Pushing Back Civil Rights

http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/atc/175
Date Written:  2015-03-01
Publisher:  Against the Current
Year Published:  2015
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX20873

An examination of the roll back of civil rights in the context of police violence against African Americans.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Every gain won by the civil rights revolution in the 1960s and 1970s is now under assault. As the film "Selma" eloquently portrays, it was the self-organization and mobilization of working-class and poor African Americans that defeated Jim Crow segregation. Without Blacks leading the struggle, putting their lives on the line, significant support from whites would not have occurred.

Yet Selma has been criticized by many "establishment" white defenders of president Johnson, who in their view was the primary reason for the civil rights legal victories. The direct actions led by Martin Luther King, and what millions of former slaves, sharecroppers and workers did to fight centuries of racial domination and exploitation, are relegated to second chair.