![]() The second is redefining the agenda to fit a vastly changing American demographic profile.īlack-white inequality persists in income, education, health, housing, technology access, and safe communities. The first is addressing the persistence of racial disparities. Two issues remain on the civil rights agenda. Meanwhile poverty in a large and intractable black underclass reaches deep into inner cities and rural communities nationwide and decisively constricts the life chances for affected parties, particularly children. The compelling evidence of African-American progress found in the burgeoning middle class helps explain why opponents of a race-based agenda feel the way they do. The American citizenry is also divided over whether the unfinished civil rights agenda has its origins in race or social class, and even whether government reforms such as affirmative action should address the lingering problems. ![]() In its wake there developed a broad base of constituent interest groups-women, the elderly, children’s rights advocates, the handicapped, homosexuals, environmentalists-that emphasize the rights of affected parties to be a critical part of the decisions affecting their interests. It also created a national expectation that individuals and groups had the right to petition their government to right legal wrongs affecting them. ![]() Above all, it helped eliminate the legal apartheid that had dogged the United States since its earliest days. The civil rights movement made lasting contributions to the nation. As new issues arose, appearing and intensifying in ways that fell beyond the scope of the legislation and social reforms, the old civil rights model-one that relied mostly on judicial and protest remedies-seemed less and less effective in dealing with them. Bread-and-butter issues such as unemployment, substandard housing, inferior education, unsafe streets, escalating child poverty, and homelessness supplanted the right to vote, eat at a lunch counter, and attend desegregated schools. By 1998, the number had grown to 39.īut the victories of the movement, however decisive they seemed at the time, did not bring the long-term parity that activists and policymakers hoped for. In 1964, only 5 blacks served in the U.S. Black political participation increased dramatically. ![]() Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas in 1954. Supreme Court officially ended legal school segregation in Brown v. In every century, race has presented the nation its greatest paradoxes, challenges, and opportunities, calling into question time and again the principle of equality on which it was founded.ĭuring the 1950s and 1960s, the golden era of civil rights activism, the civil rights movement mobilized the nation’s collective consciousness around issues of racial equity. Few issues in American life have been as intransigent as race. ![]()
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