Disillusionment In The Civil Rights Movement

When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, for many Americans it symbolized the culmination of decades of fighting for civil rights, and that we had reached Martin Luther King Jr.’s fabled “mountaintop” of equality. However, not all Americans were fully satisfied with this accomplishment, with critics like Toure Neblett writing “Surely Obama’s victory revealed something had changed in America, but it was not a signal that we’d reached… where race no longer matters and equality has been achieved”. At the time, Neblett’s opinion was very much in the minority, as many Americans believed that America had entered a new era of race relations. But, this trend of disillusionment with the rest of American society is best exemplified by the narrative …show more content…
After years of falling victim to violence from white segregationists across the country, many African Americans became disillusioned with the concept of nonviolence as the preferred means to achieving change. One of the arguably most notable examples of this was the brutal murder of 14 year old Emmett Till, an event that is credited with being instrumental in the formation of the civil rights movement in the first place. As the violence continued, leaders such as Malcolm X began to advocate for a new type of civil rights: Black Nationalism. In his famous “Ballot or the Bullet” speech, X threatened that if the government continued to deny African Americans full equality then the government may be forced to defend itself. His threats towards the government would continue to escalate, with him even calling for a new country to emerge solely for African Americans to free themselves from white oppression. Black Nationalism was growing at the same time as the Black Power movement, with leaders such as Stokely Carmichael using increasingly inflammatory rhetoric towards white America, and actually advocating in favour of partial