Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s

How did the Great Transformation carried out by the post-WWII civil rights movement happen? The authors offer two suggestions. The first is that the ethnicity theory of race came under increasing strain. The second is that the new social movements of the 1950s and 1960s sought to change not only laws and politics but social institutions as well. The civil rights movement changed in this way by the mid-1950s because of the failure of “‘normal’ politics” to overcome Jim Crow state governments in the South (164). At the same time, in the wake of World War II, new “economic and political resources” became available to the civil rights movement (164).

After World War II, Black identity itself became politicized in a new way. Drawing on existing Black religious allegories and images and on anti-colonial movements like that of Gandhi in India, Black activists reinterpreted and rearticulated their own struggles and rhetoric. The “process of rearticulation” meant a shift from “an emphasis on individual survival” to “one of collective action” (167).

The disappointments of the moderate civil rights movement helped lead to the emergence of the more radical Black power movement after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.