When we reflect on the civil rights era of the mid-20th century, we often think of the momentous accomplishments of the movement: chiefly, the end of legal racial segregation and voting rights afforded to Black Americans. We picture the lunch counter sit-ins in places like Greensboro, North Carolina, and Nashville. We hear the words, forever etched into history, of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I have a dream” speech.
But the Civil Rights Movement was not an exclusively peaceful march toward justice with some fairy-tale ending. The fight for racial equality in the 1950s and ’60s was not conceded by anything close to consensus, as today’s Republicans pretend it was.
Far from it. The call for civil rights was met with immense pushback: violent panic over school integration, undue indignance white Southerners felt when their Black neighbors no longer accepted second-class citizenship.
The foundation of Black political power was built upon decades of protest and civil disobedience from generations of Americans who were brave enough, in the face of violent resistance, to see the Jim Crow order for what it was — a brutal, authoritarian system of racial apartheid.
A system in which a mass of people are subjugated based on something as arbitrary as the color of their skin can only last so long, before this inherent injustice makes civil conflict inevitable.