The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other Americans who participated in the civil-rights movement had to defend their right to organize and to speak in the face of intense, often violent resistance, writes Johann Neem. A free civil society is critical for citizens in a democracy.
By Johann N. Neem
IN the 1950s and 1960s, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and thousands of other Americans from all backgrounds took to the streets to advocate equal treatment for all Americans. The civil-rights movement was organized from the grass roots. Voluntary groups — from African-American fraternal clubs and churches to student associations on college campuses — mobilized ordinary citizens to demonstrate and to march peacefully for change.
The streets echoed in the halls of government. Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson both felt the heat, and they responded to it. In a famous moment, Johnson stood before Congress in 1965 and, invoking the language of the streets outside, promised his fellow Americans that "we shall overcome."
The 1960s civil-rights movement demonstrates the power of citizens in civil society — the realm of action outside the privacy of the home but independent of the official public institutions of the state. But we often forget that the civil-rights movement built on earlier struggles by Americans following the Revolution.
The American Revolution can be seen as one of "civil society against the state." As colonists rejected British authority they organized themselves by forming congresses, conventions, committees, militias and even an army. Having witnessed civil society's power, however, America's leaders were loath to allow people to organize. In state after state, efforts by the people to associate were resisted. Religious and political minorities struggled to gain the freedom of association.
The freedom of association was not guaranteed by the Bill of Rights nor by state constitutions. These documents protected the freedom of assembly, a collective right exercised by "the people" as a whole. By contrast, the freedom of association is individual — the right of individuals to organize separate from the whole. Not until 1958 would the Supreme Court extend constitutional protection to associate in a case, not coincidentally, concerning the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
By the 1830s, however, American civil society had blossomed. French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville was astonished by the number and uses Americans made of voluntary associations. He wrote in "Democracy in America" (1835, 1840) that "Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all minds are constantly joining together in groups." But he did not realize that ordinary Americans had to fight for this freedom.
Like African Americans in the 20th century, Americans after the Revolution took to the streets. They advocated causes that political leaders wished to avoid, from temperance, peace and female suffrage to, most controversially, the abolition of slavery. They believed democratic citizens should appeal directly to their fellow citizens.
These founding brothers and sisters of civil society struggled against adversity. In 1835, antislavery leader William Lloyd Garrison was led out of a Boston meeting with a rope around his neck. Southerners prohibited the circulation of antislavery literature in slave states. American leaders knew that organizing transforms public opinion.
Today's grass-roots movements — from gay rights to popular conservatism to "netroots" organizing — build on foundations laid by our 19th-century forerunners as reinvigorated by the civil-rights movement.
Throughout the world, people are waging similar battles for civil society — from the streets of China and Iran, to emerging democracies in the former Soviet Union, to efforts to protect civil liberties in Europe and North America.
As we celebrate the Rev. King and the other Americans who participated in the civil-rights movement, it is worth remembering they too had to defend their right to organize and to speak in the face of intense, often violent resistance. Let us thank King for reminding us of how important a free civil society is to citizens in a democracy, and let us take this moment to remember our own past in order to sympathize with ongoing struggles around the world today.
Johann N. Neem is associate professor of history at Western Washington University in Bellingham. He is author of "Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts" (Harvard University Press, 2008).
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