In order for us as poor and oppressed people to be- come a part of a society that is meaningful, the sys- tem under which we now exist has to be radically changed. That means we are going to have to learn to think in radical terms. I use the term radical in its original meaning—getting down to and understanding the root cause. It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system. That is easier said than done. But one of the things that has to be faced is, in the process of wanting to change that system, how much we have got to do to find out who we are, where we have come from and where we are going. . . . I am saying as you must say too, that in order to see where we are going, we not only must remember where we have been, but we must understand where we have been. -- Ella Baker, 1969
The civil rights movement transformed America. It remade public schools by ending de jure segregation in education. It reconfigured the nation’s political landscape by enfranchising black southerners. It reshaped public spaces by banning racial discrimination in public accommodations. It reformed the criminal justice system by eliminating all-white juries.
It redefined public safety by neutralizing racial terror groups. It reimagined the social safety net by spurring new government-sponsored social services. And it re- fashioned neighborhoods by opening up housing on a nondiscriminatory basis.
These advances materialized quickly in the 1950s and 1960s, but the struggle to obtain them was many generations old, reaching as far back as the end of slavery. The battle to secure these rights involved a wide range of strategies and tactics, from nonviolent direct action to armed self-defense. And the effort to gain them was hard fought. African Americans were unyielding in their determination to upend the racist status quo, while whites were equally relentless in their defense of it. From Brooklyn to Los Angeles and from Selma to Detroit, African Americans contested labor systems that exploited black workers, challenged political structures that excluded black voters, and confronted social systems that perpetuated white supremacy.
Their opponents, meanwhile, did everything in their power, including resorting to mob violence, to maintain and strengthen racially discriminatory systems and structures. But the opposition’s efforts were not enough. In the end, those who believed in freedom prevailed, eliminating the most egregious forms of racial discrimination. From the vantage point of the twenty- first century, this outcome seems inevitable, but it was far from a sure
Those who led the charge for change were almost always everyday people. They were sharecroppers on white-owned land in Mississippi and factory workers on assembly lines in Ohio. They were domestics in white folks’ homes in Louisiana and stevedores in shipyards in Oak- land. Still, quite a few extraordinary people emerged from among them. Out of the Virginia Tidewater came Ella Baker. From the Mississippi Delta emerged Fannie Lou Hamer. And Sweet Auburn produced Mar- tin Luther King Jr. Together they organized family, friends, neighbors, and strangers in sustained challenges to the racial order, and they mobilized the masses for dramatic protest marches and demonstrations. But no matter who they were or where they were from, each possessed a vision of a more just society that they articulated through word and deed.
Hasan Kwame Jeffries. Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement. University of Wisconsin Press, 2019.