The United States experienced the spectacular expansion of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Moreover, the Vietnam War has also become an essential catalyzer for the civilians to form an understanding of the role of the United States in the global context. At that time, the movement achieved a number of its aims via acts of civil disobedience, court fights, and the promotion of the concept of Black Power (“The Civil Rights Movement,” n.d.). This paper will examine how Americans have understood the role of the United States in the global context.
When African American troops returned to civilian life after World War II, many of them were inspired to fight for civil rights. Despite facing discrimination inside the American military, black troops had the chance to witness countries where Jim Crow bigotry was not the law of the land (“The Civil Rights Movement,” n.d.). When black soldiers returned to civilian life, they were met with tremendous opposition from white nationalists trying to reestablish the prewar racial order. However, these individuals have traveled the world and communicated with people from different nations, which provided them with some new contexts of life in the United States.
The civil rights and antiwar campaigns were two of America’s most significant protest movements of the twentieth century. They widened the schisms that shattered American society from the mid-1960s through the early 1970s (“The Civil Rights Movement,” n.d.). Despite the fact that the civil rights movement came before the antiwar movement, it temporarily overlapped in 1965. The Vietnam Fight was a long-running military struggle that began as an anti-colonial war against the French and grew into a Cold War clash between worldwide communist and free-market democracy (“The Civil Rights Movement,” n.d.). The Soviet Union, China, and other nations backed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in the north, while the United States and its anticommunist allies supported the Republic of Vietnam (ROV) in the south. Hence, the Vietnam War was a marker for the global competition between democratic states and communist ones. The civilians in the United States comprehend the role of the country as the global leader of democracy.
Martin Luther King was one of the central figures in the civil rights movement who also opposed the war in Vietnam. For years, King advocated nonviolent direct action, and his team organized significant protest movements in Albany, Georgia, and Selma and Birmingham, Alabama. However, by 1967, King’s theological vision for nonviolence had expanded beyond peaceful street protest to encompass the abolition of what he referred to as the “three evils” that were hurting American society (Siracusa, 2022). The triple evils, according to King, were racism, poverty, and militarism, and he thought that these forces were antithetical to God’s intention for all people (Siracusa, 2022). The achievements of the black Americans had provident economic effects as. Eventually, these individuals could earn on par with other citizens.
Technology played a prominent role in aiding the communication of the people involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Anakwee (2020) states that campaigners, and organizers through five decades, beginning in the 1960s with the growth of the civil rights movement in the United States and the beginning of the computer revolution. Black entrepreneurs, engineers, and activists communicated with one another, using new technologies as they emerged. These included bulletin board systems and the Usenet during the 1970s, file-sharing, and CD-ROMs in the 1980s (Anakwee, 2020).
References
Anakwee, L. (2020). Black activism has been shaped by tech and data for 100 years. New Scientist. Web.
The Civil Rights Movement. (n.d.). Web.
Siracusa, A. (2022). How the Vietnam War pushed MLK to embrace global justice, not only civil rights at home. Web.