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Not all African Americans in the civil rights movement were comfortable with gradual change. Instead of using marches and demonstrations to change people’s attitudes, calling for tougher civil rights laws, or suing for their rights in court, they favored more immediate action that forced whites to give in to their demands. Men like
Malcolm X , the leader of the
Nation of Islam , and groups like the
Black Panthers were willing to use violence to achieve their goals (
[link] ).
Louis E. Lomax. 1963.
When the Word is Given: A Report on Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the Black Muslim World .
Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 173–174; David Farber. 1994.
The
Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s . New York: Hill and Wang, 207. These activists called for Black Power and Black Pride, not assimilation into white society. Their position was attractive to many young African Americans, especially after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968.
The civil rights movement for African Americans did not end with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. For the last fifty years, the African American community has faced challenges related to both past and current discrimination; progress on both fronts remains slow, uneven, and often frustrating.
Legacies of the
de jure segregation of the past remain in much of the United States. Many African Americans still live in predominantly black neighborhoods where their ancestors were forced by laws and housing covenants to live.
Dan Keating, “Why Whites Don’t Understand Black Segregation,”
Washington Post , 21 November 2014. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/11/21/why-whites-dont-understand-black-segregation/. Even those who live in the suburbs, once largely white, tend to live in suburbs that are mostly black.
Alana Semuels, “White Flight Never Ended,”
The Atlantic , 30 July 2015. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/white-flight-alive-and-well/399980/. Some two million African American young people attend schools whose student body is composed almost entirely of students of color.
Lindsey Cook, “U.S. Education: Still Separate and Unequal,”
U.S. News and World Report , 28 January 2015. http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/28/us-education-still-separate-and-unequal. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, efforts to tackle these problems were stymied by large-scale public opposition, not just in the South but across the nation. Attempts to integrate public schools through the use of busing—transporting students from one segregated neighborhood to another to achieve more racially balanced schools—were particularly unpopular and helped contribute to “white flight” from cities to the suburbs.
Sokol, 175–177. This white flight has created
de facto segregation , a form of segregation that results from the choices of individuals to live in segregated communities without government action or support.
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