"Fight the Power!" the Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement (Essay‪)‬

THE IMAGES REMAIN FAMILIAR, EVEN TODAY. SOME OF YOU WERE PARTICIPANTS and witnesses; others watched as the scenes came across your television screens; still others learned from books, documentary films, and oral histories and by teaching. Across the South, some half a century ago, men and women, mostly young and black, challenged Jim Crow and the laws and administrators who enforced it, tilting the jails and enduring extraordinary violence, intimidation, and harassment. Children made their way through gauntlets of cursing, spitting, screaming white parents. Activists, seeking to change the way things were, found themselves beaten in the train and bus stations, in the streets and parks, in the jails and prisons; churches, homes, schools, and buses were bombed and burned to the ground; in the rural South, "nigger hunts," murder, terrorism, racial cleansing, and economic coercion and exploitation took their toll in black lives. Few could forget as well the marches, the oratory, the raised expectations, the defiant songs (some of them rooted in old spirituals)--"We'll Never Turn Back," "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around," "Oh Freedom," "We Shall Overcome." It all made for powerful theater, and the drama often became critical to the success of the demonstrators. A new generation of black men and women embraced the promise of a new Reconstruction, more sweeping, more enduring than what had transpired a century earlier.