The 1960s Black Power activist formerly known as 

H. Rap Brown once said that “violence is as

American as cherry pie.

I. Early history
 1862 & 1863 : The Emancipation Proclamation: President Abraham Lincoln issued
the Preliminary Emanicipation Proclamation in the midst of the Civil War, announcing on
September 22, 1862, that if the rebels did not end the fighting and rejoin the Union by
January 1, 1863, all slaves in the rebellious states would be free.  Since the Confederacy did
not respond, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. 
 1865: 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery

 1866 : Civil Rights Act granted citizenship and the same rights enjoyed by white citizens to all
male persons in the United States "without distinction of race or color, or previous condition
of slavery or involuntary servitude."
 1868: 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Civil Rights extended liberties and rights
granted to former slaves
 1870: 15th Amendment: voting rights
 1871: First Jim Crow Segregation Law (series of laws that disguised their cruelty and racism
by claiming to provide equal in quality facilities while the actual motive was the common
belief of white supremacy)
 1875: civil rights act “That all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be
entitled to the full and equal and enjoyment of …”
 1896: Plessy V Ferguson: The ruling in this Supreme Court case upheld the constitutionality
of racial segregation laws and legitimized "equal but separate accommodations for the white
and colored races."

 1954: Brown V Board of Education:  the Supreme Court ruled that separating children in
public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional.
 1955: Rosa Parks and Montgomery bus boycott for 380 days that led to the abolition of
segregation in buses in 1956
 1957: Little Rock Nine were a group of nine black students who enrolled at formerly all-white
Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, but on the first day of classes the governor of
Arkansas called in the Arkansas National Guard to block the black students’ entry into the
high school. Later that month, President Eisenhower sent in federal troops to escort the Little
Rock Nine into the school. It drew national attention to the civil rights movement.
 1960: Sit-ins: It started with four black college freshmen who sat down at a segregated lunch
counter and were ignored but remained seated until the counter closed. The next day they
returned with more students, who sat peacefully at the counter waiting to be served. They
were practicing non-violent, civil disobedience. As word of them spread, other students in
cities throughout the South started staging sit-ins. The tactic called for well-dressed and
perfectly behaved students to enter a lunch counter and ask for service. They would not
move until they were served. If they were arrested, other students would take their place.
Students in many cities endured taunts, arrests, and even beatings. But their persistence paid
off. Many targeted businesses began to integrate.
 1961: freedom riders fight segregation across South: black and white freedom riders boarded
buses bound for Southern states. At each stop, they planned to enter the segregated areas.
At first, the riders met little resistance. In Alabama, white supremacists surrounded one of
 the freedom riders’ buses, set it afire, and attacked the riders as they exited. When he heard
about the violence, President Kennedy sent federal agents to protect the freedom riders.
Although the president urged the freedom riders to stop, they refused. Regularly met by
mob violence and police brutality, hundreds of freedom riders were beaten and jailed.
Although the Freedom Ride never reached its planned destination, New Orleans, it achieved
its purpose: Signs indicating “colored” and “white” sections came down in more than 300
Southern stations.
 1963: “I have a dream” speech
 1964: Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination in public places, and made employment
discrimination illegal
 1965: Bloody Sunday (during the Selma to Montgomery March: As the protesters neared the
Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, they were blocked by Alabama state and local police sent by
Alabama governor George C. Wallace, a vocal opponent of desegregation. Refusing to stand
down, protesters moved forward and were viciously beaten and teargassed by police and
dozens of protesters were hospitalized. Some activists wanted to retaliate with violence, but
King pushed for nonviolent protests and eventually gained federal protection for another
march)
 1965: voting rights act outlawed the discriminatory voting practices adopted in many
southern states after the Civil War, including literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting. 
 Thurgood Marshall

 2008: Obama election (2009-2016)

II. History
The roots of 2020’s events go far deeper into the last hundred years of American history, which were
punctuated by race riots, massacres, and clashes between the police and African Americans. Starting
in 1919, three major waves of nationwide uprisings in the 20th century shed light on how the fight
for racial equality has grown, how it’s changed, and what has stayed the same.

1. Red Summer

The first wave came in the early 20th century, culminating in the so-called Red Summer of 1919,
when the country was recovering from World War I.

That year, dozens of violent racial clashes played out with ferocity in at least 25 places. During this
first wave, hundreds of thousands of African Americans were moving north in what came to be
known as the Great Migration, seeking jobs created by wartime spending and fleeing the violence
and oppression in the former Confederacy.
In 1921, white mobs, with the complicity of local police, torched Tulsa, Oklahoma’s black business
district, known as “Black Wall Street,” killing about 300 people and leaving nearly all of the city’s
black population homeless. In most of these massacres and riots, the police turned a blind eye to
white violence and instead arrested African Americans for defending themselves.
In response to these brutal tactics, African Americans invested energy in building up civil rights
organizations in the 1920s and 1930s. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP), founded in 1909, expanded its nationwide campaign for racial justice, creating one
of the largest mass-membership organizations in the country.
Empowered by the right to vote (a right denied to blacks through voter suppression across most of
the South), African Americans in northern cities began to exercise their electoral clout

2. Fighting fascism abroad, racism at home

The second mass wave of protest and racial violence came during the disruptive years of the
Depression and World War II. In 1941, when civil rights and labor leader A. Philip Randolph
threatened a March on Washington to demand that the federal government open up defense jobs to
African Americans, President Franklin Roosevelt succumbed to the pressure and signed an order
creating the Committee on Fair Employment Practices. The hypocrisy of racism in a country that was
fighting a world war for democracy fueled anger among many African Americans, unleashing one of
the most intense periods of black political organizing and white opposition ever.
In a second wave of the Great Migration, hundreds of thousands of black workers moved north and
west during the war.
Newspapers serving African American communities launched the “Double V” campaign for victory
against fascism abroad and against white supremacy at home.
Alabama and Detroit in 1943, whites fearful of rising black militancy and competition for jobs and
housing rampaged through black neighborhoods and attacked black workers. More than 240 race
riots broke out that year throughout the United States. African Americans were not the only targets;
the same year, in Los Angeles, white mobs angry about a new racial threat attacked young Mexican-
American men. In all of these cities, the police swept in, taking the side of white rioters.
During and after World War II, African Americans actively protested—both peacefully and violently—
against racism and police brutality. New York’s City’s Harlem neighborhood was a hotbed of civil
rights activism. In August 1943, after a white police officer shot Private Robert Bandy, an African
American soldier on leave, angry crowds of blacks outraged at police brutality broke shop windows
and clashed with law enforcement officials. In 1943 and 1944, civil rights activists in Chicago staged
sit-ins at restaurants that refused to serve blacks. Those protests snowballed into a nationwide
movement between the war and the mid-1960s.

3. The turbulent Sixties

Fueled by growth of the civil rights movement, a third and enormous wave of urban uprisings swept
the country between 1963 and 1968. The protests grew out of decades of grassroots organizing
against racial segregation and discrimination in employment, housing, transportation, and
commerce, both in the North and the South.
In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference marched in
Birmingham, Alabama, demanding the desegregation of department stores, restaurants, public
restrooms, and drinking fountains. In a violent show of force, Birmingham Commissioner of Public
Safety infamously ordered police officers and firefighters to turn guard dogs and fire hoses on
nonviolent protestors, many of them schoolchildren. In retaliation for the brutality, angry local blacks
calling for self-defense rampaged through the city’s business district. When peaceful demonstrations
did not get the desired results and law enforcement officials used force to suppress dissent,
protestors often turned to more disruptive tactics.
It was a pattern that would be repeated hundreds of times over the next several years, drawing
energy from the rising Black Power movement, which called for black pride, self-defense against
racist attacks, and self-determination. 163 cities erupted in collective violence over police brutality
and indifference to black suffering. African Americans burned and looted stores and faced violent
retribution on the part of big cities’ nearly all-white police forces.
In April 1968, sorrow and fury over Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination turned to uprisings in which
more than 100 cities were burned.

4. 1990’s-now

In the decades that followed 1968, outbreaks of protest and conflict were more geographically
isolated, but their causes and fury foreshadowed (présager) the events of 2020. In 1992, mass
protests and riots exploded in Los Angeles after the acquittal of white police officers who were
captured on video brutally beating black motorist Rodney King. Twenty years later, the deaths of
more African Americans at the hands of police ignited public outrage, mass protests, and sometimes
attacks on white-owned businesses.
Activists around the country loosely banded together in the BLM, founded in 2013 in response to the
acquittal of a Florida man who fatally shot an unarmed 17-year-old black student, Trayvon Martin,
who was visiting relatives in a gated community. The coalition uses protests, social media, and
publicity to shine a bright light on police violence against African Americans.

III. Comparisons
The 1960s uprisings differed from their precursors in 1919 and 1943. Those—both nonviolent and
disruptive—were led by African Americans, unlike the race riots in Chicago, Tulsa, Detroit, and Los
Angeles that were instigated by white mobs. VS. In the 1960s, almost all looting and burning
happened in African American neighborhoods, targeting mostly white-owned local shops accused of
overcharging black customers for inferior goods. Some whites joined in vandalizing stores, but the
crowds and the business districts affected were overwhelmingly black. The only whites out on the
streets in sizeable numbers were still law enforcement officials.

2020’s uprisings resemble those of 1919, 1943, and 1968 in certain respects: They grow out of
simmering hatreds seeded by the long, festering history of white violence and police brutality against
African Americans that has taken hundreds of lives of per year, including Floyd, Breonna Taylor,
and Ahmaud Arbery, three of the most recent victims.
But more than ever before, today’s demonstrations are markedly interracial.  It suggests a new phase
of opposition that is uniting groups who did not have much in common for most of American history.
In cases where conflicts have erupted, those assaulted, tear-gassed, or shot with rubber bullets are
of all races + The geography of violence and looting looks different in 2020 as well. Clashes of the
past happened mostly in black neighborhoods; today, they have often started and spread to wealthy
downtowns and suburban shopping malls. Looters have gone after local shops and global chains in
wealthy neighborhoods such as Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, and Soho in New York. + In the 1960s,
activists confronted white mobs and police with dignity and decorum, sometimes dressing in church
clothes and kneeling in prayer during protests to make a clear distinction between who was evil and
who was good. But at protests today, it is difficult to distinguish legitimate activists from the mob
actors who burn and loot.

IV. Actuality
More than a thousand protests—most of them peaceful, though some devolved into violence—have
swept across America caused by outrage over the death of George Floyd (25/05/2020), recorded as a
Minneapolis police officer pressed a knee to his neck for nearly nine minutes while Floyd was
handcuffed and lying face down. Floyd was one of approximately 1,100 people killed annually by
police use of force in the United States in recent years. A disproportionate number of the people
killed, like Floyd, are African American.

Most of 2020’s protests have been peaceful, early reports have found, with a fraction becoming
violent.
The recent BLM protests peaked on June 6, when half a million people turned out in nearly 550
places across the United States. That was a single day in more than a month of protests.
Four recent polls suggest that about 15 million to 26 million people in the United States have
participated in demonstrations over the death of George Floyd and others in recent weeks.
Across the United States, there have been more than 4,700 demonstrations, or an average of 140 per
day, since the first protests began in Minneapolis on May 26, according to a Times analysis.
These figures would make the recent protests the largest movement in the country’s history,
according to interviews with scholars and crowd-counting experts.

One of the reasons there have been protests in so many places in the United States is the backing of
organizations like Black Lives Matter. While the group isn’t necessarily directing each protest, it
provides materials, guidance and a framework for new activists, Professor Woodly said. Those
activists are taking to social media to quickly share protest details to a wide audience + The
adversarial stance that the Trump administration has taken has led to more protests than under any
other presidency since the Cold War.

But the amount of change that the protests have been able to produce in such a short period of time
is significant. In Minneapolis, the City Council pledged to dismantle its police department. In New
York, lawmakers repealed a law that kept police disciplinary records secret. Cities and states across
the country passed new laws banning chokeholds. Mississippi lawmakers voted to retire their state
flag, which prominently includes a Confederate battle emblem + George Floyd’s death has sparked a
global movement, with statues of slave-owners being torn down from Bristol, England to Richmond,
Virginia; anti-police protestors taking the knee from Seattle to Rio de Janeiro and Rome; and U.S.
public officials debating whether to defund or rebuild their police forces from the ground up.

V. Opinions
The majority of Americans haven't embraced the activists’ message or strategies, either; fewer than a
third of Americans said Black Lives Matter focuses on real issues of racial discrimination  while 55
percent said the movement distracts from those issues. 65 percent of blacks said the movement of
BLM focuses on real issues of racial discrimination. Just 25 percent of whites felt similarly.
Such tepid acceptance of black activism isn't surprising. This country has a history of disapproving of
civil rights protests and demonstrations.

Today, sit-ins, freedom rides and marches for voting rights are viewed with historical reverence.
Schoolchildren across the country memorize Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
Conservatives invoke the moral authority of the civil rights movement as a model for their own
activism. Civil rights workers are viewed as national heroes.
But in their day, activists were met with widespread disapproval. A review of polling data from the
1960s paints a picture of an America in which the majority of people felt such protest actions would
hurt, not help, African Americans’ fight for equality. Because the very nature of protest is fighting
against the norm
“For the people on one side of the equation, who sat on the side, who didn’t experience segregation,
didn’t experience the various negative laws, everything was fine and what we were doing was a
disruption. In the black community, there was a whole different view.” –Activist in 60’s

Media played a big role in shaping how the public received the methods of 1960s civil rights
protesters.
Compared to the technology available today, their tools were rudimentary. Back then, activists
utilized phone trees and a network of organizations across the country to spread news about what
was happening on the ground.
“No national television crews were coming to Mississippi in 1963. It was critical to try and get the
word out as quickly as possible.”
The 1965 march in Selma, Ala., demonstrated the power of media in swaying public opinion. Images
of peaceful voting rights protesters beaten by policemen were broadcasted across the world.
Back in the 1960s, “it’s young people who’s doing the sitting in, the young people — in their late
teens and early 20s, just like the BLM people are predominantly young,” They are seen as impolite
while King and other older folks were viewed as much more distinguished, and certainly not impolite
at any level.

“what we share with the BLM people is their impatience. It’s their future, it’s their lives — just the
way it was our future and our lives back in the day.”

To some 60’s activists: “Many admire the cause and courage of these young activists but
fundamentally disagree with their approach.  Trained in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr., we
were nonviolent activists who won hearts by conveying respectability and changed laws by delivering
a message of love and unity. BLM seems intent on rejecting our proven methods. This movement is
ignoring what our history has taught”.

To many, while the loving, nonviolent approach is what wins allies and mollifies enemies, what we
have seen come out of Black Lives Matter is rage and anger — justifiable emotions, but questionable
strategy. 

Six-in-ten Americans say the president has been delivering the wrong message to the country in
response to these protests. Almost half say he has made race relations worse. About two-thirds of
black adults say Trump has made race relations worse
!!!