Movements for Equality, 1940s-1980s

African American Civil Rights Movement

• A brief review of earlier content helps students grasp the enormous barriers African Americans had to overcome in the struggle for their rights as citizens: legal statutes in place that prevented them from voting and exercising their rights as citizens, Jim Crow laws that kept them in a state of economic dependence, a system of violence and intimidation that prevented most African Americans from attempting to exercise power, and a legal system that was devoted to preserving the status quo. (HSS Framework, 415)
• Students should first learn about the rise of the African American Civil Rights Movement and the legal battle to abolish segregation by considering this question: What were the goals and strategies of the Civil Rights Movement? (HSS Framework, 415)
• Exploring why African Americans and other minorities demanded equal educational opportunity early on in the Civil Rights Movement is important for students to consider and understand. (HSS Framework, 416) [NAACP and Brown v. Board of Education Topeka, et. al.]
• The Brown decision stimulated a generation of political and social activism led by African Americans pursuing their civil rights. (HSS Framework, 416)
• By focusing on African Americans’ struggle to gain equal rights, students can learn about key civil rights organizations and put them in a comparative context: King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) among others. (HSS Framework, 416-417)
• There was also considerable violent opposition to the goals and strategies of the movement; many white Southerners committed their resources to pushing back against what they perceived to be an overly intrusive federal government regulating race relations. (HSS Framework, 417)
• One of the hallmark achievements of the Civil Rights Movement in the South was convincing the federal government to protect civil and voting rights. (HSS Framework, 417)
•  The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 indicated the federal government’s commitment to provide the rights of full citizenship to people of all races, ethnicities, religious groups, and sexes. (HSS Framework, 418)
• Although the Black Power movement never received the mainstream support that the Civil Rights Movement did, it had enduring social influence in its emphasis on racial pride, its celebration of black culture, and its powerful criticisms of racism. (HSS Framework, 418) [Watts Uprisings, Black Panther Party, Malcom X, Stokely Carmichael, affirmative action] (HSS Framework, 418-419)

Latino/a/x Civil Rights Movement

• Some of the most successful state and federal court cases challenged racial segregation and inequality in education, including cases in state and federal district courts, such as Mendez v. Westminster (1947), which addressed segregation of Mexican and Mexican-American schoolchildren and involved then-Governor Earl Warren, who would later, as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, write the Brown decision. (HSS Framework, 416)
• Students may study how Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and the United Farm Workers movement used nonviolent tactics, educated the general public about the working conditions in agriculture, and worked to improve the lives of farmworkers. (HSS Framework, 419)
• Students should understand the central role of immigrants, including Latino Americans and Filipino Americans, in the farm labor movement. This context also fueled the brown, red, and yellow power movements. (HSS Framework, 419)
• Students should learn about the emergence and trajectory of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement by focusing on key groups, events, documents. (HSS Framework, 420) [1968 “blowout” in east Los Angeles; El Plan de Atzlan; Chicano La Raza Unida; “I am Joaquin”]
• Meanwhile, Chicano/a activists staged protests around the country, such as the famed Chicano Moratorium in Los Angeles in 1970 that protested the war in Vietnam, and formed a number of organizations to address economic and social inequalities as well as police brutality, and energized cultural pride. (HSS Framework, 420)

Asian American Civil Rights Movement

• Students should understand the central role of immigrants, including Latino Americans and Filipino Americans, in the farm labor movement. This context also fueled the brown, red, and yellow power movements. (PHSS Framework, 419)
• Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee; Larry Itliong, Philip Vera-Cruz
• 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act; formation of Asian American Political Alliance, 1968; Vincent Chin, San Francisco’s International Hotel Struggle, 1977
• Backlash with model minority myth

Native American Civil Rights Movement

• American Indians also became more aware of the inequality of their treatment in many states where Indian tribes are located. American Indian veterans returning from World War II were no longer willing to be denied the right to vote by the states, which controlled the voting sites, or to be told their children could not attend state public schools. Some veterans and their families brought lawsuits in the late 1940s and the 1950s successfully challenging such practices. (HSS Framework, 416)
• Students should understand the central role of immigrants, including Latino Americans and Filipino Americans, in the farm labor movement. This context also fueled the brown, red, and yellow power movements. (HSS Framework, 419)
• They also sought to combat the consequences of their “second-class citizenship” by engaging in grassroots mobilization. For example, from 1969 through 1971 American Indian activists occupied Alcatraz Island; while in 1972 and 1973, American Indian Movement (AIM) activists took over the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, D.C., and held a standoff at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. (HSS Framework, 419)

LGBTQIA+ and Women’s Civil Rights Movements

• Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s movement grew stronger in the 1960s. Armed with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, helped found the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966. Similar to the NAACP, NOW pursued legal equalities for women in the public sphere. Women’s rights activists also changed laws, introducing, for example, Title IX of the 1972 Educational Amendments, which mandated equal funding for women and men in educational institutions. (HSS Framework, 420)
• On the social and cultural front, feminists tackled day-to-day sexism with the mantra “The personal is political.” Many lesbians active in the feminist movement developed lesbian feminism as a political and cultural reaction to the limits of the gay movement and mainstream feminism to address their concerns. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, feminists promoted women’s health collectives, opened shelters for victims of domestic abuse, fought for greater economic independence, and worked to participate in sports equally with men. (HSS Framework, 420-421) 
• Students consider Supreme Court decisions in the late 1960s and early 1970s that recognized women’s rights to birth control (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965) and abortion (Roe v. Wade, 1973). (HSS Framework, 421)
• Students also examine the emergence of a movement for LGBT rights, starting in the 1950s with California-based groups like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, these fairly secretive organizations created support networks; secured rights of expression and assembly; and cultivated relationships with clergy, doctors, and legislators to challenge teachings and laws that condemned homosexuality as sinful, sick, and/or criminal. In the 1960s, younger activists, often poorer and sometimes transgender, began to confront police when they raided gay bars and cafes in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and most famously at the Stonewall Inn in New York City in 1969. . Organizations such as the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance called on people in the movement to “come out” as a personal and political act. (HSS Framework, 421) 

Disability Civil Rights Movement

• Legislation: Architectural Barriers Act, 1968 – Americans with Disabilities Act, 1990
• Cause, course, and consequence of April 1977 Section 504 sit-in
• Capitol Crawl Protest, 1990
• Students can learn about how such activism informed the history of the AIDS epidemic in the United States. California students, in particular, can tap local history resources on the epidemic and its relationship to a retreat from some areas of the civil rights, women’s liberation, and sexual liberation movements. By talking about the nation’s hysteria over AIDS, educators may be able to connect the early response to the epidemic to previous alarmist reactions in American history and the activism generated by them. (HSS Framework, 431)