Civil Rights and Human Rights - TCE Modern History (Tasmania)

What this dot point is asking

The Second World War, and especially the horrors of the Holocaust, gave new urgency to the idea that all people possess basic rights that governments must respect. The newly created United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December 1948, drafted under the chairmanship of Eleanor Roosevelt. The declaration set out civil, political, economic and social rights as a common standard for all peoples. Although not legally binding in itself, it inspired later binding treaties, the European Convention on Human Rights of 1950 and the two international covenants of 1966, and became the foundation of the modern human rights movement.

In the United States the struggle for racial equality grew into a mass movement after 1945. African Americans, particularly in the southern states, faced legal segregation under the Jim Crow system, justified by the Supreme Court's 1896 doctrine of separate but equal, along with disenfranchisement and violence. Returning black war veterans and a growing northern black population added pressure for change, and Cold War competition made segregation an embarrassment for a country claiming to lead the free world.

A series of breakthroughs followed. In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, overturning separate but equal in education. The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 to 1956, sparked when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, brought Martin Luther King Jr to national prominence and showed the power of organised non-violent protest. In 1957 federal troops were sent to enforce school integration at Little Rock, Arkansas.

These pressures produced landmark federal laws. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination on grounds of race, colour, religion, sex or national origin and banned segregation in public places. After violent resistance to a voting-rights march from Selma to Montgomery in early 1965, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned the discriminatory practices, such as literacy tests, that had kept African Americans from voting, and federal enforcement sharply increased black voter registration in the South.

The movement was diverse and contested. Alongside King's strategy of non-violent direct action, drawn partly from Gandhi, other voices grew more militant. Malcolm X criticised integration and emphasised black self-reliance and self-defence, and after his assassination in 1965 the Black Power movement and groups such as the Black Panther Party stressed pride, community programs and resistance. King himself was assassinated in April 1968, an event that sparked riots in many cities. By then the movement had turned increasingly to the persistent poverty and discrimination of the northern cities, problems that proved harder to solve than legal segregation in the South.

The civil rights movement achieved profound legal and political change but left limits. It ended legalised segregation and disenfranchisement and inspired later movements for the rights of women, Indigenous peoples, and others. Yet deep economic inequality, residential segregation and discrimination persisted, and debates over how far equality has truly been achieved continue. The American example also influenced human rights struggles worldwide, including the long campaign against apartheid in South Africa, which ended with the election of Nelson Mandela as president in 1994.

The two strands connect closely. The post-war language of universal human rights gave domestic campaigners a powerful international standard to invoke, and abuses within powerful nations undermined their claims to moral leadership during the Cold War. Over time human rights became a central feature of international relations, invoked by activists, governments and bodies such as Amnesty International, founded in 1961.

Historians debate how to interpret the civil rights movement. A traditional narrative centres on prominent leaders, especially King, and on the decade from Brown in 1954 to the Voting Rights Act in 1965. More recent scholarship argues for a long civil rights movement stretching back to the 1930s and forward beyond 1965, and emphasises grassroots organisers, women and local activists rather than a few famous men. Historians also debate the role of the federal government and the courts versus pressure from ordinary people in driving change, and how far the Cold War helped or hindered the cause.