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Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was the big court case in the post-war era: it changed the dynamic of schools from one of racial segregation to integration. As Klarman (2007) notes, integration was going to happen naturally on its own, as the war had led to more accepting attitudes between the races. However, the Court decision created some uproar and pushed the issue. This created tension and the Civil Rights Movement ran into issues in the South, where opposition in places like Birmingham led to Martin Luther King’s imprisonment. His impassioned letter from a Birmingham jail helped to win more support for the Civil Rights Movement.

In 1964 the Civil Rights Act was passed and it was meant to end the dispute once and for all; however, Malcolm X would be assassinated the following year and Martin Luther King would be assassinated four years later. Along with the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, these two would cap off a turbulent decade that left a lot of issues unresolved and the nation reeling from war in Vietnam. The rise of the Black Panthers as a militant black power group preceded the current movements of Black Lives Matter and Antifa. Race relations today are not black and white, as not all black people support Black Lives Matter, and many are moving to support the Trump presidency, suggesting that race relations are more complex today than they were a half century ago. The Civil Rights Movement set out to achieve equality among the races; yet, the criminal justice system is still affected by systematic racism, as pointed out by Angela Davis (2012) and others. The for-profit prison industrial complex creates a conflict of interest in the justice system and in policing, and all this is evidence that the goals of the Civil Rights Movement were reached in lip service only.

References

Davis, A. (2012). The Meaning of Freedom. San Francisco, CA: City Light Books.

Klarman, M. (2007). Brown v Board of Education and the...…Schlafly, who advocated for traditional roles for women. Schlafly argued that the ERA would actually make it worse for women because it would strip them of protective laws that kept them from being eligible for the draft; it would deny them protection against sexual assault and alimony (US History, 2020). Schlafley argued that women would no longer be able to receive alimony because the ERA would see this as gender discrimination.

Schlafly defined freedom for women in terms of traditional norms and protective laws. Steinem defined freedom for women in terms of liberation—social, political, economic, sexual. Both sides went to extremes to frame the issues when what it was really about was banning gender discrimination in the workplace. However, what the debate showed was that push-back against the Feminist Movement was gaining by the 1970s, and social conservatism under Schlafly and then President Reagan would come to dominate the next decade. The country would not shift back over to progressivism until the 1990s under President Clinton when the…