Civil Rights from Integration to Nationalism

The story of the civil rights movement, which began as a movement for integration with the white community and became a nationalist movement with organizations like the Black Panthers and The Nation of Islam.

Essence, the civil rights movement can be seen as having two ascending phases. The first of these phases was the demand for reform between Brown vs. Board of Education in Topeka in 1954 and passage of the Civil Rights Act from 1964. After this point was a more revolutionary demands for equality and economic and social benefit, which peaked in the National Black Political Assembly in Gary, Indiana in 1972.

The first phase of the civil rights movement was essentially a struggle against segregation, the most obvious and dramatically effective form of black inequality. The effort, NAACP, SCLC, SNCC and CORE were all aimed at the reform-minded demand for an end to segregation. This demand is tied to the hopes and aspirations of thousands of blacks, both North and South, working class and middle class, in a movement that did not realize immediate similarity with the downfall of separation except for the name. 

The inklings of a possible collapse of the civil rights movement in fundamentalist and nationalist elements can be seen as far back as the early days of SNCC. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was the action base at the beginning of the civil rights movement. While the NAACP and some elements of the SCLC, preferred to work through the courts and lawsuits, SNCC and CORE remergent was an activist base of grassroots organizers, as approved by marching in the streets, bus riding, and other forms of social protest as a more direct expression of the black community demands equality. As disillusionment with the courts and the U.S. political arena grew, both middle-class reformers and the working class and activists became radicalized. Demands from reformers and integrationist increasingly move from the theoretical equality of concrete social demands. The leftwards movement of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the SCLC to social demands and especially MLK still more links to Black proves this trend, making the socialist outlook of Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party, which formed during the radicalization of the civil rights movement. Although black elected and Congressional Black Caucus was radicalized and swept away by the power of nationalist sentiments grew in the black movement.

The radical part of the black movement went from activist organizations rightly lost faith in the reforms within the system. Yes, it was SNCC members and the Black Panthers who were killed, beaten in the streets, and imprisoned, while the NAACP and the CBC filed lawsuits and enacted legislation. The biggest proponent of Black Nationalism Malcolm X was the Nation of Islam. Because of his charisma and working class roots and deviant, Malcolm was able to appeal to a wider audience of disillusioned black working class and young offenders to MLK and SCLC had little in common with. Malcolm's and later the general political agenda Black Nationalism, was the complete separation of the races. The idea was that blacks and whites could never come together, and that integration was really erase everything black. Thus, the only solution was a separate black state. Originally, this agenda was purely emotionally based, but as Malcolm matured, his analysis of the white community became more and more a critique of capitalism. Organizations such as SNCC and CORE training the militant black nationalist agendas, pushing the white members and increasingly isolate their white hinterland. Black trade unions in the form of revolutionary trade unionism took in the same direction, organizing militant unions in all black.

The reformists in the NAACP and SCLC sharply criticized black nationalists and Malcolm X in particular, to spread hatred and injustice, and only hinder the struggle for equal rights by alienating their white hinterland. They wanted to integrate into mainstream American society and have the same opportunity as whites to succeed in a capitalist structure. Meanwhile, militants of SNCC and the Black Panthers criticized the reformists, which inhibit the revolutionary force of the black movement and betraying the cause. Notwithstanding the mutual criticism in the late sixties and early seventies, the nationalists were in virtual control of the civil rights movement. National Black Political Assembly in 1972 in Gary, Indiana, the general mood at the meeting, including members of the CBC, SCLC, SNCC, and the other was one of nationalism. Even MLK's widow was seen shouting "Nation's time!"

The influence of these different organizations and trends vary over time. But in any one period, it was the radical wing of the struggle for civil rights, which pushed the movement forward. During the reformist period and the struggle against segregation, SNCC activist elements and organizers as MLK in Montgomery bus boycott and other popular marches, what pushed the movement forward. Organizations like the NAACP and individuals who were challenging segregation in the courts for decades with little progress. As black fundamentally challenged the system of mass mobilization, should focus more on their requirements. Even after 1964, pushed the radical and militant elements of black nationalism movement past the obstacle of potential co-optation of the movement of federal legitimacy movements and federal approval of the reformist demands NAACP and SCLC. As the militant part of the movement has slowly been suppressed, even Completion, and an unfortunate movement itself began to die. This is not to say that the nationalist element was necessarily right or even had a particular purpose, or realized agendas, but they were the militant force that kept the movement on track.