The American Civil Rights Movement was a series of mass protest held in the southern states of America in an aim to put an end to years of slavery and racial segregation. The protests took prominence in the mid 1950s-60s. Even though members from the Black community had been liberated following the end of the Civil War and had been granted civil rights as a result of the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, there was still continued struggle in a bid to secure federal protection of these rights that had been granted to them. The struggle therefore continued during the next century. The nonviolent protests of the American Civil Rights Movement that took place during the 1950s-60s broke a pattern of the racial segregation that was happening in public facilities in the south, therefore achieving one of the most important breakthroughs in African-American's equal-rights legislation since Reconstruction (1865-77). The American Civil Rights Movement that was spear headed by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. showed Dr. King who employed discussion and nonviolent ways in order to campaign for civil rights of African Americans.
However, even though the was victory in the passage of major civil rights legislations in 1964 and 1965, there was a rise in militant black activists who not only wanted to achieve civil rights reforms but also wanted to confront the enduring cultural, political and economic consequences of past racial oppression. Led by Stokely Carmichael, the militants gave rise to the Black Power Revolution. Carmichael, who was a veteran Civil Rights campaigns earlier in the century like many other black activists, had become fed up with the nonviolent Gandhian philosophy and approach used by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the Black Power struggle. "The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975," was thus a documentary film taken by Swedish television journalists in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States with a purpose of showing the country as it really was. Carmichael was a man of stern belief and devotion and who also employed force in order to fight for the rights of the American Americans.
Zinn's writing, A People's History of the United States, takes the readers through the country's history from: Chapter 1, "Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress" all the way through to Chapter 11, "Robber Barons and Rebels" (Zinn 5). Through the book, the reader gets to understand the history of America, not through the eyes of the economic and political elite, but rather through those of the common civilian. The book which is frequently revised has covered events as recent as up to 2005, and therefore, in turn covered events that unfolded during the American Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Revolution.
Malcolm X on the other hand, a Minister and a political activist (1925-1965), lived through a time when nonviolent means were used to campaign for the rights of the Blacks during the American Civil Rights Movement. Unlike Carmichael, Malcolm X had similarities with Dr. King and employed a series of tactics including forming parties that would help campaign for civil rights. He was a member of Pan-Africanism and Black Nationalism political movements. He also formed Organization of Afro-American Unity and the Muslim Mosque Inc. He was assassinated in 1965 by three members of the Nation of Islam Group, which he had repudiated. Malcolm X had traveled Africa and the Middle East, come back to America and denounced his earlier youthful ways and was now a courageous advocator for Black people rights. Indeed, the fight for the black civil rights had taken a long process, one that cause lives and destruction of billions worth of property. Nevertheless, the struggle over the decades has ensured that the Black community receives the rights they deserve.
Works Cited
Zinn, Howard. The Twentieth Century, a People's History. New York: Harper & Row, 1984. Print.
