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La lucha por los derechos civiles, 1961-1968

Posted in Bobby Seale, Derechos civiles, Esclavitud, Huey P. Newton, La Reconstrucción, Ley de Derechos Civiles, Lyndon B. Johnson, Malcom X, Martin Luther King, Panteras Negras, tagged Black Panthers, Black Power, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Civil rights movement, Rosa Parks on 17 febrero 2018| 1 Comment »

La década de 1960 fue testigo de la lucha de los afro-estadounidenses por la igualdad social y política. Tras el fin de la guerra civil, los afro-estadounidenses disfrutaron de un corto periodo de libertad e igualdad. Durante este periodo, ciudadanos negros llegaron ser electos alcaldes, gobernadores y representantes. Sin embargo, a finales de la década de 1870, éstos habían perdido sus derechos políticos gracias al desarrollo de un sistema de segregación racial. Este sistema conocido como “Jim Crow” creó formas para negar o limitar el derecho al voto de los afro-estadounidenses, además de marginarles social y económicamente. Con el fin de separar las razas, se aprobaron leyes segregando racialmente las escuelas, los parques, y hasta las fuentes de agua. Los matrimonios entre blancos y negros fueron declarados ilegales en varios estados de la Unión.

Los afro-estadounidenses no sólo fueron arrebatados de sus derechos políticos, segregados y marginados, sino también fueron víctimas de la violencia racial. Entre 1880 y 1920, miles de afro-estadounidenses fueron linchados por el mero hecho de ser negros. Durante este largo periodo, el gobierno federal dejó abandonados y sin protección a miles de sus ciudadanos negros.

En los años 1960 se dio un renacer en la lucha de los afro-estadounidenses por el reconocimiento de sus derechos políticos y por el fin de la segregación racial. Bajo el liderato de personas como Martin Luther King, Malcom X, Rosa Parks, Huey P. Newton y Bobby Seale, los afro-estadounidenses usaron diversos tipos de medios para luchar contra quienes les oprimían y maltrataban (boicots, marchas, resistencia pacífica, resistencia armada, etc.). El resultado de esta lucha fue el desarrollo de un vasto movimiento a favor de los derechos civiles que logró la aprobación de leyes federales protegiendo los derechos de los ciudadanos afro-estadounidenses . Sin embargo, esta lucha constituyó una verdadera revolución, pues cambió considerablemente las relaciones y actitudes raciales en los Estados Unidos.

Martin Luther King

Rosa Parks

Una de las figuras claves de la lucha por los derechos civiles fue un joven pastor negro llamado Martin Luther King. Nacido en Atlanta en 1929, era hijo y hermano de pastores y vivió desde muy niño la segregación racial. En 1954, King se convirtió, a los veinticinco años de edad, en pastor de una iglesia bautista de la ciudad Montgomery. Un año más tarde, una mujer afroamericana llamada Rosa Parks se negó a cederle su asiento en un autobús público a una persona blanca, por lo que fue arrestada por violar las leyes segregacionistas vigentes en el estado de Alabama. En respuesta, el reverendo King encabezó un boicot contra el sistema de transportación pública de Montgomery que duró más de trescientos días. En 1956, el Tribunal Supremo declaró ilegal la segregación en los autobuses, restaurantes, escuelas y otros lugares públicos, lo que marcó el fin del famoso boicot de Montgomery.

Martin Luther King y Lyndon B. Johnson

King le dedicará los próximos trece años de su vida a la lucha por la igualdad racial por medio de marchas, boicots, bloqueos, toma de edificios, etc. Creyente en la resistencia pacífica promulgada por Henry David Thoreau y Gandhi, King rechazó el uso de la violencia y se opuso a la intervención de los Estados Unidos en la guerra de Vietnam, por lo que ganó el Premio Nobel de la Paz en 1964.

King no sólo defendió el pacifismo, sino que también optó por aliarse con los sectores liberales en busca de reformas. Para él, la integración racial era posible y necesaria. King creía que sólo el cambio pacífico a través de la colaboración con los blancos traería el cambio que los afro-estadounidenses estaban esperando y del que eran merecedores.

Este gran líder estadounidense fue asesinado el 4 de abril de 1968 en Memphis. Su muerte provocó fuerte disturbios raciales, pero no frenó la lucha de los afro-estadounidenses por sus derechos civiles.

La Ley de Derechos Civiles

El asesinato de John F. Kennedy en noviembre de 1963 ocurrió en un momento que la lucha por los derechos civiles había ganado fuerza y contaba con el apoyo del presidente asesinado. La actitud que asumiría el nuevo residente de la Casa Blanca preocupaba a los líderes negros, pues Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) no se había caracterizado por sus simpatías hacia la lucha de los afro-estadounidenses . Por el contrario, como Senador Johnson había bloqueado legislación a favor de los derechos civiles.

Afortunadamente para los afro-estadounidenses , LBJ entendió que la lucha por los derechos había cambiado el panorama político estadounidense. Además, éste quería unir a los Demócratas y demostrar que era un líder nacional por lo que adoptó el tema de los derechos civiles. Johnson hizo claro que estaba dispuesta a transar y uso todo su poder e influencia para conseguir que el Congreso aprobara una ley de derechos civiles en 1964.

La aprobación de la Ley de Derechos Civiles es uno de los episodios más importantes en la lucha de los afro-estadounidenses por la igualdad. Ésta es, además, la legislación más importante aprobada en los Estados Unidos con relación al tema de los derechos civiles desde el periodo de la Reconstrucción. La ley prohíbe la discriminación en los espacios públicos, ilegaliza la discriminación en el trabajo por sexo, raza u origen nacional, prohíbe la discriminación en programas federales y autorizaba al Departamento de Justicia a iniciar casos legales para integrar escuelas y otras dependencias públicas.

El “Black Power”

No todos los afro-estadounidenses adoptaron el pacifismo reformista predicado por Martin Luther King. Otros reclamaron cambios sociales inmediatos y optaron por la confrontación. Éstos manifestaron su rencor hacia la sociedad blanca que restringía y limitaba sus aspiraciones, así como también rechazaron la resistencia pacífica, la integración y las alianzas de King. Cansados, frustrados y sin fe en la justicia de los blancos, estos afro-estadounidenses demandaron la creación de un poder negro o “Black Power”, es decir, la creación de instituciones y movimientos políticos propios que dieran forma a una agenda propia de la comunidad afroamericana. En otras palabras, los defensores del “Black Power” querían definir su destino, no depender de los blancos para ello.

Muhamad Ali y Malcom X

El movimiento “Black Power” estuvo fuertemente influenciada por las ideas de uno de los más importantes líderes afro-estadounidenses de la historia, Malcom X. Nacido como Malcom Little, éste cambió su apellido a X como un acto simbólico de repudio al pasado esclavista. Tras una temporada en la cárcel por venta de drogas, Malcom fue liberado en 1952 y se convirtió al Islam. Malcom se unió a una agrupación musulmana afroamericana llamada la Nación del Islam que era dirigida por Elijah Muhammad. La inteligencia y oratorio de Malcom X le convirtieron muy pronto en una de las figuras más importantes de la comunidad musulmana afroamericana.

El pensamiento de Malcom tenía una fuerte tendencia separatista y nacionalista. Éste insistía en que los negros tomaran conciencia y se levantaran en defensa de sus derechos para así alcanzar la independencia verdadera. Según Malcom, los negros debían estar orgullosos de su negritud y de sus raíces africanas. Crítico acérrimo de King, Malcom insistía que los afro-estadounidenses debían conseguir su libertad usando cualquier medio posible, incluyendo la violencia. En 1965, Malcom abandonó la Nación del Islam y fue asesinado por tres hombres vinculados a ese movimiento.

En 1966, Huey P. Newton y Bobby Seale fundaron el Partido de las Panteras Negras, el grupo más famoso en defensa de la autodeterminación de los afro-estadounidenses . Las Panteras Negras recurrieron a la violencia y se enfrentaron a la policía y el FBI en diversas ocasiones, pero fueron encarcelados o resultaron muertos, lo que terminó destruyendo al partido.

Huey P. Newton y Bobby Seale

El movimiento “Black Power” tuvo un efecto importante para los afro-estadounidenses , pues fomentó el desarrollo de organizaciones comunitarias negras independientes de los blancos, ayudó a la creación de programas universitarios dedicados al estudio de los negros estadounidenses y sirvió para movilizar política y electoralmente a los afro-estadounidenses . Además, sirvió para promover el orgullo racial y la autoestima de los negros.

Norberto Barreto Velázquez, PhD

Lima, Perú

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MLK’s Case for Reparations Included Disadvantaged Whites

Posted in Derechos civiles, Esclavitud, tagged African Americans History, Birmingham, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, Slavery on 17 julio 2014| Leave a Comment »

Martin Luther King Jr. waves to supporters on the Mall in Washington, D.C., Aug. 28, 1963.
AFP/GETTY IMAGES

MLK’s Case for Reparations Included Disadvantaged Whites

Jonathan Rieder

The Root July 15, 2014

What does white America owe black America? To even broach that question 50 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 seems straight-out wacky. Did not the election of a black president redeem the nation? At a minimum, it’s rude—refusing to avert the eyes from that elephant in the room: “America begins in black plunder and white democracy.” That’s how Ta-Nehisi Coates deemed it recently in his extraordinary “The Case for Reparations.”

Far from fringe lunacy, the idea of a primal debt was obvious to Martin Luther King Jr. Exactly 50 years ago this month in Why We Can’t Wait, his Harper & Row account of the Birmingham, Ala., protests, he made his own impassioned case for compensation. And yet no matter how much he shared Coates’ desire to square accounts, King would settle on a rival solution for the crimes of slavery and all the forms of racism that succeeded it.

In the rapture of King’s crescendo at the March on Washington, it’s easy to forget the language of bankers that pervaded the first half of “I Have a Dream” (pdf): “America had defaulted on this promissory note” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” One year later, in Why We Can’t Wait, he was not coy about the nation’s “need to pay a long overdue debt to its citizens of color.” He retold the story of his 1959 visit to India, where Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru recounted all the preferential policies that aided the untouchables: “This is our way of atoning for the centuries of injustices we have inflicted upon these people.”

Invoking the sacred precedent of “our fighting men [in World War ll]” who “had been deprived of certain advantages and opportunities,” King ticked off all the things—the GI Bill of Rights—that were done “to make up for this.” Then King pivoted and pounced: “Certainly the Negro has been deprived” and just as surely “robbed of the wages of his toil.” You didn’t need a course in logic to complete the syllogism.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not diminish King’s zeal for reparations. “Frederick Douglass said we should have 40 acres and a mule,” he told a mass meeting not long before his death. Instead, the nation left blacks “penniless and illiterate after 244 years of slavery.” Calculating that $20 a week for the 4 million slaves would have added up to $800 billion, he noted acerbically, “They owe us a lot of money.”

The failure to repair thus added a new crime to the original one. It was like putting a man in jail and discovering his innocence years later: “And then you go up to him and say, ‘You are free,’ but you don’t give him any bus fare to get to town. You don’t give him any money … to get on his feet in life again. Every code of jurisprudence would rise up against that.”

There was still one more twist in the torment to come. All those “white peasants from Europe” who enjoyed the largesse of land grants and low-interest loans “are the very people telling the black man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. … It’s a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”

Are the progeny of those “white peasants” readier to reckon with our racist legacy? Thirty-five years ago, a Brooklyn, N.Y., woman fumed to me about the TV program Roots, “If they keep shoving that stuff down our throats, there’s never going to be peace. … that was over 200 years ago that this slavery bit was!”

Today, countless Americans think blacks have received compensation in the form of anti-poverty money and quotas. As one person told political consultant Stanley Greenberg (pdf), “Didn’t they get 40 acres and a mule? That’s more than I got.” West Indians and African immigrants, too, sometimes complain that black Americans are too racial, and many millennials who used to thrill to President Barack Obama’s exalted flights are preoccupied with their own plights and the grit of a post-Lehman Brothers economy.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of whites even reject apologies for slavery, which cost nothing save one’s dignity. Many of the supporters of affirmative action whom Stanford political scientist Paul Sniderman queried in the 1990s endorsed the remedy only if blacks were not its sole recipients and the rationale was universal: “help people who are out of work” rather than “because of the historic injustices blacks have suffered.”

It’s possible that attaching a race to the injustice made the respondents squirm. Perhaps it forced whites to dwell on this unsettling fact: Our success in part is a windfall, reaped from the access black exclusion gave us to jobs, slots in housing markets and much else.

In truth, white psyches and circumstances are too varied to sustain such generalities. The woman who recoiled from “that slavery bit” didn’t lack empathy. She filled up with emotion as she observed, “The blacks were treated worse than animals; they were taken up from their own happy soil.” When Greenberg returned to McComb County, Mich. (pdf), before the 2008 election, some of the same Reagan Democrats (or their children) who had seen blacks as the source of all their ills in the 1980s and heard Jesse Jackson’s “Our time has come” as “Your time is over,” could now acknowledge America’s special burden: “We did hold them back, and a lot of people were cheated.” As for Sniderman’s respondents, likely many of them saw universalism as a different, equally righteous take on healing and helping.

Maybe, then, it’s best to settle for those modest moral advances, especially if that’s the price of any coalition of conscience that might some day be motivated to remedy the ills of suffering Americans. Better to leave the fuller atonement to those Deep South museums that have confronted their louche local past; people who exit Twelve Years a Slave in turmoil; lawsuits seeking compensation for specific violations like the racist rampage in Tulsa, Okla. Anything more perfect might be the enemy of the good, even the moral good.

Ultimately, in the very chapter of Why We Can’t Wait in which he laid out the justice of reparations, King rejected the idea of recompense for blacks alone. It’s not that he was prepared to abandon this equation of restorative justice: The nation that did something special against the Negro had to do something special for him.

But the special thing that King proposed—“A gigantic Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, our veterans of the long siege of denial”—left plenty of room for white “veterans” in the mix. He offered solace to the least of these, no matter what their complexion. Inevitably, there was a shrewdness to this inclusion, part of the effort to woo white allies and crystallize the liberal coalition on race that had been growing since Birmingham. It was also, King underlined, “a simple matter of justice.”

Already in 1964, King was looking beyond the Civil Rights Act. He could grasp its limited power to effect “improvements” in the Negro’s “way of life.” He could see that rights and respect might arrive more quickly than economic equality. He could also see that however much white supremacy left blacks vulnerable to inimical forces, the forces could be unsentimentally free of bigotry and wreak havoc on whites and blacks alike.

At the March on Washington, King invited whites to join the “we” who could sing, “Free at last … we are free at last,” and thus share in bondage and deliverance. He did something just as generous inWhy We Can’t Wait. Likely it took a Christian whose idea of a fair exchange was blessing those who curse you to offer poor and middling Southern whites this face-saving gift: He defined them not as beneficiaries of white supremacy but as “victims of slavery” who suffered their own “derivative bondage.” This wasn’t masochism talking, but a faith at once hard-boiled and brimming with grace.

What, then, about balancing the ledger for specifically black injuries? Throughout Why We Can’t Wait, there are hints that resolving matters of policy and politics didn’t still all the feelings churning within King. “A price can be placed on unpaid wages,” he underlined, but “no amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries.” He rejected an easy “four-minute atonement” as inadequate to “400 years of sinning.”

Atone, you sinners! That is the sound of the muffled voice of the preacher rising up through the printed page. And in the end it seems Coates, too, is seeking something similar: recognition as much as reparations; “not a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe” but “the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences.”

King harbored no illusions that whites as a whole had the moral gumption to undergo that ordeal. In the Letter From the Birmingham Jail, he observed, “I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race.”

The evidence for pessimism only intensified as 1964 unfolded. George Wallace broke out of his Southern lair. White backlash quickened in the North. By 1968 King could warn, “a nation that put as many Japanese in a concentration camp … could put black people in concentration camps.”

And so, in the absence of full justice, the preacher could be a chastising prophet, who once told a mass meeting: “Do you know that in America the white man sought to annihilate the Indian, literally to wipe him out, and he made a national policy that said in substance, the only good Indian is a dead Indian? Now, a nation that got started like that has a lot of repentin’ to do.”

But even rebuke did not close the case. There remained the work of memory and mourning. King never stopped honoring that history, whose pain could not be fully assuaged by rebuke or recognition. In the refuge of a black church, in the nurturant embrace of his people, he grieved: “We read on the Statue of Liberty that America is the mother of exiles.” But whites “never evinced the maternal care and concern for its black exiles who were brought to this nation in chains. And isn’t it the ultimate irony … that the Negro could sing in one of its sorrow songs, ‘Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.’”

As the audience erupted in applause, King demanded, “What sense of estrangement, what sense of rejection, what sense of hurt could cause a people to use such a metaphor?”

Jonathan Rieder, a professor of sociology at Barnard College, Columbia University, is the author most recently of Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter From Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation and The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King Jr.

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Now On Display: The Civil Rights Act of 1964

Posted in Imperialismo norteamericano, tagged 1964 Civil Rights Act, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Jr., Lyndon B. Johnson on 30 junio 2014| Leave a Comment »

Now On Display: The Civil Rights Act of 1964

Prologue: Pieces of History June 30, 2014

Today’s post comes from David Steinbach, intern in the National Archives History Office.

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the 1964 Civil Rights Act as Martin Luther King, Jr., others look on, 07/02/1964. (The Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library)

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the landmark legislation.

The first and the signature pages of the act will be on display at the National Archives Rubenstein Gallery in Washington, DC, until September 17, 2014. These 50-year-old sheets of paper represent years of struggle and society’s journey toward justice.

The most comprehensive civil rights legislation since the Reconstruction era, the Civil Right Act finally gave the Federal Government the means to enforce the promises of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. The act prohibited discrimination in public places, allowed the integration of public facilities and schools, and forbade discrimination in employment.

But such a landmark congressional enactment was by no means achieved easily. Indeed, developments within the civil rights movement were critical in motivating the bill’s movement through Congress. The push for legislation accelerated in May 1963, when nightly news broadcasts displayed footage of Eugene “Bull” Connor cracking down on demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama.

In this atmosphere, President John F. Kennedy demanded a strong civil rights bill in a national address on June 11: “The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities.”

Pressure for legislation continued to build when thousands of Americans engaged in the peaceful March on Washington on August 28. Two weeks later, a bomb in Birmingham killed four young African American girls. With civil rights at the forefront of the national consciousness, these and other developments encouraged House Democrats to introduce amendments strengthening the bill.

President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Sen. Richard Russell, 12/07/1963. (The Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library)

External pressure made up only one chapter in the story of the bill’s passage, as supporters of the legislation had a battle of their own to wage in Congress. Just five days after Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, President Johnson urged lawmakers “to eliminate from this Nation every trace of discrimination and oppression that is based upon race or color.”

Despite the President’s support, the bill encountered significant difficulties in both chambers of Congress. It took a 70-day hearing process for the legislation to clear the House in February 1964.

As soon as the bill entered the Senate, southern senators commenced a 60-day filibuster—the longest continuous debate in Senate history. With the help of Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey, supporters softened language concerning government regulation of private organizations and finally won over a bloc of conservative lawmakers.

After clearing the Senate and House, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2. Thanks to public pressure and political maneuvering, the nation finally had a substantive civil rights bill.

This 50th anniversary represents a rare opportunity to see the original Civil Rights Act.