The Neverending Story: The Civil Rights Movement’s Expansion of US Democracy and Its Limits

This paper will center the protests of civil rights movement activists of the 1960s and their efforts to make the ideals of the nation’s founding real. These movements to expand the body politic and change the relationship between the state and “the people,” along with the social tensions they created were, in my view, are the ultimate expressions of patriotism; the work to make American democracy more inclusive and beneficial to the least powerful within the society. Various justice movements have strengthened American democracy in concrete ways, often pushing for state and federal legislation to include more people within the political process and broader society, thereby making US democracy more real when successful. If enforced, those laws and regulations change State behavior in more equitable ways. This gives less maneuverability to those that seek to undermine democratic participation and preserve an unequal and unjust status quo. I think of the passage of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, respectively. Struggles to create, maintain, or expand democracy never end because there are always reactionary forces that want to preserve the systemic inequities that benefit them, their socioeconomic class, or other privileged identity. These minoritarian movements have also been successful in constricting democratic participation in numerous ways and through a variety of cultural, legal, and extralegal methods. These minoritarian movements deserve much of the blame for preventing the creation of a multiracial democracy. However, it is also necessary to discuss the limits of the respectability politics of the civil rights movement, leaving doors open for regressive policies that eroded the movement’s gains and allowed for other avenues of state repression to emerge, including the growth of the carceral state beginning in the late-1970s.