Eye for an Eye: The Role of Armed Resistance ... - Freedom Archives

England . Civil rights are basically rights which citizens are entitled to under a
democratic government's rule of law or fundamental standard. At the same time in
the period after World War II, this struggle gained a momentum, due to domestic
and international conditions, which gave the struggle for Black civil rights a new
qualitative and quantitative level of involvement and organization . While recog-
nizing that the struggle for Black civil rights is a continuum that goes back to at
least the Eighteenth Century, the text of this work will refer to this struggle from
the post World War II period until the late 1960's as the "Civil Rights Movement."
The terms "Black freedom movement" and "Black liberation movement"
are also utilized in this work . These two terns are a recognition that the achieve-
ment of civil rights is just one, though very important, aspect of the overall his
toric political, social, and economic struggle of Black people in the United States .
Besides efforts for citizenship rights, nationalism and Pan-Africanism have been
significant tendencies in the historic Black freedom struggle . The objectives of
Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism, while often complimentary, are not
synonymous with civil rights .
The term "human rights" is often utilized as a companion to "civil rights ."
I have often found that southern Blacks before and after World War II were
concerned with their treatment not only as American citizens but as human be
ings . For example, in the 1960's, people ofAfrican descent in several communi-
ties in southwest Mississippi included in their demands that they no longer wished
for Black adults to be referred by whites as "boy" or "girl," but as "Mister,"
"Misses," or "Miss ." A significant aspect of the Black freedom movement in the
South, then, was a struggle to destroy the stigma of inferiority that was attached