Identity Politics

1
Identity Politics Liberation Ideologies

• MLK Jr. and the
• Black Civil Rights Movement

2
Background

• Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
• Attended and graduated from racially segregated
  school high school and colleges in Atlanta
• Received doctorate from Boston U in 1955
• Executive Board of NAACP in 1953
• Began pastoral work in Montgomery, Alabama in
  1954

3
Background

• Elected leader of the Southern Christian
  Leadership Council in 1957
• Led the March on Washington, 1963

4
Background

• In 1964, became the youngest person to win the
  Nobel Peace Prize
• Assassinated in 1968

5
Overview

• Historical Background to the Civil Rights
  Movement
• Liberalism and Liberation
• Kings Arguments

6
Civil War Reconstruction

• Union army occupies south
• 14th Amendment (1868)
• 15th Amendment (1870)
• Civil Rights Enforcement Act (1870)
• Civil Rights Act (1872)
• Civil Rights Act (1875)

7
Reconstruction

• First black political leaders elected to Congress
• Hiram Revels (MS) first black senator
• 6 blacks elected to serve in House in 41st and
  42nd Congress

8
Reconstruction

• 1876 Presidential Election
• Rutherford B. Hayes (R)
• Samuel Tilden (D)

9
1876 Presidential Election
10
Reconstruction

• In exchange for Hayes winning electoral college
  vote, Republicans agree to end occupation of the
  South
• 1877 Reconstruction essentially ends with end of
  occupation
• Southern governments and vigilante groups move to
  disenfranchise black voters

11
Rise of Segregation

• Voter intimidation (e.g., KKK activity)
• Change voting requirements
• poll tax, literacy test, white primaries,
  grandfather clause
• Civil Rights cases (1883)
• Supreme Court invalidates the 1875 Civil Rights
  Act
• Plessy vs Ferguson (1896)

12
Plessy vs Ferguson

• The object of the Fourteenth Amendment was
  undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of
  the two races before the law, but in the nature
  of things it could not have been intended to
  abolish distinctions based upon color, or to
  enforce social, as distinguished from political,
  equality, or a commingling of the two races upon
  terms unsatisfactory to either. -- Justice
  Henry Billings Brown

Homer Plessy
13
Plessy v. Ferguson

• "We consider the underlying fallacy of the
  plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption
  that the enforced separation of the two races
  stamps the colored race with a badge of
  inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason
  of anything found in the act, but solely because
  the colored race chooses to put that construction
  upon it.

Justice Henry Billings Brown
14
Jim Crow
15
Jim Crow
Jim Crow statutes by state
16
Jim Crow

• For black civil rights leaders, segregation posed
  difficult questions of strategy and how to combat
  legal (de jure) inequality

17
Response to Segregation

• Booker T. Washington and Accomodationism
• Take whatever opportunities white America
  provides and do best you can until conditions
  change

18
Response to Segregation

• W.E.B. Dubois and the founding of the NAACP
• Legal strategy of challenging of separate but
  equal provision

19
Separate, but Equal?
Classroom in black school Seat Pleasant, Maryland
20
Separate, but Equal?
Black school, Camden, MS
21
Separate, but Equal?
Black school, Louisa County, VA
22
Response to Segregation

• Key desegregation cases
• Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938)
• Sweatt v. Painter (1950)

23
Response to Segregation

• McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher
  Education (1950)

24
Response to Segregation

• 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, KN

25
Modern Civil Rights

• Emergence of Modern Civil Rights Movement

26
Modern Civil Rights

• In wake of Brown v. Board of Education,
  combination of further legal challenges,
  political mobilization, civil disobedience
  (peaceful and other)

27
Liberalism Revisited

• Liberalism focuses on the primacy of the
  individual
• The liberation and identity movements we will be
  examining make two types of claims
• Some groups have been treated as individuals
  legally, and thats neither fair nor just
• Because of this historical treatment, government
  policy should be used to advance the collective
  group well being