Analysis: The View From The Trenches

Improved Essays
Christianna Valnes
US History 137

Charles M. Payne was an American academic who studied in the areas of civil rights activism, urban education reform, social inequality, and modern African-American history. Charles Payne and Steven Lawson both examined the different individuals who made the civil rights movements a success in “The View from the Trenches”, a book written by both Payne and Lawson. “The American South had a long tradition of racial oppression, but during the civil rights movement, the weight of American Institutions—the presidency, the judicial system, the media, the American sense of fair play—were finally brought to bear on the problem, leading to remarkable changes in southern race relations”. “Far from being the solution,
…show more content…
But there are many that are unfamiliar to us when we bring up the Civil Rights Movement. We never think of the minor people like Harry T. Moore or Fred Shuttlesworth, Ella Baker, Charles Hamilton Houston. James Farmer pointed out in 1963, the proponents of nonviolence, peace and friendship were only a small proportion of the participants in the movements. Like Malcolm X, Farmer believed that “If nonviolence worked, fine; but if not, they were willing to use other method.” (132) A man named Robert William engaged in a shoot-out with Klan members who were attacking his community. Williams became a hero among his rank and file and to his community. Septima Clark did not think that voting was for her, much as it was an organizing device. She believed that the purpose for citizenship schools was to discover local community leaders. She believed that political victories are transitory but finding leadership, transforming victories, was as important as winning legislative victories was more important than political. Political power can be granted easily one day but taken away the next day unless the movement has created people who are capable of fighting for …show more content…
Ella Baker believed that Septima Clark spoke the truth. Baker believed that great big leaders weren’t the key to mass freedom. She believed that people had to learn to lead themselves and not have a leader lead for them. “My basic sense of it has always been to get people to understand that in the long run they themselves are the only protection they have against violence or injustice. . . People have to be made to understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but to themselves.” (119) Some activist wasn’t so lucky, The Shuttlesworth survived the 1950’s but others like Harry T. Moore weren’t so lucky. Moore was a school teacher in Mims, Florida and was often described as a shy man. His work in politics propelled her into the presidency of the NAACP. He campaigned for the prosecution of a sheriff who had shot two black boys, killing one. Shortly after he retired with his wife on Christmas Eve that year, a bomb destroyed their bedroom. He died immediately and a few days later his wife died. What is the difference that makes us leave people out? Why are some activist more famous than others? The less known civil rights activist and their struggles they represent are

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Beginning with Harry Truman, the “president who put civil rights firmly on the nation’s agenda” and ending with Lydon B. Johnson, Dudzaik’s chronological retelling of the events will shed new light on the federal government’s decision to finally intervene on behalf of the movement. Rather than a movement simply beginning as a grassroots issue and gaining steam through local and national politics, Dudzaik shows how “domestic racism and civil rights protest led to international criticism… International criticism led the federal government to respond.” (13) These responses would be witnessed by the world through the decisions made by the Supreme Court and passage of legislation, such as The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, aimed at opposing American segregation. In closing, Duzaik’s book is a fantastic addition to the civil rights and Cold War periods. Cold War Civil Rights doesn’t only offer a look at how international politics can affect domestic issues in a country, but it also contains many morals and lessons within the book.…

    • 759 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Houston, Delaine, Clark did everything that Rosa Parks did but you have never heard of these names. Why didn’t they get more recognition? This is what Payne wants us to see. He wants us to realize that these people worked just as hard as everyone else but didn’t get the credit. They were just as much help in the movement as Martin Luther King Jr. was and more.…

    • 1050 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Outline: Thesis: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was significant to African Americans because of the act, segregation in public places and employment prejudice on the pigment of skin, national origin, gender, ethnicity, or/and religion was brought to an end. The Civil Rights Act was one of the most momentous events to impact the African American community on the account of bringing equality to minorities and leading to the Voting Rights Act 1965, which added greater strength to minorities in government and in America. The Act made a consequential impact on the presidential election and progressed and rewarded the activists in the African American community. There were great consequences that either progressed a greater movement or added to the…

    • 1456 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    These two men were famously known for striving for the equality of the African American race. Although they came from different lifestyles, both men grew up to become successful. Despite their different approaches to targeting the issue of racism in America, they shared the same goal. With the…

    • 793 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Although the North was progressing with the integration of black people, the South was holding out strong going against integration. The South did a lot of things to hold segregation to their tradition. They were scared to change. This essay will show how the South lived before the Emmett Till case and the Civil Rights’ Movement, also what the South did to resist integration, and lastly how the town of Money,Mississippi, worked together so two killers did not get convicted for a murder of a black forteen-year old boy.…

    • 463 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Derrick Bell’s After We’re Gone: Prudent Speculations on America in a Post-Racial Epoch reminds us how minorities have suffered oppressions from white supremacy, and that even our Constitution provides only limited protection from such oppression. Thomas Jefferson “expressed the view that blacks should be free, but cannot live in the same government.” During the civil rights movement, African Americans’ goals were to end the racial segregation and discrimination. After blacks won their equality, they were considered separate but equal.…

    • 387 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The United States of America was a nation built upon the notion of freedom and equal opportunity- in which all peoples have impartial opportunities and rights. However, these principles did not always have their right of way. From the first ship of enslaved African Americans to arrive in the early seventeenth century to modern times, discrimination and racial segregation has always been an issue. In both “Sympathy”-- a poem about a caged bird’s fight for freedom after being liberated from slavery-- by Paul Laurence Dunbar and A Voice That Challenged a Nation --a biography which spoke about Marian’s struggle for equal rights after she had experienced the harshness of the South --by Russell Freedman, the two parties faced the challenges of…

    • 996 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Through nonviolent protest, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s achieved the most important breakthrough in equal rights legislation and fought against racial discrimination. Ten years subsequent to Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and in a form of honor, Cesar Chavez, a labor union organizer and civil rights leader, delivered his speech in 1978, “He Showed Us The Way,” in time where equality for African-Americans was overlooked. Due to a rise of hatred and conflict between those who fought for civil rights and the government, Chavez attempts to prove that nonviolence is the better alternative compared to violence in resolving conflicts. Chavez makes it appear that nonviolence triumphs violence and leaves little to no doubt…

    • 830 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    During the 1950’s the idea of “separate but equal” continued to be a prominent ideology in the United States, particularly in the Southern states. It was not until after World War II and the Cold War that international concerns provoked Americans to rethink about the domestic issues about human rights within the country. The United States had became the leader in preventing the spread of communism to parts of the world, but refused to realize that segregation and the denial of human rights made the United States existed. The United States was in a way hyprocrite to the causes it was fighting for. In Robert F. Williams’ book, Negroes with Guns, he addresses the international concerns that influenced the strategies pursued by Williams and other civil rights activists.…

    • 1054 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The United States, during the Gilded Age through the Progressive era, experienced a period of unprecedented economic, technological, and industrial growth that benefited millions of American citizens. Moreover, for many Americans it was an era of “ever-expanding progress” (Major Problems, 240) that elevated the United States into a world power. However, behind this veneer of prosperity remained the costs of progress in addition to the rancid core of racism and white hegemony that forced many minorities, mainly African Americans, into the role of second class citizens. According to T.J. Jackson Lears, “Dreams of rebirth involved renewal of white power, especially in the former Confederacy. Elite white Southerners recaptured state governments and their successors solidified white rule—purifying electoral politics by disenfranchising blacks, recasting social life by codifying racial segregation, and revitalizing white identity through the occasional blood of sacrifice of lynching.”…

    • 1026 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Civil War Dbq

    • 1703 Words
    • 7 Pages

    The latter half of the nineteenth century saw a bitter and bloody Civil War fought over one underlying factor: slavery. Though many, including President Abraham Lincoln himself, claimed this war was to ‘protect the union’, the south clearly wanted slaves, and opposed anyone who could take their slaves away. To all, this contention for slavery brought up questions as to what American liberty and freedom really meant in relation to African Americans, questions that yielded an incredibly wide array of answers within the country. What caused this array of answers differed with the race, sex, socioeconomic demographic that Americans were a part of. These perspectives on liberty and freedom in relation to African Americans, though different because…

    • 1703 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Complexity of The Civil Rights Struggle Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin are three prominent writers during the Civil Rights movement. These authors all write about race relation and segregation. This essay will summarize these authors’ ideas, discuss the reasons why Martin Luther King is the most analytically interesting author and examine the similarities and differences between Malcolm X’s “Message to the Grass Roots” and King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. This essay also differentiates between Martin Luther King’s primary text, “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, and his secondary text, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.”…

    • 1340 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    During the Glided Age of America radical reconstruction of the America was something that changed the future of our nation. Our country was spilt North VS. South on whose ideology was right for the future of America. The South’s ideology was that African Americans were beneath them simply for the color of their skin often times African Americans were described as “Childlike and inferior” (238). This is a prime example of the demeanor that many southerns had towards people of African American descent.…

    • 1316 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Equality has always been a serious issue regards racial segregation in the South of the United States, especially in the Jim Crow Era. African-Americans were dehumanized and considered inferior compared to White Americans. They were treated unfairly and restricted in public places for their rights and resources were stripped. Based on the two autobiographical memoirs, Black boy and Separate Pasts, the authors have expressed their own opposite respective experiences of Blacks and Whites to show how the Constitution rights were overturned.…

    • 907 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    This book serves as a reminder that the common person doesn’t know nearly enough about the movement and that there are many important, yet untold, stories that will open the reader’s eye to all that really happened in this time period. This book will leave its audience hungering to learn more and give them an understanding of the trials of the Civil Rights…

    • 958 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays