Civil Rights Movement

The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s sought social and political equality for racial minorities in the United States. In challenging racial discrimination, civil rights activists also raised questions about traditional American gender identities, paving the way for the modern feminist movement and creating new possibilities for minority men to define their own masculine identities. With voting rights, increased educational opportunities, and access to better jobs, minority men became better able to fulfill traditional male roles as fathers, husbands, and community leaders. They also challenged racist stereotypes about who they were and what types of men they could be, constructing models of manhood grounded in racial identity and the struggle for racial justice.

The U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing racial segregation in public schools is often seen as the beginning of the civil rights movement. Yet African-American activism for equal rights reached back at least as far as the Revolutionary era, and was long intertwined with models of African-American manhood that emphasized black identity. A more immediate precursor to the civil rights movement was minority men's participation in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II and the Korean War. Serving in the military was not the only way to “become a man,” but it was a traditional rite of passage for young men and an obligation of American (especially male) citizenship. When minority men risked their lives to defend democracy in Europe and Asia, they gained a new sense of themselves as men and saw clearly the hypocrisy of disfranchisement (denial of the right to vote) and segregation in the United States. The activism of returning black veterans and the Brown decision inspired protests against racial discrimination in education, public transportation, and electoral politics from the mid-1950s through the 1960s.

Southern white men responded to black activism and challenges to white male supremacy by calling for “massive resistance”to the civil rights movement. The Citizens' Council, a segregationist group founded by middle-class southern white men in Mississippi in 1954, called on white husbands and fathers to fulfill a longstanding duty of white southern manhood: to “defend” white women and children from racial integration. This rhetoric inspired vigilante violence—often considered an expression of traditional white southern manhood and honor—such as the 1955 lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till for supposedly whistling at a white woman in rural Mississippi and the 1957 castration of a black man in a Ku Klux Klan initiation ritual in Birmingham, Alabama.

[Page 93]Southern political leaders did little to stop such atrocities. In fact, governors Ross Barnett (Mississippi), George Wallace (Alabama), and Orval Faubus (Arkansas) based their political careers on opposition to integration. Like the Citizens' Council and the Klan, southern elected officials tapped into a fear that miscegenation (interracial sexual relations) would result from social integration. These southern white men demonized black men as hypersexual beasts in an effort to galvanize opposition to civil rights, just as their political forefathers had done in the 1890s to justify disfranchisement, segregation, and lynching.

Civil rights activists fought such racist stereotyping and discrimination with a variety of strategies. On the one hand, there were advocates of nonviolent direct action protests in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). SCLC's founder and long-time president, Martin Luther King, Jr., was one of the most eloquent advocates of the nonviolent philosophy, not only in the pursuit of civil rights, but also in protesting American involvement in the Vietnam War. King and other advocates of nonviolence sought to put into practice a conception of American manhood based not on physical power and domination, but on brotherly love, moral principle, spiritual strength, interracial cooperation, and—for African Americans—group empowerment and pride in blackness. The nonviolent protests of the civil rights movement caricatured, and were intended to expose, the unchristian violence on which white male supremacy stood. The movement's successes served to stigmatize and stereotype traditional white southern manhood in the minds of many Americans.

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