The Evolution of a Revolution

"From Jim Crow to Civil Rights to Black Liberation?"

ByMarc Imhotep Cray, M.D. / bnaRBG Street Scholar

ALUTA CONTINUA (The Struggle Continues)

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From Jim Crow to Civil Rights

The 1950s was a verypolitically unstable timefor Afrikan in American.Our rights wereconstantly under attack.All the efforts madeduring the Forties tointegrate the ArmedForces were abolished during the Korean War. Anew era of racist assassinations began to occurand we as a people started to take a stand againstthe system and business of white supremacy andits blatant racism. The NAACP argued cases inSouthern

states against the discriminatory practices in public schools.In May of 1954, the Brown vs. Board of Education occurred. This case ruled racialsegregation in public schools to be unconstitutional. The African American non-violent

movement began taking the form of boycotts, sit-ins, and peaceful

protests. The African American authors during this decade were writing about love, discrimination, the prisonsystem, protest, black sexuality, and black lifein Harlem. (also see The Black Arts Movement

)

In addition, the decade of the 1950s in theUnited States is known for the dramatic rise ofrepressive U.S. government politics,especially the virulent anti-communism of theMcCarthy era. Amidst and against thisbackdrop emerged the civil rights struggle,initially spearheaded in the southern UnitedStates where Black repression was greatest.

Witnessing the

Brown v. Board of Education

decision,

the

lynching of Emmett Till and the resistance of

Rosa Parks, the

Black community was enlivened, enraged andgalvanized into collective action. The boycott that followed Rosa Parks ' courageous stand in the south began as a protest against police brutality sprung

in the north. Soonevents transformed into an all-out denunciation of segregation and other forms ofoppression.

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The Two Tendencies of Black Struggle

TheMontgomery bus boycott inspired Black students in Greensboro, North Carolina to organize sit-ins in segregated spaces. After centuries of enslavement and decades of JimCrow inequality, the Black community seized upon the first opportunity to fight thesystem, throw off the yoke of legal segregation and finally achieve formal democraticrights. Consequently, great numbers of Black people entered into the civil rightsmovement.

Alongside the civil rights movement, the 1950s also witnessedthe

rise of the Nation of

Islam, which advocated a separatistagenda. The NOIkept its distancefrom the non-violent, directaction ofintegrationistgroups. Malcolm X came to embody this second current of the Blackliberation movement, which emphasized our common heritage,identity and destiny as a people. The Nation of Islam encouragedthe Black community to take control of its own institutions, tosupport Black businesses and to disengage from the cultural andsocio-political happenings of the white man.

Over time, Malcolm

X’s frustration with this overall policy of disengagement of the

NOI and his silencing over the "chicken coming home to roost"comment; Minister Malcolm made his official break with theNation of Islam in 1964. Critical of the non-violent principles ofmainstream civil rights groups, Malcolm organized the secularOrganization of Afro-American Unity to take the political, socialand economic demands of the growing Black and liberationmovement into an international arena.