Civil Rights for All: Multiracial Identities and the Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54097/74sssd70Abstract
The Civil Right Movement (CRM) in the United States has profoundly reshaped the racial politics, reconfigured the racial dynamics, and inspired extensive historiographical scholarship on African American grassroot political activism in the post-neoliberal era. However, the movement’s multiracial dimensions have remained relatively underexplored. The essay employs a subaltern approach, centring on grassroots political activism against the deprivation of labour, cultural and political rights of Mexican Americans and Indigenous Americans within the CRM. This highlights the influence of the foundational philosophy of the African American CRM while also underscoring the movements’ remodelling based on differing pursuits of each racial group. By integrating with a comparative analysis of the contemporary CRM efforts among these marginalized groups, the essay highlights how these movements inherit the original CRM’s political philosophy while adapting their new purposes and actions. This adaptation is framed within the broader context of political polarization, the entrenchment of racial inequality, and the rise of “symbolic racism,” reflecting the enduring legacy of the original CRM. Given the essay’s unipolar focus on race in analysing the grassroots activism of these racial groups, incorporating a nuanced examination of gender and class within the historiographical framework would offer a more detailed differentiation of the social-cultural challenges faced by subgroups within these communities. Such an approach would make a judicious contribution to the future scholarship on the CRM.
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