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Tensions Among Black Activists And White Activists During The Civil Rights Movement

Black vs White: The Social Tensions Between the Two Groups.

"Our objective is not the creation of tensions, but the surfacing of tensions already present" (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.). This is a great preamble to the topic of the many tensions between blacks and whites in the 20th century. In researching this issue I have come across just a few out of many reasons why there is an extreme tension between the African American people and the Euro-white Americans.
In the mid-1950s, nearly one hundred years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation and three hundred years after colonists forced Africans into slavery, Rosa Parks took what is commonly considered the first step in the movement towards true equality among blacks and whites. Refusing to give up a bus seat for a white passenger, she directly challenged the southern belief that blacks were inferior. Her actions generated a Civil Rights Movement involving not only blacks but also two white groups who would eventually serve as a critical function in the movement.
One of these two white groups were college liberals which were a radical result of the Cold War Era. The "inequality of black people was gradually becoming a prime symbol of what needed to be changed in American society" (Isserman/Kazin pg. 50), and liberals aimed to improve the blemish on America's image – a blemish that had quickly became "a staple of Soviet propaganda" (Isserman/Kazin pg. 50). Liberals fought inequality in order to improve conditions in the nation as a whole in addition to those in the black community as a unit. The second group was white politicians, affecting the movement at the most critical of junctions – the intersection of politics and leadership. White politicians sought a balanced recipe that could allow them to fight the evils of segregation and racism without losing votes in the south.
Within ten years of Parks' rebellion the whites would play a significant yet daring role in the Civil Rights Movement...