, 1957, angry whites harassed nine black students as they arrived
at school
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