CITIZENSHIP

Citizenship in Martin Luther King's and Malcolm X's Speeches

Citizenship in Martin Luther King's and Malcolm X's Speeches

In more recent times, as a result of new concerns and new theories of citizenship, identity has become an important dimension of citizenship. The traditional conceptions of citizenship on the whole did not consider the question of identity and more generally the problem of culture. Today, this question of culture and citizenship is at the fore of debates on citizenship and has extended citizenship, originally attached to a conservative ideology of the polity, into a deeper notion of democracy as entailing social transformation and extending beyond the nation-state to global contexts and cosmopolitan discourses. The relationship between identity and citizenship can vary from commitment to a particular cause, patriotism, loyalty to the normative ideas of the polity, and group-specific identities, such as ethnic ties.

For Malcolm X, the civil rights movement describes a period in U.S. history when large numbers of ordinary people and organizations mobilized to destroy the legal segregation and second-class citizenship of African Americans, Latinos/as, Asian Americans, and indigenous peoples encoded in federal and state laws and enforced by the proliferation of violence at all levels of society and in every region of the country. The purpose of the civil rights movement was to secure economic and political equality, empowerment, and democracy.

While resistance to discrimination and racism has existed since the very first contact among Europeans, Africans, and indigenous peoples in the 15th century, the modern civil rights movement often is thought of beginning with the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision banning school segregation and ending with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act or the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

African-Americans did not voluntarily immigrate to the United States but rather were forced through slavery to come there. As slaves they were not accorded civil rights as citizens of the country, and in most cases they were not even accorded basic human rights. Abolitionists such as Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass fought for an end to slavery and for the establishment of citizenship rights for African-Americans. Civil war ensued (1861-1865) between the North and South over the issue of slavery. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all slaves in 1863. As much as this freedom was a step toward progress for African-Americans, it was also a military strategy that supplied the Union Army with soldiers, ensuring the North's victory.

The follow-up Civil Rights Act of 1875 guaranteed equal accommodation for blacks and whites in public facilities other than schools; the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution (1868) provided for equal protection under the law; and the fifteenth amendment (1870) guaranteed the right to vote regardless of race. Under their Reconstruction Act, despite southern retaliation and violence, some political and civil rights progress occurred.

In contrast to King, Malcolm X, began to participate in the political process, to hold political offices, serve on juries, and work in federal positions. The Radical Republican leadership was marked by their ...