R2.11 Social movements in the Americas (1945–2020)

A social movement is a sustained, organised campaign by large numbers of people to change society, usually by putting pressure on governments from outside the formal political system. Between 1945 and 2020 the Americas saw some of the most influential social movements of the modern world, above all the African American civil rights movement, whose methods and ideas were copied by Indigenous peoples, Mexican Americans, women, students, disabled people and gay and lesbian activists from Canada to Argentina.

Identifying the movements

Several groups who campaigned for rights after 1945 are easily confused, and each had a different history and different goals. The table of the main movements sets out who they were. The differences matter, because a movement’s goals followed from its history: African Americans, whose ancestors had been enslaved, demanded equal citizenship and the end of segregation, while Indigenous nations, who had signed treaties as separate peoples, often demanded the opposite of integration, namely recognition of their sovereignty and their land.

Why the African American civil rights movement emerged, c. 1945–1955

Black Americans had resisted slavery and segregation for centuries, and organisations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP, founded 1909) had fought Jim Crow in the courts for decades. The question historians ask is why this long struggle became a mass movement in the decade after 1945. The answer lies in a combination of social, political and economic changes and new ideas, which the diagram of causes groups together.

Social factors: Jim Crow

In 1945 eleven southern states and several border states enforced racial separation by law, under the system called Jim Crow. The Supreme Court had approved it in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which allowed separate facilities for Black and white people as long as they were “equal”. In practice they never were. Black and white southerners used separate schools, hospitals, railway carriages, waiting rooms, restaurants and cemeteries, and the Black facilities were almost always poorer. In 1940 southern states spent on average less than half as much on each Black pupil as on each white one.

Segregation rested on disfranchisement, the removal of the right to vote. Southern states used poll taxes, literacy tests judged by white registrars, “white primaries” that excluded Black voters from the only election that mattered in a one-party South, and economic threats and violence against anyone who tried to register. In Mississippi only about 5 per cent of Black adults were registered in the early 1960s. Without the vote, Black southerners could not change the laws or the officials who enforced them.

Violence held the system together. Lynching, the murder of Black people by white mobs, had declined since the 1920s but had not ended, and juries of white men almost never convicted the killers. The murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, in August 1955, and his mother Mamie Till’s decision to hold an open-casket funeral so that the world could see what had been done to him, showed a national Black audience through photographs in Jet magazine that the old order would be defended by killing. The acquittal of his murderers by an all-white jury a month later deepened the anger.

Outside the South, segregation was de facto but real. From the 1930s federal housing agencies graded neighbourhoods by risk, marking Black areas in red on their maps, so that banks refused mortgages there, a practice later called redlining. Restrictive covenants in property deeds barred Black buyers from white suburbs. Black migrants to northern cities therefore found themselves crowded into ghettos with poor schools and high rents.

Political factors: war, presidents and the Cold War

The Second World War was the main political catalyst. About a million Black men and women served in the armed forces, in segregated units. In 1942 the Pittsburgh Courier, a Black newspaper, launched the Double V campaign: victory over fascism abroad and over racism at home. The labour leader A. Philip Randolph had already threatened a march on Washington in 1941, which led President Franklin Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802 banning discrimination in defence industries. These wartime events, which belong to the history of the war itself, showed that mass pressure could move a president. Black veterans returned determined not to accept second-class citizenship, and several of them, such as Medgar Evers in Mississippi, became leaders of the movement.

The presidency began to change. In 1946 a wave of attacks on Black veterans, including the blinding of Sergeant Isaac Woodard by a South Carolina police chief, led President Harry Truman to appoint a President’s Committee on Civil Rights. Its report, To Secure These Rights (October 1947), called for federal laws against lynching and the poll tax and for an end to segregation. Congress, where southern Democrats controlled key committees and could block bills by filibuster, passed none of them. Truman acted where he could without Congress: Executive Order 9981 of 26 July 1948 ordered equal treatment in the armed forces, which led to their desegregation during the Korean War.

Truman’s stand split his party. In 1948 southern Democrats walked out of the party convention and formed the States’ Rights Democratic Party, the Dixiecrats, which won four southern states. Truman still won the election, helped by Black voters in northern cities such as Chicago, Detroit and New York. The Great Migration had turned Black Americans into a voting bloc that could decide close elections in large northern states, which gave both parties a reason to take civil rights seriously.

The Cold War added international pressure. The United States presented itself as the leader of the free world, but Soviet propaganda used every lynching and segregated school as evidence of American hypocrisy, and African and Asian diplomats in Washington were refused service in segregated restaurants. As colonies in Africa and Asia gained independence, beginning with India in 1947 and Ghana in 1957, the United States needed their friendship. The historian Mary Dudziak, in Cold War Civil Rights (2000), shows that the Justice Department’s brief in support of school desegregation in 1952 argued that segregation damaged American foreign policy.

Economic factors: migration, mechanisation and buying power

The Great Migration of Black southerners to northern and western cities, which began during the First World War, became even larger during and after the Second. About five million people moved between 1940 and 1970. In 1940 about three-quarters of Black Americans lived in the South; by 1970 just over half did. Migrants found better-paid industrial jobs and the vote, and their earnings and votes supported organisations such as the NAACP, whose membership grew roughly ninefold in the 1940s, from about 50,000 in 1940 to about 450,000 or more in 1946 (estimates vary).

Southern agriculture was changing at the same time. The mechanical cotton picker, in widespread use from the late 1940s, and the use of herbicides reduced the need for sharecropping labour, which had tied Black families to white landowners. Black southerners increasingly lived in towns and cities, where churches, colleges and businesses gave them institutions independent of white employers. A Black middle class of ministers, teachers, doctors, lawyers and business owners, who did not depend on white incomes, provided many of the movement’s leaders.

Black workers and consumers also had economic power that could be used against segregation. Black trade unionists such as Randolph, whose Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was the first major Black-led union, and E. D. Nixon, a Pullman porter who led the Montgomery NAACP, knew how to organise. Black customers made up a large share of the riders of southern city buses and the shoppers in downtown stores, which made boycotts a powerful weapon.

The role of ideas

Several traditions of thought gave the movement its goals and its methods:

• The Black church. Christian teaching about the equality of all people before God, the story of the Exodus from slavery and the tradition of preaching gave the movement its language, its meeting places and many of its leaders. Churches were the one large institution in the South that Black people owned and controlled.

• Gandhian non-violence. The Indian campaign of satyagraha led by Mohandas Gandhi inspired American pacifists. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded in Chicago in 1942 by members of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, used sit-ins against segregated restaurants in the 1940s. Bayard Rustin and James Lawson later trained activists in the discipline of non-violence.

• The American creed. Activists appealed to the Declaration of Independence and the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of equal protection of the laws. The Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944) argued that the conflict between the American ideal of equality and the treatment of Black Americans was the nation’s central moral problem, an argument that influenced white liberals and the Supreme Court.

• The NAACP’s legal strategy. From the 1930s the lawyers Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall planned a step-by-step attack on segregated education through the courts, first in graduate and law schools, where unequal provision was easiest to prove.

• Black nationalism. The tradition of Marcus Garvey, whose Universal Negro Improvement Association had millions of followers in the 1920s, and of the Nation of Islam, which preached separation from white America, rejected integration and stressed Black pride and self-reliance. It would return to the centre of the movement in the 1960s.

Methods: the legal challenge to segregation, 1944–1957

The first method of the post-war movement was litigation, led by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (the LDF), which Thurgood Marshall directed. Its strategy was to make “separate but equal” too expensive and then to attack it directly. A series of Supreme Court victories prepared the way:

Data on southern registration: US Commission on Civil Rights estimates, quoted in Steven Lawson, Black Ballots (1976).

Brown v. Board of Education, 1954

Brown v. Board of Education combined five cases from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware and the District of Columbia. Marshall’s team used evidence from social scientists, including the psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s experiments in which Black children preferred white dolls to Black ones, to argue that segregation itself harmed Black children. The new Chief Justice, Earl Warren, appointed by President Eisenhower in 1953, worked to secure a unanimous decision so that the South could not claim the Court was divided.

To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. … We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

Chief Justice Earl Warren, opinion of the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 17 May 1954. The opinion was deliberately short and non-technical so that it could be printed in newspapers and read by the public. By resting the decision on the psychological harm done to children, not on the history of the Fourteenth Amendment, Warren avoided a debate he might have lost, but critics then and since have argued that the decision rested on social science more than on law.

Massive resistance and Little Rock

The decision provoked a white backlash in the South. Citizens’ Councils of white businessmen and politicians formed to resist integration, and in March 1956 101 southern members of Congress signed the Southern Manifesto, promising to use “all lawful means” to reverse Brown. Virginia’s policy of massive resistance closed schools rather than integrate them; Prince Edward County closed its public schools entirely from 1959 to 1964, while white children attended private academies. The Ku Klux Klan revived. Alabama banned the NAACP from operating in the state from 1956 to 1964.

The first test of federal will came at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1957. Governor Orval Faubus used the state National Guard to stop nine Black students from entering, and a white mob surrounded the school. President Eisenhower, who privately disliked the Brown decision, could not allow a state to defy a federal court. He sent the 101st Airborne Division and federalised the Arkansas National Guard to escort the students. The NAACP state leader Daisy Bates organised and protected the “Little Rock Nine”. Faubus then closed Little Rock’s high schools for the 1958–1959 school year.

Little Rock showed both the power and the limits of the courts. A Supreme Court decision could be enforced if the president was willing to use troops, but presidents were reluctant, and the decision could be resisted school district by school district. Ten years after Brown, only about 2 per cent of Black children in the South attended school with white children, as the graph of school desegregation shows. In 1957 Congress passed the first civil rights act since Reconstruction, which created a Civil Rights Commission and a Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department, but southern senators had removed its most effective clauses.

Methods: non-violent direct action and Martin Luther King Jr., 1955–1968

From 1955 the movement added mass protest to litigation. Its central method was non-violent direct action: protesters broke segregation laws openly, accepted arrest and violence without hitting back, and so forced the authorities to respond in front of the press and television. Non-violence served several purposes at once. It allowed ordinary people, including children and the elderly, to take part; it denied southern officials the excuse of public order for repression; and it presented the protesters, in the eyes of the national public, as the moral side. The campaigns are summarised in the timeline of direct action.

Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma

The Montgomery bus boycott began after Rosa Parks was arrested on 1 December 1955 for refusing to give up her seat. The Women’s Political Council, led by Jo Ann Robinson, had already prepared a boycott, and on 5 December most of the city’s Black riders stayed off the buses. A car pool of volunteer drivers and church-organised transport kept the protest going for 381 days. It ended on 20 December 1956, after the Supreme Court upheld the ruling in Browder v. Gayle that bus segregation was unconstitutional.

In Birmingham, Alabama, the SCLC and the local minister Fred Shuttlesworth launched a campaign of marches, sit-ins and boycotts in April 1963 against segregation in the city’s shops and public places. King was jailed on 12 April and wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in reply to white clergy who had urged him to wait. In early May, hundreds of schoolchildren joined the marches, and the police under Eugene “Bull” Connor used dogs and high-pressure fire hoses against them in front of reporters. The photographs shocked national opinion, businesses agreed to desegregate on 10 May, and on 11 June President Kennedy announced the civil rights bill that became the Act of 1964.

The Selma campaign of early 1965 was aimed at voting rights in Dallas County, Alabama, where very few Black adults were registered. A state trooper shot the young activist Jimmie Lee Jackson, who died in February. On 7 March 1965, “Bloody Sunday”, state troopers and a sheriff’s posse attacked about 600 marchers with clubs and tear gas at the Edmund Pettus Bridge; John Lewis of SNCC was among those injured. President Johnson spoke to Congress on 15 March in support of a voting rights bill, and a protected march from Selma to Montgomery reached the state capital on 25 March. The Voting Rights Act followed in August. The sit-ins and Freedom Rides, and the use of these campaigns as examples of how popular movements create change, are covered in the thematic study of popular movements; here the campaigns are used for what they show about leadership, organisation and the movement’s relationship with the federal government.

King’s ideas and leadership

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) was a Baptist minister from Atlanta with a doctorate in theology from Boston University. He became leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) in December 1955 because he was new to the city and had no enemies among its Black leaders, not because he had planned the boycott. His philosophy combined the Christian ideal of love for one’s enemy, Gandhi’s method of non-violent resistance, which he studied with the help of Bayard Rustin and the Fellowship of Reconciliation during the boycott, and the American creed of equal rights. He argued that unearned suffering was redemptive and that non-violence aimed to win over the opponent, not to defeat him.

King’s greatest strengths were as a speaker and a symbol. His sermons and speeches, above all at the March on Washington on 28 August 1963, translated the demands of Black southerners into the language of the Bible and the Declaration of Independence, which white Americans outside the South could accept. His fame brought money and journalists to every campaign he joined, and his relationship with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson gave the movement access to the White House. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

King’s record as a strategist was more mixed. The table of King’s role in the main campaigns shows that he initiated few of them and that some of his own campaigns failed.

Non-violence was met with violence throughout. In 1963 alone, Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s field secretary in Mississippi, was shot dead outside his home in Jackson on 12 June, the day after Kennedy’s televised address on civil rights, and a Klan bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham killed four Black girls on 15 September, less than three weeks after the March on Washington. Such killings tested the commitment of younger activists to non-violence, but in the short term they also strengthened national support for federal legislation.

King learned from failure. In Albany he saw that a police chief who arrested protesters quietly could defeat a campaign, so in Birmingham and Selma the SCLC chose places where officials such as Eugene “Bull” Connor and Sheriff Jim Clark were likely to use violence in front of cameras. In 1966 he took the movement north to Chicago to campaign against slum housing and segregated neighbourhoods. Marchers in the white suburb of Marquette Park were stoned in August 1966, and King said that he had never seen a crowd so hostile, even in the South. The campaign won only a weak open-housing agreement with Mayor Richard Daley, which showed that non-violent protest against de facto segregation and poverty could not produce the national crisis that had worked against southern laws.

In his last years King moved to the left. In April 1967 he publicly condemned the Vietnam War, which cost him his relationship with Johnson and the support of the NAACP and many liberals. He planned a Poor People’s Campaign to bring poor people of all races to Washington to demand jobs and an income, and went to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers. He was shot dead there on 4 April 1968. Riots followed in more than 100 cities.

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Methods: grassroots organisations and the role of women

The civil rights movement was not one organisation. It was a network of national and local bodies that cooperated, competed for members and money, and often disagreed about methods. The diagram of the main organisations shows how they were linked.

Organising the rural South: SNCC and Mississippi

SNCC developed a different method from the SCLC’s short, high-profile campaigns. Its field secretaries, many of them students who had left college, lived for months or years in rural counties in Mississippi, south-west Georgia and Alabama, where they encouraged local people to try to register to vote and helped them become leaders themselves. Bob Moses, a teacher from New York, began this work in McComb, Mississippi, in 1961. The work was slow and dangerous: the local farmer Herbert Lee, who had helped Moses, was shot dead by a state legislator in September 1961, and no one was punished.

In 1964 COFO brought between about 700 and 1,000 mostly white northern student volunteers to Mississippi for Freedom Summer, to register voters and run “freedom schools”. Its organisers calculated that violence against white students would bring the national attention that violence against local Black people did not. Three activists, James Chaney, a local Black man, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, white New Yorkers, were murdered by Klansmen and local law officers near Philadelphia, Mississippi, on 21 June 1964. Their deaths brought the FBI to Mississippi in force.

Because Black Mississippians were kept off the rolls, COFO organised the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which held its own open elections and sent a delegation to the Democratic National Convention at Atlantic City in August 1964 to challenge the all-white official delegation. President Johnson, fearing the loss of southern states, arranged a compromise that offered the MFDP two seats without a vote. The MFDP rejected it. Many SNCC activists concluded that liberal allies and the Democratic Party could not be trusted, which helped to prepare the turn to Black Power.

Women in the movement

Women made up a majority of the movement’s rank and file and did much of its organising, but men held almost all its public leadership posts. The historian Charles Payne, in I’ve Got the Light of Freedom (1995), argues that in Mississippi women were far more likely than men to attend meetings, canvass and attempt to register, and that the “organising tradition” of patient local work, often led by women, mattered more than the “mobilising tradition” of mass marches led by ministers.

Ella Baker

Ella Baker (1903–1986) had been the NAACP’s director of branches in the 1940s and was the first acting executive director of the SCLC from 1958. She was frustrated by the ministers’ dependence on one charismatic leader and their unwillingness to take a woman’s advice. In April 1960 she called a conference of sit-in students at her old college, Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, where SNCC was founded, and she encouraged the students to remain independent of the SCLC.

The Student Leadership Conference made it crystal clear that current sit-ins and other demonstrations are concerned with something much bigger than a hamburger or even a giant-sized Coke. … This inclination toward group-centered leadership, rather than toward a leader-centered group pattern of organization, was refreshing indeed to those of the older group who bear the scars of the battle, the frustrations and the disillusionment that come when the prophetic leader turns out to have heavy feet of clay.

Ella Baker, “Bigger than a Hamburger”, The Southern Patriot, 1960. Baker wrote this account of the Raleigh conference for a newspaper of white southern liberals that supported integration. Her description of the students is also an argument: the remark about leaders with “feet of clay” was a criticism of the SCLC’s reliance on King, and it shows the disagreement over leadership that divided the movement’s organisations from the start.

Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977) was a sharecropper from Sunflower County, Mississippi, who was evicted from the plantation where she had worked for 18 years after she tried to register to vote in August 1962. She became a SNCC field secretary. In June 1963 she was savagely beaten in the jail at Winona, Mississippi, after a voter-registration workshop. Her televised testimony to the Credentials Committee at the 1964 Democratic convention, describing the beating, made her a national figure, and she became vice-chair of the MFDP. Her life showed the movement’s claim that ordinary poor people, not only educated leaders, could transform politics.

Angela Davis

Angela Davis (born 1944), a philosophy lecturer at the University of California and a member of the Communist Party, represents the radical, Marxist strand of Black activism after 1968. She campaigned for Black prisoners and was linked with the Black Panthers. In 1970 she was charged with supplying guns used in a courthouse escape attempt in which a judge was killed, became one of the few women on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list and spent 16 months in prison before an all-white jury acquitted her in June 1972. The international “Free Angela” campaign made her a symbol of resistance to state repression, and she later became a leading campaigner for the abolition of prisons.

Other women shaped the movement at every stage. Jo Ann Robinson of the Women’s Political Council printed the leaflets that launched the Montgomery boycott; Septima Clark designed the citizenship schools that taught adult literacy so that Black southerners could pass registration tests; Diane Nash led the Nashville sit-ins and kept the Freedom Rides going in 1961; Dorothy Height led the National Council of Negro Women; and Elaine Brown chaired the Black Panther Party from 1974 to 1977.

Women also met sexism inside the movement. No woman was invited to give a full speech at the March on Washington. In 1965 two white SNCC activists, Casey Hayden and Mary King, circulated a memo on the position of women in the movement that helped start the women’s liberation movement. Black women who felt excluded by both white feminism and male-led Black organisations formed the Combahee River Collective in Boston in 1974, whose statement of 1977 helped to develop the ideas now called intersectionality; this strand is studied in the focused study of feminism in the USA.

Methods: radical activism, Malcolm X, Black Power and the Black Panthers

Alongside the non-violent mainstream there had always been Black Americans who rejected integration as a goal, non-violence as a method, or both. Their influence grew in the mid-1960s, when legal victories in the South did little for the poor in northern ghettos and when violence against non-violent protesters went unpunished.

Armed self-defence in the South

Many Black southerners kept guns to protect their homes, and even some non-violent activists relied on armed local people to guard them at night. Robert F. Williams, president of the NAACP branch in Monroe, North Carolina, organised armed defence against the Ku Klux Klan in the late 1950s, was suspended by the national NAACP for saying Black people should meet violence with violence, and described his ideas in Negroes with Guns (1962) after fleeing to Cuba. In 1964 Black veterans in Jonesboro, Louisiana, formed the Deacons for Defense and Justice, which guarded CORE workers and marches with guns. The historian Timothy Tyson, in Radio Free Dixie (1999), argues that armed self-defence and non-violence existed side by side in the southern movement.

Malcolm X

Malcolm X (1925–1965), born Malcolm Little, joined the Nation of Islam while in prison for burglary and became its most effective preacher, building its mosque in Harlem. The Nation, led by Elijah Muhammad, taught that white people were inherently evil, that Black Americans should separate from white society, and that they should defend themselves. Malcolm mocked the March on Washington and called non-violence a betrayal of Black people’s right to self-defence. His message of pride and anger appealed above all to the urban poor of the North, whom the southern movement did not reach.

In March 1964 Malcolm broke with Elijah Muhammad. After a pilgrimage to Mecca, where he saw Muslims of all races worshipping together, he converted to Sunni Islam, moderated his view of white people and founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity, which linked the struggle of Black Americans to independence movements in Africa. He began to speak of working with civil rights organisations on voter registration.

No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. … So, I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver—no, not I. I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.

Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet”, speech in Cleveland, Ohio, 3 April 1964. Malcolm gave the speech soon after leaving the Nation of Islam, to a mixed audience at a church meeting organised by CORE, while the Civil Rights Act was being filibustered in the Senate. His rejection of the American creed directly contradicts the appeal to American ideals at the centre of King’s speeches; his warning that Black people would turn to “the bullet” if denied the ballot was aimed at persuading white America to act quickly, so the speech is evidence of a radical strategy of pressure as well as of anger.

Malcolm X was assassinated by members of the Nation of Islam in New York on 21 February 1965. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written with Alex Haley and published later that year, made him more influential in death than in life.

Black Power

The slogan Black Power was popularised by Stokely Carmichael, the new chairman of SNCC, at a rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, on 16 June 1966, during the “March Against Fear” begun by James Meredith, who had been shot on the second day of his walk. The crowd’s response showed how far frustration had grown. Black Power meant different things to different people: Black political control of areas where Black people were the majority, Black-owned businesses and schools, pride in African heritage, and the right to self-defence. In practice it meant that Black people should lead their own organisations. In December 1966 SNCC voted to exclude its white members, and CORE took the same path.

Black Power had a large cultural impact. The slogan “Black is beautiful”, natural hairstyles, African dress and names, the creation of Black studies departments in universities, the holiday Kwanzaa (first celebrated in 1966) and the raised fists of the athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the medal podium at the Mexico City Olympics on 16 October 1968 all expressed a new pride. Older civil rights leaders such as Roy Wilkins of the NAACP condemned Black Power as separatist, and King warned that the slogan frightened white allies without bringing real power.

The Black Panther Party

The Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland, California, in October 1966 by two college students, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. It began by sending armed members to follow police patrols, carrying law books and loaded guns, which was legal in California at the time, to watch for brutality. In May 1967 armed Panthers entered the California state legislature to protest against a bill to ban the open carrying of loaded guns, which brought them national publicity. The party combined Black nationalism with Marxism and saw Black Americans as a colony inside the United States, comparable to the colonised peoples of Africa and Asia. Its programme set out its demands.

We Want Freedom. We Want Power To Determine The Destiny Of Our Black Community. We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny. … We Want An Immediate End To Police Brutality And Murder Of Black People. We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality.

Black Panther Party, Ten-Point Program, points 1 and 7, October 1966. The programme was written by Newton and Seale as the party’s founding document and printed in every issue of its newspaper. Its demands mix the language of the Declaration of Independence with a Marxist analysis of capitalism; the fact that police violence was the first concrete grievance that the party organised around shows a continuity with the protests of 2014–2020.

The Panthers opened chapters in dozens of cities and at their peak in 1968–1969 had an estimated 5,000 members. Their community programmes, including free breakfasts for schoolchildren from 1969, health clinics and testing for sickle-cell anaemia, won local support. Their armed stance, shoot-outs with the police and internal violence also brought heavy repression. The FBI director J. Edgar Hoover described the party as the greatest internal threat to the country’s security, and the FBI’s COINTELPRO counter-intelligence programme used informers and forged letters to divide it. In Chicago, the 21-year-old Panther leader Fred Hampton was killed in a police raid organised with FBI help on 4 December 1969. By the mid-1970s the party had declined.

Urban uprisings

Between 1964 and 1968 rioting broke out in hundreds of American cities, beginning in Harlem in July 1964. In the Watts district of Los Angeles in August 1965, five days after the Voting Rights Act was signed, 34 people died; in Detroit in July 1967, 43 died, and federal troops were sent in. President Johnson appointed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, chaired by Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois, to explain the violence. Its report, published in February 1968, rejected the claim that outside agitators were responsible.

This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal. Reaction to last summer’s disorders has quickened the movement and deepened the division. Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American. This deepening racial division is not inevitable.

National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission), Report, summary, February 1968. The commission was appointed by a president who wanted to show that his government was responding to the riots, and its members were mainly moderate politicians, which gives its condemnation of white racism and its call for massive spending on jobs and housing particular weight. Johnson, whose budget was already strained by the Vietnam War, declined to endorse the report in public, and its recommendations were largely ignored.

The uprisings were not organised by any movement, but they were political. They were directed above all at the police and at white-owned shops in neighbourhoods where poverty, unemployment and overcrowding were worst. They also strengthened a white backlash: in 1968 Richard Nixon won the presidency promising “law and order”.

The extent of change: courts, Congress and presidents

Historians measure the movement’s achievements in four areas: Supreme Court decisions, legislation and presidential action, social and cultural change, and economic change. The legal revolution of 1954–1968 was the clearest success, and it came through the combined pressure of courts, protest and politics.

Presidents and Congress, 1953–1969

Johnson’s achievement depended on the movement. After Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, Johnson made the civil rights bill a memorial to him. Southern senators filibustered it for 60 working days, the longest debate in the Senate’s history, until on 10 June 1964 the Senate voted for cloture, the procedure that ends a filibuster, for the first time on a civil rights bill, by 71 votes to 29. Johnson had worked with the Republican leader Everett Dirksen to win the votes of Republicans from the Midwest. Johnson’s domestic record as a whole, the Great Society, belongs to the political history of the United States in these years; the laws themselves were the movement’s main achievements.

The civil rights laws

The Voting Rights Act was the most effective of the laws. The chart of registration shows that in Mississippi the share of Black adults registered rose from under 7 per cent to about 60 per cent in two years. Black voting changed southern politics: white politicians who had campaigned as segregationists, such as George Wallace of Alabama, began to court Black voters in the 1970s and 1980s, and the number of Black elected officials in the United States rose from 1,469 in 1970 to more than 10,000 by the 2010s, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

The Supreme Court after Brown

The Supreme Court continued to extend civil rights. In Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States (1964) it upheld the Civil Rights Act under Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. In Loving v. Virginia (12 June 1967) it struck down the laws of 16 states that banned marriage between races. In Green v. County School Board of New Kent County (1968) it ordered districts to end dual school systems at once, and in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971) it approved busing pupils to achieve integration.

After 1970 the Court, reshaped by Nixon’s appointments, began to set limits. In Milliken v. Bradley (1974) it ruled that suburbs could not be included in busing plans for cities unless they had themselves discriminated, which allowed white families to avoid integration by moving to the suburbs. In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) it banned fixed racial quotas in university admissions but allowed race to be considered as one factor, keeping a limited form of affirmative action. In Shelby County v. Holder (25 June 2013) it struck down the formula that decided which areas needed preclearance under the Voting Rights Act, arguing that conditions in the South had changed; several states then introduced stricter voter identification laws.

The extent of change: social, cultural and economic change, 1968–2020

Social and cultural change

The most visible social change was the end of legal segregation. Within a few years of 1964 the “Whites only” signs had gone from southern restaurants, stations and hospitals, and by the early 1970s the South’s schools were the most integrated in the country. Black Americans entered occupations and institutions from which they had been excluded: southern universities, police forces, newsrooms and television, corporate management and the officer corps of the armed forces. Public opinion changed too. In Gallup polls the share of Americans who said they would vote for a well-qualified Black candidate for president nominated by their party rose from 38 per cent in 1958 to more than 90 per cent by the late 1990s.

Black culture moved to the centre of American life. Motown and soul music, the Black Arts Movement in literature and theatre, and athletes such as the boxer Muhammad Ali, who refused the draft in 1967 on religious grounds and was stripped of his title, made Black identity visible and proud. Holidays and symbols followed: Congress made Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a federal holiday in 1983 after a long campaign led by the singer Stevie Wonder and Coretta Scott King.

De facto segregation proved much harder to change than de jure segregation. The resistance to busing in the North was as bitter as anything in the South: in Boston from 1974 white crowds stoned buses carrying Black children to schools in Irish American South Boston. As white families left city school districts for the suburbs, many urban schools became almost entirely Black and Hispanic, and from about 1990 southern schools also began to resegregate, as the graph of school desegregation shows. The historian and lawyer Michelle Alexander, in The New Jim Crow (2010), argued that the “war on drugs” from the 1980s and the growth of mass incarceration created a new system of racial control: the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated in 2003 that a Black boy born in 2001 had about a one-in-three chance of going to prison during his lifetime, compared with about one in seventeen for a white boy.

Economic change

Economic change was real but much more limited than legal change. The chart of poverty rates shows that the share of Black Americans living in poverty fell sharply in the late 1960s, from about 55 per cent in 1959 to 32 per cent in 1969, a period that combined the civil rights laws, Johnson’s War on Poverty and a long economic boom. Title VII and affirmative action opened better-paid jobs in government and large companies, and a substantial Black middle class grew in the suburbs.

After 1970 progress slowed. The decline of manufacturing industry in northern cities in the 1970s and 1980s removed the well-paid factory jobs that had drawn migrants north. The sociologist William Julius Wilson, in The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), argued that the departure of jobs and of middle-class Black families from inner cities left behind concentrated poverty, which, in his view, explained Black disadvantage better than racial discrimination alone. Others stressed continuing discrimination in hiring, lending and housing. Black median household income has remained at about 60 per cent of white income since the 1970s, and the gap in wealth, which reflects generations of exclusion from home ownership through redlining, is much larger: in 2019 the median white family held about US$188,000 in wealth and the median Black family about US$24,000, according to the Federal Reserve.

Politics and protest, 1970–2020

The movement’s energy moved into electoral politics. Black mayors were elected in most large cities, including Atlanta, Detroit, Los Angeles and Chicago; the Congressional Black Caucus was founded in 1971; and Jesse Jackson, a former aide to King, ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988, winning about 7 million primary votes in 1988 with a “Rainbow Coalition” of minorities, poor whites and liberals. The election of Barack Obama as the first Black president on 4 November 2008 was seen by many as the fulfilment of the movement’s hopes, and by others as proof that a symbolic victory could coexist with structural inequality.

Protest returned whenever police violence was seen to go unpunished. In Los Angeles in 1992 the acquittal of four police officers who had been filmed beating Rodney King led to six days of rioting in which more than 60 people died. The Million Man March of 16 October 1995, called by the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan, brought several hundred thousand Black men to Washington in a call for responsibility and self-help.

Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter began as a hashtag in July 2013, created by three Black women organisers, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, after George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black 17-year-old, in Florida. It became a movement after a police officer shot dead Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, in Ferguson, Missouri, on 9 August 2014, and local protests lasted for months. The killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer on 25 May 2020, filmed by a bystander, led to the largest protests in American history: polls suggested that between 15 and 26 million people took part in demonstrations in June 2020.

Black Lives Matter differed from the movement of the 1960s in important ways. It was deliberately decentralised, with no single leader, which reflected Ella Baker’s ideas and the influence of social media; its founders were women, two of whom identified as queer, and it stressed the experiences of Black women and LGBTQ+ people; and its target was not a law that could be repealed but practices of policing and imprisonment. By the end of 2020 it had led some cities and states to ban police chokeholds and to cut or redirect police budgets, and it had changed the language of American politics about race, but federal police reform had not passed Congress.

Data: US Census Bureau (poverty); Federal Reserve, Survey of Consumer Finances, 2019 (wealth); Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies (elected officials).

Perspectives and debates: interpreting the African American civil rights movement

Historians have argued about who led the movement, when it began and ended, how much the courts achieved and how to understand Black Power. The table of interpretations summarises the main positions.

These views can be weighed against each other. The top-down and bottom-up interpretations are not opposites: campaigns such as Selma depended on years of SNCC organising and on King’s ability to bring national attention and the president’s response. Klarman’s backlash thesis and Dudziak’s Cold War thesis both explain why the federal government acted when it did, but both depend on the movement having created the crises that drew attention. Recent historians generally reject the older picture of a heroic, non-violent movement that “went wrong” after 1965, while warning against assuming that all the different goals of Black activists after 1968 were one movement.

Another movement: Indigenous movements in the USA and Canada

Indigenous movements are the fullest example of a social movement in the Americas apart from the African American one, because they emerged at the same time, borrowed some of its methods and achieved large legal changes in both the United States and Canada. Their goals were different. Indigenous peoples were nations with their own governments, lands and treaties, and most of their leaders wanted the government to honour those treaties and allow them to govern themselves, not to be absorbed into the majority society.

Reasons for emergence

Political factors: termination and the White Paper

In both countries the immediate cause of protest was a government plan to end the separate status of Indigenous peoples. In the United States, Congress adopted House Concurrent Resolution 108 in August 1953, which declared that Native Americans should be made subject to the same laws as other citizens as quickly as possible. Under this termination policy, between 1953 and the mid-1960s the federal government ended its recognition of more than 100 tribes and bands, including the Menominee of Wisconsin and the Klamath of Oregon. Their lands were sold or placed under state control, and about 13,000 people lost their status. Public Law 280 (1953) transferred criminal jurisdiction over many reservations to state governments without the tribes’ consent.

In Canada, Indigenous peoples were governed under the Indian Act of 1876, which controlled almost every aspect of life on reserves, banned ceremonies such as the potlatch until 1951 and denied status Indians the federal vote until 1960. In June 1969 the government of Pierre Trudeau, through its minister of Indian affairs Jean Chrétien, issued a White Paper proposing to abolish the Indian Act, end Indian status and transfer services to the provinces, in the name of equality. Indigenous leaders saw it as a plan to end their treaty rights and take their land.

Social and economic factors

Indigenous people were the poorest group in both countries. In the 1960s unemployment on many US reservations was often above 40 per cent, life expectancy was years below the national average, and housing often lacked running water. Under the Indian Relocation Act of 1956 the Bureau of Indian Affairs paid Native Americans to move to cities such as Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis and the San Francisco Bay Area, where many found only low-paid work and discrimination; by 1970 almost half of Native Americans lived in cities. Urban Indians from different nations met in Indian centres and universities, which created a new pan-Indian identity and the networks from which Red Power came.

In Canada about 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children were sent to residential schools, boarding schools funded by the federal government and run by churches, between the 1880s and 1996, when the last one closed. Children were separated from their families, punished for speaking their languages, and many suffered neglect and physical and sexual abuse. Thousands died. The schools’ effects on families, languages and mental health across generations became central to Indigenous politics.

The role of ideas

Indigenous activists drew on their own traditions of sovereignty, treaty-making and spirituality, and on the example of other movements. The civil rights movement showed the power of direct action, and Black Power’s stress on pride and self-determination inspired the slogan Red Power. Decolonisation in Africa and Asia suggested that Indigenous peoples too were colonised nations. The Standing Rock Sioux writer Vine Deloria Jr.’s Custer Died for Your Sins (1969) and the Cree leader Harold Cardinal’s The Unjust Society (1969), a reply to Trudeau’s promise of a “just society”, gave the movements a widely read argument for treaty rights and self-government.

Methods: organisations, protest and law

Indigenous movements used a wide range of methods, from lobbying and lawsuits to occupations and, in a few cases, armed confrontation. Older organisations such as the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI, founded 1944) worked through Congress and the courts; younger activists in the National Indian Youth Council (1961) and the American Indian Movement (AIM), founded in Minneapolis in July 1968 by Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt and others to monitor police treatment of urban Indians, used direct action.

Fish-ins and the occupation of Alcatraz

In Washington state in the 1960s, Native Americans held “fish-ins”, fishing openly in rivers where state law banned it, to assert the fishing rights guaranteed by treaties of the 1850s. They were arrested and sometimes beaten by state officers. The Nisqually activist Billy Frank Jr. was arrested dozens of times. The campaign won in the courts: in United States v. Washington (1974), the Boldt decision, a federal judge ruled that the treaty tribes were entitled to up to half of the harvestable fish.

On 20 November 1969 a group calling itself Indians of All Tribes, led by the Mohawk student Richard Oakes and including many students from California universities, occupied Alcatraz Island, the site of a closed federal prison in San Francisco Bay. They claimed it under an old treaty that, they argued, allowed Indians to take unused federal land, and issued a proclamation that turned the history of colonisation into satire.

We, the native Americans, reclaim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all American Indians by right of discovery. We wish to be fair and honorable in our dealings with the Caucasian inhabitants of this land, and hereby offer the following treaty: We will purchase said Alcatraz Island for twenty-four dollars ($24) in glass beads and red cloth, a precedent set by the white man’s purchase of a similar island about 300 years ago.

Indians of All Tribes, “Proclamation to the Great White Father and All His People”, Alcatraz, November 1969. Written by young, college-educated activists for the press, the proclamation reverses the language of European discovery and treaty-making, offering the same price that the Dutch were said to have paid for Manhattan. Its irony made the occupation a national news story, and it shows that the occupiers aimed at public opinion more than at the island itself.

The occupation lasted until June 1971, when federal marshals removed the last 15 occupiers. It won no title to the island, and it declined after Oakes left following his stepdaughter’s death in a fall. Its significance was symbolic: it was one of the first Indigenous protests to attract sustained national attention, it inspired dozens of further occupations, and Native Americans have dated the start of the modern movement from it.

From the Trail of Broken Treaties to Wounded Knee

AIM became the most visible Indigenous organisation. In November 1972 it led a caravan, the Trail of Broken Treaties, to Washington to present a Twenty-Point Position Paper demanding that the government restore treaty-making and review all treaty violations. When officials refused to meet them, activists occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs building for six days and took away files that they said proved mismanagement.

On 27 February 1973 about 200 AIM members and Oglala Lakota activists, led by Russell Means and Dennis Banks, occupied the village of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where the US Army had massacred more than 250 Lakota in 1890. They protested against the corrupt tribal chairman Dick Wilson, who used a private militia against his opponents, and demanded that the government honour the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. Federal marshals and FBI agents surrounded the village with armoured vehicles, and the two sides exchanged gunfire. Two Native men were killed and a federal marshal was paralysed before the occupation ended by negotiation on 8 May, after 71 days.

Wounded Knee showed both the strength and the weakness of armed confrontation. It drew worldwide attention: when Marlon Brando refused his Academy Award in March 1973, he sent the actor Sacheen Littlefeather to explain that he did so in protest at the treatment of Native Americans. But it also brought prosecutions of AIM leaders, a period of violence on Pine Ridge in which many of Wilson’s opponents were killed over the next three years, and a shoot-out in June 1975 in which two FBI agents and a Native man were killed; the AIM member Leonard Peltier was convicted of the agents’ murders in 1977 in a trial that his supporters argued was unfair; his sentence was commuted in January 2025. By the late 1970s AIM was divided and weakened.

YouTube

Canada: from the Red Paper to Oka

In Canada the main method was political organisation and legal action. The Indian Association of Alberta, led by Harold Cardinal, answered the White Paper with a counter-proposal, Citizens Plus, known as the Red Paper, which its chiefs presented to Trudeau and his cabinet in Ottawa on 4 June 1970.

To us who are Treaty Indians there is nothing more important than our Treaties, our lands and the well being of our future generation. We have studied carefully the contents of the Government White Paper on Indians and we have concluded that it offers despair instead of hope.

Indian Association of Alberta, Citizens Plus (the Red Paper), June 1970. The title came from a government-commissioned report of 1966 that had recommended treating First Nations people as “citizens plus”, with the rights of all Canadians and their treaty rights as well. The chiefs used it to turn the government’s language of equality against it: equal treatment that ignored the treaties would, they argued, mean the loss of their land. The government withdrew the White Paper in 1971.

First Nations then used the courts. In Calder v. British Columbia (1973), brought by the Nisga’a Nation, the Supreme Court of Canada accepted that Aboriginal title to land had existed before colonisation, which led the federal government to begin negotiating comprehensive land claims. The Cree and Inuit of northern Quebec, opposed to a huge hydroelectric project, won the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (1975), the first modern land-claims treaty. Indigenous organisations lobbied in London and Ottawa during the debates on the new constitution, and section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 recognised and affirmed “the existing aboriginal and treaty rights” of the Indian, Inuit and Métis peoples.

Direct action returned in 1990. In June that year Elijah Harper, a Cree member of the Manitoba legislature, used procedural rules to block ratification of the Meech Lake Accord, a constitutional agreement that recognised Quebec as a distinct society but ignored Indigenous peoples. From 11 July to 26 September 1990, Mohawks of Kanehsatà:ke near Oka, Quebec, blockaded a road to stop a golf course being extended onto land that included a burial ground. A police officer, Corporal Marcel Lemay, was killed in a police raid on the first day, and the army was eventually deployed. The Oka crisis led the federal government to set up the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1991–1996).

The role of women

Women led many Indigenous campaigns. In Canada, the Indian Act took away the status of a First Nations woman who married a man without status, but not of a man who married a non-status woman. Jeannette Corbiere Lavell lost her case against this rule in the Supreme Court in 1973, but Sandra Lovelace, a Maliseet woman from New Brunswick, took her case to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, which ruled in 1981 that Canada had violated her rights. Bill C-31 (1985) ended the rule and restored status to more than 100,000 people. In the United States, LaNada Means (later War Jack) was a leader of the Alcatraz occupation; Women of All Red Nations (1974) campaigned against the sterilisation of Native women without proper consent in Indian Health Service hospitals; Ada Deer led the successful campaign to restore the Menominee; and Wilma Mankiller became the first woman principal chief of the Cherokee Nation (1985–1995). In 2012 four women in Saskatchewan, Jessica Gordon, Sylvia McAdam, Sheelah McLean and Nina Wilson, began the protest movement Idle No More against federal changes to environmental law.

Extent of change achieved by Indigenous movements

Legal and political change

The clearest change was in government policy. In a special message to Congress on 8 July 1970, President Nixon formally rejected termination.

The time has come to break decisively with the past and to create the conditions for a new era in which the Indian future is determined by Indian acts and Indian decisions. … Self-determination among the Indian people can and must be encouraged without the threat of eventual termination.

Richard Nixon, Special Message to the Congress on Indian Affairs, 8 July 1970. The message came eight months into the Alcatraz occupation, and Nixon had political reasons for it: a Republican president could present self-determination as a way of reducing federal bureaucracy. It shows that by 1970 the movement’s central demand had become federal policy, before the most dramatic protests had taken place.

A series of laws followed. The Taos Pueblo regained Blue Lake, a sacred site, in 1970; the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (1971) gave Alaska Natives title to 44 million acres and about US$962 million; the Menominee Restoration Act (1973) reversed their termination; the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (1975) allowed tribes to run federally funded services such as schools and health care themselves; the Indian Child Welfare Act (1978) stopped the widespread removal of Native children to non-Native foster homes; the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978) protected traditional religions; and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990) required museums to return human remains and sacred objects. In McGirt v. Oklahoma (9 July 2020) the Supreme Court ruled that much of eastern Oklahoma remained a Muscogee (Creek) reservation for the purposes of federal criminal law.

In Canada, constitutional recognition in 1982 was followed by court decisions that gave section 35 real force, including Delgamuukw v. British Columbia (1997), which accepted oral histories as evidence of Aboriginal title, and Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia (2014), the first declaration of Aboriginal title to a specific area of land. The Inuit of the eastern Arctic negotiated the largest land-claims agreement in Canadian history, and the territory of Nunavut, with an Inuit majority and its own legislature, was created on 1 April 1999.

The movement over residential schools produced the most important changes of the 2000s. Thousands of survivors sued the government and the churches. The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (2006, in force 2007) provided compensation and created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. On 11 June 2008 Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologised in the House of Commons for the schools. The commission heard more than 6,000 witnesses and in June 2015 published 94 Calls to Action; its report concluded that the schools were a central part of a policy that “can best be described as ‘cultural genocide’.” In 2007 the United Nations adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; Canada and the United States were among four states that voted against it, but both endorsed it in 2010.

Social, cultural and economic change

Cultural change was significant. Indigenous languages, ceremonies and arts revived, tribal colleges were founded from 1968, and Indigenous peoples gained control of more of their children’s education. Public attitudes changed slowly: sports teams with Native names and mascots faced growing protest, and in Canada reconciliation became official language by 2015. The protests at Standing Rock in North Dakota in 2016–2017 against the Dakota Access oil pipeline, which brought together hundreds of Native nations and environmental activists, showed the movement’s continuing power to mobilise, although the pipeline was completed.

Economic change was the most limited. Some tribes gained income from gaming after the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (1988), but the benefits were uneven, going mainly to tribes near large cities. In 2019 the poverty rate of American Indians and Alaska Natives was still about twice the national average, and in Canada First Nations communities had far higher rates of poverty, poor housing and unsafe drinking water than other Canadians. The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (final report, June 2019) showed that Indigenous women faced far higher rates of violence than other women.

Indigenous movements in Latin America

Indigenous movements also grew in Latin America from the 1980s, especially in countries with large Indigenous populations. The 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in 1992 became a focus for protest across the continent, and the K’iche’ Maya activist Rigoberta Menchú of Guatemala, whose testimonio of the army’s violence against her family and community was published in 1983, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. The anthropologist David Stoll later argued (1999) that parts of her account were inaccurate, which started a debate about how testimony by survivors should be judged; the main facts of the army’s violence against the Maya are not disputed.

• Ecuador. The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), founded in 1986, led a national uprising in June 1990 in which Indigenous communities blocked roads and occupied churches to demand land and recognition. It became one of the most powerful social movements in Latin America and helped bring down two presidents (1997 and 2000).

• Mexico. On 1 January 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement came into force, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) seized towns in Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest state. After twelve days of fighting it turned to peaceful methods, using the internet and international solidarity to win support, and in 1996 signed the San Andrés Accords on Indigenous rights with the government, which the government did not fully implement.

• Bolivia. Indigenous and peasant movements led protests against the privatisation of water in Cochabamba in 2000 and against gas exports in 2003. Evo Morales, an Aymara coca growers’ leader, became Bolivia’s first Indigenous president in January 2006, and a new constitution of 2009 renamed the country the Plurinational State of Bolivia, recognising 36 Indigenous nations and their languages.

In Latin America, Indigenous movements gained more direct political power than in the United States or Canada, because Indigenous people were a larger share of the population (a majority in Bolivia) and because they allied with peasants, unions and the left. Their political impact on the region’s governments, including the Zapatistas and the “pink tide” of left-wing governments, belongs to the political history of Latin America.

Another movement: the Chicano movement and the farmworkers, c. 1962–1986

Americans of Mexican descent were the largest Hispanic group in the United States, concentrated in the south-western states that had been part of Mexico before 1848. In the 1960s a younger generation began to call themselves Chicanos, a term once used as an insult, to express pride in a mixed Mexican and Indigenous identity and rejection of assimilation. The Chicano movement included the farmworkers’ union led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, student and youth movements in the cities, campaigns for land in New Mexico and a political party in Texas.

Reasons for emergence

Political factors. About 350,000–500,000 Mexican Americans served in the Second World War, and like Black veterans they returned unwilling to accept discrimination. When a funeral home in Three Rivers, Texas, refused in 1949 to hold a wake for Private Félix Longoria, killed in the Philippines, the American GI Forum, founded in 1948 by the doctor Héctor P. García, protested, and Senator Lyndon Johnson arranged his burial at Arlington National Cemetery. Mexican American children were often placed in separate “Mexican schools”; in Mendez v. Westminster (1947) a federal court ruled this unlawful in California, and in Hernandez v. Texas (1954) the Supreme Court ruled that Mexican Americans were protected by the Fourteenth Amendment after a Texas county had not allowed a single Mexican American on a jury in 25 years. In 1954 the government’s “Operation Wetback” deported large numbers of Mexican workers (the government claimed more than a million, a figure historians treat as inflated) and frightened Mexican American citizens too.

Economic and social factors. Farmworkers were among the poorest workers in the country. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which protected the right to form unions, did not cover agricultural workers, so growers did not have to recognise unions. The Bracero Program (1942–1964) brought millions of Mexican contract workers to American farms and was used to keep wages low and to break strikes; its end in 1964 made it possible to organise. In the cities, Mexican American students attended overcrowded, under-funded schools in the barrios, where they were punished for speaking Spanish and more than half did not finish high school. Mexican Americans also died in disproportionate numbers in Vietnam.

Ideas. Chávez combined Catholic social teaching, which taught the dignity of work and the duty to help the poor, with Gandhi’s non-violence, and used Catholic symbols such as the Virgin of Guadalupe in marches. Younger activists were inspired by Black Power and by the Cuban Revolution, and wrote the idea of Chicano nationhood into El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, adopted at a youth conference in Denver in March 1969. It named the south-west Aztlán, after the legendary homeland of the Mexica (Aztecs), and called for Chicano control of their own communities.

Methods: strikes, boycotts and protest

César Chávez, Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers

César Chávez (1927–1993), the son of migrant farmworkers, and Dolores Huerta (born 1930), a teacher, learned organising in the Community Service Organization in California. In 1962 they founded the National Farm Workers Association, which soon made Delano, in the Central Valley, its base. On 8 September 1965 Filipino grape workers of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, led by Larry Itliong, went on strike against Delano grape growers, and on 16 September Chávez’s association voted to join them. The two groups merged in 1966 into what became the United Farm Workers (UFW).

Strikes alone could not win, because growers brought in replacement workers and had the support of local police and courts. The union therefore used methods that took the struggle beyond the fields:

• A pilgrimage. In March–April 1966 strikers marched about 300 miles (480 km) from Delano to the state capital, Sacramento, arriving on Easter Sunday. The march, led by a banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, presented the strike as a moral and religious cause, and the Schenley company signed the first contract during it.

• The national grape boycott. From 1967–1968 the union sent strikers to cities across the United States and Canada to persuade shoppers, unions, churches and supermarkets not to buy table grapes. The union cited a Harris poll of 1975 as showing that about 17 million Americans were boycotting grapes, a figure that is the union’s own claim and that no independent source has confirmed. As the photograph of pickets in 1973 shows, the boycott moved the conflict to places where the growers were weak.

• Fasting and non-violence. When some strikers called for violence in 1968, Chávez fasted for 25 days to recommit the union to non-violence. Senator Robert Kennedy joined him when he broke the fast in March 1968.

In July 1970 most table-grape growers in Delano signed contracts with the union, raising wages and banning dangerous pesticides. The union then faced a long struggle in the lettuce fields and against the Teamsters union, which signed rival contracts with growers in 1973; strikers were beaten and two were killed in August 1973. Political pressure led California to pass the Agricultural Labor Relations Act (1975), which gave farmworkers the right to secret-ballot union elections, the first such law in the United States.

Dolores Huerta was the union’s chief negotiator, lobbyist and boycott organiser, and created its slogan ¡Sí, se puede! (“Yes, it can be done!”) during Chávez’s fast in Arizona in 1972. She was often less visible than Chávez in histories of the union, which reflects the place of women in the movement. Chicana activists who met at the Conferencia de Mujeres por la Raza in Houston in 1971 criticised sexism within Chicano organisations and developed a Chicana feminism that combined questions of race, class and gender.

Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.

César Chávez, address to the Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco, 9 November 1984. Chávez spoke to an audience of business and professional people at a time when the UFW was losing contracts and members and when Governor George Deukmejian’s administration was weakening the enforcement of the 1975 law. His claim that change was irreversible was partly a statement of faith and partly an argument to the powerful that the Mexican American population, growing in numbers and votes, could no longer be ignored.

Urban and youth activism

In the cities the movement was led by students and young people. In March 1968 thousands of Mexican American students walked out of five high schools in East Los Angeles, demanding bilingual teaching, Mexican American teachers and courses on their history, with the support of the teacher Sal Castro. The Brown Berets, a youth group modelled partly on the Black Panthers, provided security. On 29 August 1970 between 20,000 and 30,000 people joined the Chicano Moratorium march in East Los Angeles against the Vietnam War and the high death rate of Chicano soldiers. The police broke up the rally, and the journalist Rubén Salazar was killed by a tear-gas projectile fired by a sheriff’s deputy into a bar.

Other leaders took more radical paths. In New Mexico, Reies López Tijerina’s Alianza Federal de Mercedes demanded the return of land grants lost after 1848 and in June 1967 raided the courthouse at Tierra Amarilla in an armed attempt to arrest the district attorney, in which two officers were wounded. In Denver, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales founded the Crusade for Justice and wrote the epic poem Yo Soy Joaquín (1967). In Texas, José Ángel Gutiérrez founded La Raza Unida Party (1970), which won control of local government in Crystal City and other towns where Mexican Americans were a majority.

Extent of change achieved by the Chicano movement

After 1980 immigration became the central issue for Hispanic Americans. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 had ended quotas based on national origin but for the first time limited immigration from the Western Hemisphere, which turned many Mexican migrants into undocumented workers. The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 6 November 1986 gave legal status to about 2.7 million undocumented immigrants while penalising employers who hired undocumented workers. Later conflicts showed both the backlash and the growing power of Latino communities: California voters approved Proposition 187 in 1994, which denied public services to undocumented immigrants (it was blocked by the courts), and in the spring of 2006 millions of people marched in cities across the country against a bill to make illegal residence a crime. In June 2012 President Obama created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which protected from deportation young people brought to the country as children.

Historians disagree about how much the movement achieved. Ignacio García, in Chicanismo (1997), stresses the lasting change in identity and political consciousness. Matt Garcia, in From the Jaws of Victory (2012), argues that the UFW won a remarkable victory in 1970 but then lost much of it because of Chávez’s increasingly authoritarian leadership, his purges of staff and his decision to put the boycott and his own community ahead of organising workers in the fields.

Other social movements in the Americas

The African American movement’s methods and language of rights spread to many other groups. Each of these movements has its own causes, methods and results.

Feminist movements beyond the United States

Second-wave feminism in the United States between 1960 and 1979, its causes, methods and achievements, is a focused study of its own. The wider story of feminism in the Americas shows how differently women’s movements developed in different political systems.

• Canada. Pressure from women’s groups led the government to appoint the Royal Commission on the Status of Women (1967–1970), whose report of December 1970 made 167 recommendations on equal pay, child care, maternity leave and abortion. The National Action Committee on the Status of Women (founded 1971–1972) became the main lobby. In 1970 the Abortion Caravan drove from Vancouver to Ottawa, and protesters chained themselves in the public galleries of the House of Commons. Women’s groups lobbied to include sex equality in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982), sections 15 and 28, and in R v. Morgentaler (28 January 1988) the Supreme Court struck down Canada’s abortion law.

• Latin America. Women won the vote across Latin America by 1961 (Mexico 1953, Peru 1955, Paraguay 1961). Under the military dictatorships of the 1970s, women’s movements often began as human rights movements: the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, whose children had been “disappeared” by the military, marched every Thursday in Buenos Aires from April 1977 and used their identity as mothers as a protection that the regime found hard to attack. Regional feminist meetings (encuentros) began in Bogotá in 1981. Argentina’s Ley de Cupo (1991) was the world’s first law requiring parties to place women in at least 30 per cent of winnable positions on candidate lists, and quota laws spread across the region.

• After 2010. The campaign Ni Una Menos (“Not one less”) began with a march in Buenos Aires on 3 June 2015 against femicide, the killing of women because they are women, and spread across Latin America. A mass campaign led Argentina’s Congress to vote to legalise abortion on 30 December 2020. In the United States, the Women’s March of 21 January 2017 was one of the largest single-day protests in the country’s history, and the #MeToo campaign from October 2017 exposed sexual harassment and abuse.

Youth, students and the counterculture

The baby-boom generation, the largest and best-educated in American history, produced a youth movement in the 1960s. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) issued the Port Huron Statement in June 1962, calling for “participatory democracy”; the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, led by Mario Savio, a veteran of Freedom Summer, used the sit-in against university restrictions on political activity. Opposition to the Vietnam War turned student activism into a mass movement, with marches of hundreds of thousands and the burning of draft cards. The counterculture of the “hippies”, the Summer of Love in San Francisco (1967) and the Woodstock festival (August 1969) rejected middle-class values of work, consumption and sexual restraint.

Repression peaked in May 1970, when the Ohio National Guard shot dead four students at Kent State University on 4 May and police killed two Black students at Jackson State College in Mississippi on 15 May. The Twenty-sixth Amendment (1971) lowered the voting age to 18. In Mexico, a student movement demanding democracy before the 1968 Olympics ended when soldiers and police opened fire on a rally at Tlatelolco in Mexico City on 2 October 1968; the government admitted few deaths, and estimates by historians and later investigations range from several dozen to more than 300.

Disability rights

Disabled Americans used civil rights methods to demand access and equality. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 banned discrimination by programmes that received federal money, but the government delayed issuing the regulations to enforce it. In April 1977 disabled activists led by Judith Heumann occupied the federal building in San Francisco for more than three weeks, supported by the Black Panthers, who brought food, until the regulations were signed. On 12 March 1990 activists left their wheelchairs and crutches to crawl up the steps of the Capitol in Washington, the “Capitol Crawl”, to demand passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, signed on 26 July 1990, which banned discrimination in employment and required public places and transport to be accessible.

Gay and lesbian rights

Early “homophile” organisations, the Mattachine Society (1950) and the lesbian Daughters of Bilitis (1955), worked cautiously for acceptance. The Stonewall riots, which began after a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York, on 28 June 1969, marked the start of a more militant gay liberation movement; the first Pride marches followed in 1970. Harvey Milk became one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States in San Francisco in 1977 and was assassinated in 1978. During the AIDS crisis of the 1980s ACT UP (1987) used direct action to force faster drug approval. Legal change came at different speeds: Canada decriminalised homosexual acts in 1969 and legalised same-sex marriage in 2005; Argentina legalised it in 2010; and the US Supreme Court required every state to recognise it in Obergefell v. Hodges (26 June 2015).

Afro-Latino and Afro-Caribbean movements

Many Latin American states officially denied that they had a race problem. In Brazil, the idea of a “racial democracy”, associated with the sociologist Gilberto Freyre’s work of the 1930s, held that centuries of mixing had produced a society without racism, which made it hard even to name discrimination against Afro-Brazilians. The activist and artist Abdias do Nascimento challenged this idea, and in 1978 the Movimento Negro Unificado (Unified Black Movement) was founded at a protest in São Paulo against police violence and discrimination. The 1988 constitution made racism a crime and recognised the land rights of quilombo communities descended from escaped slaves; the Lei Caó (1989) set penalties for racial discrimination; and a 2012 law reserved half of the places at federal universities for state-school pupils, with places within that share set aside for Black, mixed-race and Indigenous students in proportion to their share of each state’s population. In Colombia, Law 70 of 1993 gave Afro-Colombian communities on the Pacific coast collective title to their lands.

Comparing the movements

The movements of 1945–2020 shared much: most emerged from the same post-war conditions of migration, war service and rising expectations, most borrowed the methods of the African American movement, and all found legal change easier to win than economic change. The table of the three main movements compares them under the same headings.

Several patterns explain the differences. The African American movement won the most federal action because it was the largest movement, because its demands for equal citizenship fitted the American creed and the Constitution, and because the Cold War made southern segregation an international embarrassment. Indigenous movements were much smaller (Native Americans were less than 1 per cent of the US population in 1970) but had a distinct legal basis in treaties and federal trust responsibilities, which allowed them to win in the courts and to gain recognition as nations. The farmworkers had neither large numbers of votes nor a constitutional claim, which is why they depended on the economic weapon of the boycott and why their gains were the most fragile.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

Paper 3: the emergence of the civil rights movement

Paper 3: the methods of the civil rights movement

Paper 3: the extent of change

Paper 3: one other social movement

Paper 3: women in one other social movement

Self-check

• To do:

  I can explain the social, political and economic factors and the ideas that led to the emergence of the African American civil rights movement after 1945.

• To do:

  I can explain the NAACP’s legal strategy and the significance of Brown v. Board of Education and the resistance to it.

• To do:

  I can assess the role of Martin Luther King Jr. and the strengths and limits of non-violent direct action, including in the North.

• To do:

  I can explain the roles of the NAACP, CORE, SCLC, SNCC and COFO, and of women such as Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer and Angela Davis.

• To do:

  I can explain the ideas and methods of Malcolm X, Black Power and the Black Panther Party, and the debate about their significance.

• To do:

  I can weigh the contributions of the Supreme Court, Congress and presidents to legal change, using the laws of 1964–1968.

• To do:

  I can assess social, cultural and economic change for African Americans from 1968 to 2020, including Black Lives Matter, using data.

• To do:

  I can explain why Indigenous movements emerged in the USA and Canada, the methods they used and the changes they achieved.

• To do:

  I can explain why the Chicano movement and the farmworkers’ union emerged, their methods and leaders, and the extent of their achievements.

• To do:

  I can outline feminist, youth, disability, LGBTQ+ and Afro-Latino movements in the Americas and what they achieved.

• To do: