Summary: The Long Civil Rights Movement

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Despite its popularity, the long civil rights movement paradigm is not without its critics. Issues of periodization and accentuation are generally the main areas of contestation. For the latter category, regional and tactical variations are the most strongly disputed aspects in the extended framework. In addition, some scholars criticize Hall’s approach for exaggerating the role leftist organizations played in the evolution of the movement. Moreover, some historians criticize Hall’s extreme overhaul of the classical timeline. While she sees the extensions of the civil rights timeline up to the present-day as essential for addressing persisting inequalities, Cha-Jua and Lang believe that just the opposite is true. In order to inspire activists and effectively tackle current issues, they see it as important to distinguish between the different phases of activism. However, some of the criticism that Cha-Jua and Lang direct at the long civil rights movement proponents, for example, that they would downplay the severity of the racial caste system in the South, is unjustified. Hall and others indicate that the northern patterns of racial oppression, which gained considerable ground in the South beginning in the 1960s, are by now the prevailing methods and …show more content…
Since that time, scholars, pundits, and the public have shared their various interpretations of the term and its long-term implications. While some of these statements were better informed than others, few people in 1966 would have suggested that the call for Black Power was not a clear departure from the previous phase of the struggle for civil rights, with which most Americans, thanks to the broad media attention it received, had been fairly