Sixty years have passed since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his momentous “I Have a Dream” address during the landmark 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. While the event has come to be linked with the causes of desegregation and voting rights, it sought to highlight an array of racial and economic injustices, many of which still resonate today – in education, housing and criminal justice reform.
So how does today’s movement differ from its predecessor? First of all, in name: Julie Buckner Armstrong, an English professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa who has written several books about the Civil Rights Movement, said it’s not fair to use the same term to describe today's efforts.
“Doing so minimizes the distinctiveness of what happened during the 1950s and 1960s,” Armstrong said.
Adriane Lentz-Smith, an associate professor of history at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, said the contemporary movement is both a continuation of and heir to previous struggles. While many issues remain the same, she said, today’s activists face a political mainstream that not only has shifted significantly to the right but that “no longer has competition with the Soviet Union pressuring it to make good on the promise of democracy.”
“Activists have drawn on and refined organizational models from the past, just as white supremacy has retooled to mask racialized power in colorblind language,” Lentz-Smith said.
Armstrong compared today's specter of white supremacy to the mythical Hydra, whose heads, when cut off, grow two more in one’s place.
“Just as white supremacy evolves over time,” she said, “the fight must adapt and change. ... That Hydra is behind the rise of mass incarceration disproportionately targeting Black and brown men, and it’s behind efforts to prevent educators from talking about diversity, equity, inclusion and even racism itself.”
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Emilye Crosby, a professor of history at the State University of New York College at Geneseo, said that while some might disagree about whether today’s efforts continue or are distinct from the civil rights era, “what’s going on today is definitely part of that larger Black freedom struggle,” she said “Some people are inspired by it. Some are using similar tactics. Some are still taking on unfinished issues. There are lots of continuities.”
The earlier movement is often perceived as more defined and centered largely in the South – in contrast with today’s Black Lives Matter movement, which drew criticism for lacking coherence with its nationwide chapters focused on their own priorities. But the efforts of the 1950s and 1960s were just as nuanced as today's, she said, differing in places such as Birmingham, Detroit, New York and Los Angeles.
“There’s a tendency in the present to smooth over complications of the past,” Armstrong said. “We don’t see that back then was just as messy as now.”
Experts cited several key issues for today’s movement and some of the people and organizations leading the fight:
One major difference between today’s struggle and that of the past is that today's movement isn’t galvanized around a specific figurehead.
“I don’t think there is a leader today who’s comparable to Dr. King,” Crosby said. “But I don’t think that’s a negative. ... Part of what’s exciting about the current movement is that there are lot of groups and people on the local level. There’s not one overarching organization.”
Lentz-Smith said that while 1960s media too often focused on King as the face of the movement, “grassroots activists and organizations like CORE and SNCC understood that the goal was to nurture leadership in everyday people who could articulate their own political visions.”
Today’s organizations and leaders, on a national and local scale, “speak to the success of the civil rights movement’s ethos, not a dilution of it,” she said.
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