3. Strain, Christopher Barry. “Civil Rights and ... - Freedom Archives

It was not until the 1950's and 1960's that cracks began to appear in the South's
rxial hegemony, and black activists used nonviolent tactics to widen these cracks into
full-blown civil rights reform . During this period, nonviolent activists challenged Jim
Crow segregation in the United States by nullifying the stultifying violence that had come
to define the region . Leading the nation to a new understanding of responsible citizenship
and biracial unity, these activists offered black and white Americans alike a new way of
living their lives : not only as citizens of a multicultural nation-state but also as members
of what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called a "beloved community" in which diverse
peoples could come together and live in harmony . They also helped to mask the dcep
scars left on the South by the region's "peculiar institution" : slavery. Nonviolence, as
both a protest txtic and a way of life, provided the means to a better way of human
interaction .
But most Americans, including many civil rights xtivists, were slow to embrace
what nonviolence required . Wary of such a self-sxrii'icing concept, they shied away
Another historian has noted :
Perhaps the most important charxteristic of American rxe relations in the early
1950's was the degree to which terror reigned in the blxk community and in the
black mind . Black Southerners lived in a police state, a plxe where violenceofficially
sanctioned violence-could be visited upon them in a moment, and for no
reason at
all . . . And the oppressors could do anything they wanted and get away with it.
Fred Powledge, Free at Last? : The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It
(New York : Harper Perennial, 1991), 33 .
iv