The rights guaranteed by the state to its citizens. It incorporates the belief that governments should not arbitrarily act to infringe these rights, and that individuals and groups, through political action, have a legitimate role in determining and influencing what constitutes them. In common usage, the term is taken to mean the rights of groups, as opposed to the rights of the individual, although there is a clear element of overlap. Women's rights, gay rights, ethnic and racial minority rights, and others are all commonly cited in this connection, but the term has come to be especially associated with movements in the USA, especially 195468, which aimed to secure the legal enforcement of the guarantees of racial equality contained in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the US Constitution. Beginning as an attack on specific forms of racial segregation in the Southern states, it broadened into a massive challenge to all forms of racial subordination, and achieved considerable success, especially at the level of legal and juridical reform. It was less successful in allaying black/white economic disparity, which was the central problem outside the Southern states.
If the movement had any definite beginning, it was in the law school of the black-oriented Howard University (Washington, DC) and in the councils of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). At Howard a generation of black lawyers received the training that would be vital during a long, well-planned assault against the legal structure of segregation. Among the most important was Thurgood Marshall (190893), who presented the argument against school segregation in the epochal Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954). Marshall would eventually become the first black justice on the court. The NAACP, founded early in the 20th-c, provided the funding and organizational support for the many cases in which the courts tested the constitutional validity of segregation statutes. Throughout the movement's history, the justices of the Supreme Court proved important allies.
The movement began at the level of law, but developed into a popular confrontation with the segregationist political and social order. The first major event (1955) was a boycott of the bus system of Montgomery, AL. It arose from a driver's victimization of Mrs Rosa Parks after she refused to yield her seat to a white, as the law required. The boycott saw the emergence to leadership of Martin Luther King Jr, who was to be the foremost black spokesman until his assassination in 1968. During his career King was denounced in the strongest terms by enemies of the movement. Now his birthday is a holiday in most States.
King had a major hand in establishing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). This joined in coalition with the NAACP and such other organizations as the Urban League, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC). Strongly influenced by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, King led a campaign aimed at the desegregation of all public facilities, including schools, restaurants, stores, and transport services, and at winning the rights to vote and hold public office. Major instances included: the struggle to desegregate the schools of Little Rock, AR (1957); the Freedom Rides of 1961 aimed at ending discrimination in long-distance bus transport; specific campaigns in many S cities, especially Albany, GA (19612), Birmingham, AL (1963), and Selma, AL (1965); and the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. On many occasions participants in the movement were arrested and/or injured. Some lost their lives.
The movement did benefit from growing white support, made manifest in the Freedom Rides, at the national March on Washington (1963), and in Selma and Mississippi. Whites likewise suffered arrest, injury, and death. But at all levels the driving force was the energy and anger of African-Americans, whether it was expressed in legal briefs, in strategic planning, or in direct protest. By 1965 the original goals seemed won. Court decisions, major legislation, and the actions of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and especially Johnson put the power of the federal government on the black side in the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965). The result can be seen in the fact that Southern communities which were once bastions of segregation now have African-American mayors and other officials. But even as the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s was being passed, issues were arising that proved too great to be resolved.
The new problem was the quality of life in the ghettos of the N cities, where during 19647 there was massive rioting in black neighbourhoods. Sometimes it was directed against the local police, and sometimes against the whole ghetto situation of poverty and permanent unemployment. The most articulate exponent of the situation was Malcolm X (192565, born Malcolm Little), who entered the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims) while in prison for youthful crimes. Malcolm X began his public career with wholly separatist ideas, but by the time of his assassination his position was changing towards a more inclusive attitude. Neither he, nor King, who turned his attention northward during the last three years of his life, nor anyone else succeeded in working out a strategy comparable to the winning one that had been developed in the South.
Nonetheless, considerable gains were made. New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles, have all elected African-American mayors and other public officials. Virginia has elected an African-American governor. The powerful candidature of the Rev. Jesse Jackson for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 demonstrated that an African-American could become a serious figure in national politics. No African-American need now endure the sort of discrimination that was written into the law until the middle of the 20th-c, though informal discrimination and social justice remain serious problems. It may fairly be said that the Civil Rights Movement ranks with the American Revolution and the era of the Civil War as one of the major formative epochs in American public life.
| Theories of rights |
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| Animal rights |
| Civil rights |
| Collective rights |
| Group rights |
| Human rights |
| Inalienable rights |
| Individual rights |
| Legal rights |
| Natural rights |
| Negative & positive |
| Social rights |
| "Three generations" |
| Women's rights |
| Men's rights |
| Workers' rights |
Civil rights are the protections and privileges of personal liberty given to all citizens by law. Civil rights are distinguished from "human rights", "natural rights or "republican rights"—civil rights are rights that are bestowed by nations on those within their territorial boundaries, while natural or human rights are rights that many scholars claim ought to belong to all people. For example, the philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) argued that the natural rights of life, liberty and property should be converted into civil rights and protected by the sovereign state as an aspect of the social contract.
Laws guaranteeing civil rights may be written, derived from custom or implied. In the United States and most continental European countries, civil rights laws are most often written. In the United States, for example, laws protecting civil rights appear in the Constitution, in the amendments to the Constitution (particularly the 13th and 14th Amendments), in federal statutes, in state constitutions and statutes and even in the ordinances of counties and cities. "Implied" rights are rights that a court may find to exist even though not expressly guaranteed by written law or custom, on the theory that a written or customary right must necessarily include the implied right. One famous (and controversial) example of a right implied from the U.S. Constitution is the "right to privacy", which the U.S. Supreme Court found to exist in the 1965 case of Griswold v. As a rule, state governments can expand civil rights beyond the U.S. Constitution, but they cannot diminish Constitutional rights.
Examples of civil rights and liberties include the right to get redress if injured by another, the right to privacy, the right of peaceful protest, the right to a fair investigation and trial if suspected of a crime, and more generally-based constitutional rights such as the right to vote, the right to personal freedom, the right to freedom of movement and the right of equal protection.
Civil rights can in one sense refer to the equal treatment of all citizens irrespective of race, sex, or other class, or it can refer to laws which invoke claims of positive liberty. The theories set out below explain why such laws should not be considered legitimate, but do not explain why the case failed to declare the general principle that all manifestations of segregation were a breach of civil rights (that would be more properly a question of politics). Some other countries have enacted similar legislation, or have given direct effect to supranational treaties and agreements such as the European Convention on Human Rights (with forty-five countries as signatories), which encompass both human rights and civil liberties.
Related terminology
The term 'civil rights' is often used synonymously with civil liberties, even though theoretical jurisprudence distinguishes between right and liberty. The term Human rights refers to a broader
concept.
In the early legal systems of Ancient Rome,women and slaves had no right to vote whether as a juror or for political purposes, and ownership of property was an aspect of patria potestas,
i.e. This practice of dividing societies by reference to class or caste associates privilege with the upper layers of society and means that civil rights attach to people by virute of their
citizenship of a state.
Today, in most western societies, it is taken for granted that every person has a number of rights and freedoms, which are valued deeply, closely associated to the modern concept of
democracy and supported by public policy. As each individual moves from state to state, the extent of the civil rights to be enjoyed will be determined by the interaction between the domicile
of origin, and the cultures and laws of those states in which that person resides as a citizen.
The term human rights is not limited to citizenship of one state and reflects the concept of fundamental rights that all human beings can claim. Whereas 'civil rights', 'civil liberties' and 'constitutional rights' are used to denote expectations as to behaviour and treatment by fellow citizens in any one sovereign state, 'human rights' is more often used in the context of international law, the supranational systems of law that may or may not have direct effect in sovereign states depending on the treaties signed by each state and the nature of their legal systems. Human rights include civil rights. Jurist Karel Vasak, for example, discusses a right to peace and the right to a clean environment as fundamental human rights. By examining the relationships between these concepts, he hoped to explain the legal interests that have evolved in the real world of civil society and to answer the question whether citizens of a state have any right to access any of the possible forms of social security. If A claims a right against B, this is meaningless unless B has a duty to honour A's right. Indeed, Hohfeld described liberty as an a priori condition of the rule of law, coming into existence long before any Bill of Rights and offering an individual power to the extent that it is not restricted by any law. Nozick argued that no state is ever justified in offering anything more than the most minimal of state functions, and further, that whatever might exist by way of rights exists only in the negative sense of those actions not yet prohibited. He denied the possibility that any citizen can have rights that require others to offer him or her services at the state's expense, and tested whether exchanges between individuals were legitimate by an entitlement theory:
The "transfer principle" holds that goods or services "freely acquired from others who acquired them in a just way are justly acquired" The "acquisition principle" states that people are entitled to retain all holdings acquired in a just way The "rectification principle" requires that any violation of the first two principles be repaired by returning holdings to their rightful owners as a "one time" redistribution (a reference to the Rawlsian Difference Principle).Nozick, therefore, believed that there are no positive civil rights, only rights to property and the right of autonomy. This is an important teleological protection: the Jeffersonian political philosophy right to the pursuit of happiness is the freedom to engage in any actions so long as they do not infringe upon that same right exercised by others.
Just society
John Rawls (1921–2002) developed a model of a different form of just society which relied on:
The "liberty principle" which holds that citizens require minimal civil and legal rights to protect themselves The "difference principle" which states that every citizen would want to live in a society where improving the condition of the poorest becomes the first priority.
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