Perpetually Mutating American Racial Injustice: A Comparative Analysis of Media Uses Throughout the Historic Civil Rights Movement

The American justice system discriminatively treats socioeconomic and racial minorities due to legislatively embedded structures of inequality. A remnant of legalized human subjugation, these constitutional constructs of oppression have morphed in observable practice over the course of American cultural development, but not without vigorous opposition from technologically empowered, empathetically stirred modern activists. Our country’s shackling and extermination of most indigenous, ethnic people who aboriginally resided on a shared, inherited continent — not to mention the economic commodification of undeserving human lives from overseas and their subsequent market-controlled transatlantic voyage — unfortunately stains and continues to infiltrate our history, taking shape through a persistent, everchanging racial misbalance. The historic struggle between complete abolition and a nationally widespread economic technique which enslaved human beings culminated in a fatality-ridden military conflict, the Civil War. At first, Union and confederate armies battled over domestic unity, until Lincoln exercised a momentous, diplomatically strategic initiative to end all slavery in seceded states, the Emancipation Proclamation (“The Emancipation Proclamation, 1863”). While ostensibly freeing millions of people from perpetual involuntary servitude and transferring the overall spirit of the war from a countrywide cohesion among states to a campaign for liberty, our sixteenth president’s hallmark governmental accomplishment ultimately terminated the Civil War without any discussion of unconditional ideological surrender. Such an unemphatic conclusion to a fundamentally charged issue released the bigotry and hatred of this national phenomena from the confines of acting as the social bond of slavery.

Following the Civil War, sentiments bred during the previously socially unquestioned acceptance of racial inequality immediately retaliated in the form of a shocking assassination of our Commander in Chief; an act that sent American history down a controversial path of disputed federal decisions termed Reconstruction. Not surprisingly, a quagmire of rationally unthinkable bureaucratic implementations which characterized governmental actions at the time led to the nation’s first executive impeachment investigation, leaving Andrew Johnson, democratic vice president to Lincoln’s administration, without a conviction by a single vote (“Senate Historical Office”). Nevertheless, societal trends, in general, started to diverge from antebellum prejudices, as artistic expression underwent satirical influences that punctuated the inherent moral incorrectness ubiquitous throughout the institution of slavery. Taking advantage of the media platforms technologically available at the time, Reconstruction Era philosophers and abolitionist authors such as Samuel Clemens or Harriet Beecher Stowe published novels that rapidly accumulated critical acclaim and widespread recognition. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, written several years preceding the Civil war, allowed many ignorant citizens to experience and empathize with the traumatizing effects slavery had on families and the overall human spirit (“Impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Slavery, and the Civil War”). Stowe’s story uniquely chronicles the life of Uncle Tom, an African American Christian slave, from his own point of view, humanizing the inferior stereotypical slave a plethora of supporters imagined when reading the novel. After all, second only to The Bible in terms of nineteenth century sales, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the themes Stowe explores within reached the minds of millions of readers, some undoubtedly supportive of the economic practice of serfdom (“Uncle Tom”). If this was the story intended on shedding the public’s blindness to the uncontested horrors occurring around them, Mark Twain’s (Samuel Clemens is his real name) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was designed to similarly unveil a reemergence of antebellum principles in disastrous popularizations of tyrannical schemes such as Jim Crow laws that littered the extensive list of government supported injustices characteristic of post-war American society. Twain likens a societally brainwashed adolescent, Huck Finn, to a young country excessively accepting of traditionally instilled beliefs, America. The protagonist of this story could only remedy his developmentally entrenched prejudices concerning racial inequities through a threadbare journey with an African American companion along the Mississippi River, but America declined an opportunity to thoroughly assimilate ethnically, favoring statutes that blatantly segregated in accordance with something as arbitrary as the concentration of melanin inside skin cells.

Activism during the Reconstruction Era, as the country spiraled toward separate but equal destinies, mostly took shape through print and spoken word. Beside producing books that would potentially reach millions as aforementioned literary examples, the only other way to successfully reach out to a grassroots audience motivated to work for change was oration. Cathartic, emotionally stirring speeches were a distinguishing feature of noted abolitionist Frederick Douglass, vastly effective in garnering support for an abolitionist cause partly from his exemplary sophistication and educational background. Broadly looking at all the actions and leaders that propelled the abolitionist movement and the civil rights movement thereafter, formal oral addresses account for many of the significant achievements. In addition to Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, civil right leader active around the turn of the nineteenth century, published a widely-read autobiography and delivered impactful speeches that stirred intellectually virulent discourse in both white and African American political spheres (Ferris and Wilson). Of course, the Emancipation Proclamation itself was literally proclaimed after the Battle of Antietam in September 1862, setting a date for the freedom of nearly three million slaves and subsequently radically transforming the movement for implementing unequivocally equal human rights (“Lincoln Issues Emancipation Proclamation — Sep 22, 1862”). Even though the medium of communication behind the cause of multiple groundbreaking legislative accomplishments remained predominantly oral or printed (speeches, flyers, and books almost always connected to some form of either proposed, enacted or criticized law in the civil rights movement), numerous prominent moments in the organizational development of the struggle for equality features landmark judicial rulings.

The Supreme Court of the United States, alongside uncountable decisions settled in lower courts, undeniably has a structurally fundamental role in the progression of the abolitionist, civil rights movements as well as perpetuating despicably atrocious attitudes toward the treatment of racial minorities. A primary factor behind the violence proliferating in communities desolated by segregation, the derogatorily discriminating doctrine of separate but equal comes from a late eighteen-hundreds case, Plessy v Ferguson (“United States Supreme Court”). Consequentially, states were rewarded with the capability to quarantine diversity. Communities divided in a twisted whitewashed attempt to recreate antebellum conditions that yielded unfounded yet infatuating positive feelings from the social superiority. Consumers of all commodities nationwide had been partitioned by flesh tone. With businesses aiming to reach the widest customer base possible and since all stores, everything had to distinguish the wavelength of pigment permitted inside, the economic impact of Jim Crow laws certainly affected thousands of innocent bystanders happy to serve the entire human race. Colored schools, bathrooms, even drinking fountains trended toward invading social customs in states particularly inclined toward a “White Man’s Burden” mentality. Qualifying Caucasian narcissism by declaring less civilized people divinely destined for a future of hegemonic subjugation, Rudyard Kipling’s poem, mostly referring to imperialism and international colonization, still resonated with the American people. Its effect and current historic relevance in the discussion of social tensions further demonstrates how written published documents, ranging from speeches to poems to laws, substantially affected multitudinous aspects of the evolution of the civil rights movements, from disrespectful poems to flat out racist constitutional amendments. Activists on both sides of the issue employed the latest media technology available to attempt to imprint a way of thinking onto their followers in full agreement with the cause. Still, generations of Americans passed through life genuinely confident in the delusion that black civilizations legitimately differed from their own and deserved antagonistic seclusion, but who can blame them when even the entire justice system, not to mention the government, kept affirming the reality of this fantasized inequitable utopia.

The first half of the twentieth century benefited no one. With the economic antics of the Great Depression and the prior Roaring Twenties, the momentum propelling civil rights movements fell into a lull; further depleted during international periods of tragic conflict, two World Wars only a couple of decades apart. Even the opposition to civil rights advancements, white supremacist groups advocating African American extermination, puttered out with the dissolution of the second Ku Klux Klan in the early forties, largely a factor of the simultaneous second world war escalating to unpredictable proportions (“Ku Klux Klan In the Twentieth Century”). Only a couple of legislative regulations and court decisions even slightly resembled progress on either side of the movements trajectories. Beside the organizational formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and the nationwide showing of a propaganda white supremacist film in 1915, practically nothing happened on the two fronts of systemic injustice and universal equality until a monumental judicial (over)turning point in the early nineteen-fifties. The NAACP did a lot of work behind the scenes in terms of political opposition toward segregationist judge nominations and educating the public about truths disregarded in the pro-KKK production, The Birth of a Nation, marginally successful at achieving a ban on showing the cinematographic piece in a handful of densely populated cities (The Birth of a Nation and Black Protest”). Still, a lot of the organizations actions at the time embellish the reputation of the group a lot more than authentically further the cause of racial equality. This era for the civil right movement served as a time for metamorphosis, the egalitarian side procured a powerful Association and the supremacist side faded from its previous form. Still, while the Klan continued to decline after the mid-twenties, white nationalists could celebrate the elaborate wording of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth Amendments, progress which further allowed minorities to be discriminated against through specialized implementations such as mass incarceration and voting restriction. However, most if not all the progress achieved during this period is largely overlooked in the discussion of the historic civil rights movement due to the developmentally impactful weight several Supreme Court decisions carry that followed shortly afterward.

In 1954, a Supreme Court reconsideration of the revoltingly unjust doctrine of separate but equal cemented by Plessy v. Ferguson through Brown v. Board of Education and its ultimate overturning of the toxic segregation policy, invigorated the civil rights movement at the time, largely creating the image ubiquitously recognized today. The landmark backtrack on an earlier decision deemed the concept altogether “inherently unequal,” allowing previously racially consolidated locations to undergo rapid diversification, a process unnerving to large amounts of historic supremacists. Following an established trend, the social movement accomplishments on the civil rights side during the time include more celebrated speeches. Enormous audiences turned out to witness Martin Luther King Jr., arguably the figurehead of the civil rights movement, who delivered such extensively renown gems such as “I have a dream” (“Martin Luther King I Have a Dream Speech — American Rhetoric”). However, unlike earlier versions of the same civil right movement which focused on speeches and books to cultivate a thirst for change in their members, the modern form of the struggle for equality took advantage of the opportunities new technologies offered. Inventions such as radio and microphones revolutionized just the speaking capabilities of activists, a future legendary civil rights orator Frederick Douglass could have undoubtedly never imagined. Supporters of the movement could talk on radio shows, appear on nightly news, or engage in the nonviolent civil disobedience occurring over the country. Most noticeably, the actions of this movement greatly differ from their strategic engagements beforehand. Abolitionists rarely mobilized in mass and nonviolent resistance wasn’t typical of post-Reconstruction opposition to forceful segregation. The members of organizations such as NAACP and the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL) orchestrated sit ins, taking seats in white-only diners with the glorified purpose of getting arrested, marches, powerful mobilizations of thousands of supporters to a preselected destination, and boycotts, an abstaining of using certain government features like buses (“Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956)”). While most of King’s messages mimicked the nonviolence of Gandhi’s teaching, other prominent voices in the civil right movement such as Malcolm X became entire movements themselves with the formation of the black nationalist political party the Black Panthers (“Malcolm X’s Influence on The Black Panther Party’s Philosophy”). Whereas previously most of the achievements along the front of civil rights were legislative measures, an objective observer of the history of American racial injustices would clearly notice that legislative support of the civil rights cause didn’t completely occur until this point, citing the obvious recurrence of antebellum sentiments in “Jim Crow” laws and slavery itself as definitive evidence. Even then, successful political campaigns such as Civil and Voting Rights acts of the time, got dwarfed in comparison to the tragic assassinations that concerned participants in the struggle. Cold-blooded fatal eliminations of instrumental civil rights figureheads such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X shocked the fabric of the entire civil rights movement. These disastrous events extend the list of assassinations sustained throughout the history of the fight for human rights, joining Abraham Lincoln and the thousands of union soldiers slaughtered in the Civil battle for universal liberty. Much of the relative stalemate that followed the sixties era can be attributed to this loss of critical leadership, especially because some of the leadership lost fell under the hand of the government like the promisingly passionate Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, shot twice by an FBI squad point-blank into the skull, a full one-eighty from the days of Lincoln when an estranged white supremacy activist shot the literal face of American government (Gregory). Nonetheless, overall, little changed with regards to media approach between the movement in an enslaved America and a Vietnam America. Beside an expanded use of new platforms such as television or radio, the civil rights movements and its opposition remained stifled in a seemingly prehistoric society until the pervasive availability of the internet.

The evolution of racial tensions and systemic injustice in this country greatly depends on external forces and technological market innovations. Government creates laws that affect the American people, and the people use technological instruments to amend or propose laws themselves through the power of social movements. Specifically, the story of the development of the civil rights movement in America is filled with unexpected turns of events such as international military conflicts or federally sanctioned assassinations (Gregory). Despite these immense factors of influence, what transformed the civil rights movement the most was the invention of the internet and its subsequent proliferation into American pockets encapsulated in the form of candy bar smartphones. Only empowered by the ubiquity of smartphones and an increased demographical social media connectivity, could have the civil rights movement undergone the rebirth it did with the arrival of Black Lives Matter. However, before dissecting and analyzing the effects of this fresh Movement for Black Lives, attention must be directed toward the way racially prejudiced ideologies persisted in the zeitgeist over hundreds of years. Blatant racial inequality takes a clear path from slavery, to segregation, to the final relative equality accomplished within Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, but its impact on everyday American life continues. Narcissistically entitled delusions of natural white dominance and the oppressive, organized shape these public convictions take today goes back to the ineffectual conclusion to the economically entangled institution of slavery during the Reconstruction Era. Even the language of the Thirteenth Amendment appears non-homogenously suspicious, abolishing all slavery except for duly convicted parties, essentially retaining it as a system of punishment.

The American civil rights movement since the dawn of time mostly follows the equal treatment of African Americans, but after the seventies and three decades later a lot of the racial tensions politically discussed during these post-MLK civil rights era dealt more with the unjust behavior directed toward Middle Eastern minorities and Muslims. International conflicts such as the Gulf War and rising terrorism with a tragic domestic attack on the practical honeymoon of the twenty first century shifted the focus away from the African American civil rights movement, away from the ongoing African American population explosion occurring in prisons nationwide (Dargis). In fact, it took a stressed, overfull prison industrial complex, continually undergoing legislative manipulation to turn out more money and enforced by increasingly polarized (read racist) law enforcement officers to reawaken the civil rights movement in the second decade of this century. Just as before, a controversial judicial ruling spurred the people into organized action, but this time almost everything was different. The ruling freed George Zimmerman, murderer of a merely walking by African American teenager, Trayvon Martin, but the consequential actions an enraged activist populace took reimagined the technological possibilities available (Ross). The entire Black Lives Matter movement began with an internet post on a social media website that has billions of individual daily users. Tagged with a #BlackLivesMatter, a single electronic publication rose to such popularity the emotions gathered behind this extensive sharing could only be released in the form of demonstrations akin to the golden, MLK Jr. civil rights movement. The countless electronic communications responsible for the backbone of this movement and mass demonstrations such as blocking bridges came as the response of a disturbed public to militaristic policing which had an empirically disproportionate lethal effect toward African Americans. Inexplicable police brutality has extinguished hundreds of innocent and undeserving souls; and with smartphones in every pair of jeans around these graphic instances get recorded and shared on social media, cultivating invigorating emotions in civil rights supporters.

While many could label the Movement for Black Lives as an issue concerning police accountability efforts, they miss the key realization that this issue stems from the evolution of racial tensions within America. Inequality has traveled from slavery, to Jim Crow, to the justice system, to the prison industrial complex, and now to the way African Americans get systemically directed there. After all, legislation such as the war on drugs was designed to discriminate against minorities and perpetuate sentiments apparent to be extinct after Jim Crow; no wonder there’s systemic racism within countrywide police departments (LoBianco). Nonetheless, throughout its history, the entire civil rights movement consistently remains holistically affected by political actions such as legislation and judicial ruling. Less consistent is the movements response to these top down directives. At first printed press and speeches drove the resistance for equality, then mass mobilizations and group demonstrations became the norm, but still speeches stuck around. In the modern world, the civil rights movement finds itself armed with a technological tool of mass communication in its fight against a drastically mutated system of injustice that lashes out in horrific killings. Speeches only happen at widely attended demonstrations or events, with the recent ability to reach even more people through a highly-followed Twitter account, for example. Opposition never left. All Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter campaigns argue for inclusion of other groups in the discussion and thus fail to see the systemic message of the Movement for Black Lives, but this discourse now happens on social media platforms. Thus, technological innovation has aided the evolution of the civil rights movement substantially, allowing increasingly greater social coordination between members. Through revolutionary methods of protest and communication, the civil rights movement continues to battle the racial inequalities embedded in the American justice system.