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Essentially, the Civil Rights movement can be seen as having two ascending phases. The first of these phases was the demand for reform between Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka 1954 and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. After this point was a more revolutionary demand for equality and economic and social betterment which peaked in the National Black Political Assembly at Gary, Indiana in 1972 (Marable [Race, Reform, and Rebellion]123).
The first phase of the Civil Rights movement was essentially a fight against segregation, the most blatant and violently real form of black inequality. The efforts of the NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, and CORE were all aimed at the reformist demand for an end to segregation. This demand, however, bound the hopes and expectations of thousands of blacks both north and south, working class as well as middle class, into a movement that did not realize immediate equality with the downfall of segregation except in name.
The inklings of the eventual split in the Civil Rights movement into integrationist and nationalist elements can be seen as far back as the early days of SNCC. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was the action base of the early Civil Rights movement. While the NAACP and some elements of the SCLC preferred to work through the courts and litigation, SNCC and the remergent CORE were an activist base of grass roots organizers who condoned marching in the streets, bus riding, and other forms of social protest as a more direct expression of the black community's demand for equality. As disillusionment with the courts and the American political arena grew, both middle class reformists and the working class and activists were radicalized. Demands by reformists and integrationsist moved ever increasingly from theoretical equality to concrete social demands. The leftwards movement of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the SCLC to social demands and especially MLK's ever increasing ties to black labor evidence this trend as does the socialistic outlook of Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party which formed during the radicalization of the Civil Rights movement. Even black elected officials and the Congressional Black Caucus were radicalized and swept away by the tide of nationalist sentiment which grew in the black movement.
The radical element of the black movement came from activist organizations which justifiably lost faith in reform within the system. After all it was SNCC members and Black Panthers who were getting killed, beaten on the streets, and imprisoned while NAACPers and the CBC filed law suits and passed legislation. The greatest spokesman for black nationalism was Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam. Due to his charisma and working class and deviant roots, Malcolm was able to appeal to a larger crowd of the disillusioned black working class and youth criminals that MLK and the SCLC had very little in common with. Malcolm's and later the general political agenda of black nationalism, was complete separation of the races. The idea was that blacks and whites could never get along and that integration was really the erasure of everything black. Thus, the only solution was a separate, black state. Initially this agenda was purely emotionally based, but as Malcolm matured, his analysis of white society became more and more a criticism of capitalism. Organizations such as SNCC and CORE took up militantly black nationalist agendas, ejecting white members and increasingly isolating their white support base. Black unions in the form of Revolutionary Union Movements took up similar lines, organizing militantly into all black unions.
The reformists in the NAACP and SCLC vehemently criticized black nationalists and Malcolm X in particular for spreading hate and injustice and only hindering the fight for equal rights by alienating their white support base. They wanted to integrate into mainstream U.S. society and be afforded the same opportunity as whites to succeed under a capitalistic structure. Meanwhile militants in SNCC and the Black Panthers criticized the reformists as holding back the revolutionary force of the black movement and betraying the cause. Regardless of the mutual criticism, by the late sixties and early seventies, the nationalists were in virtual control of the Civil Rights movement. In the National Black Political Assembly of 1972 at Gary, Indiana, the general mood of the meeting, including members of the CBC, SCLC, SNCC, and others was one of nationalism. Even MLK's widow was seen chanting "it's nationtime!"
The influence of these various organizations and tendencies varied over time. However, in any one period, it was the radical element of the fight for civil rights that pushed the movement forward. During the reformist period and the fight against segregation, the activist elements of SNCC and organizers such as MLK during the Montgomery bus boycott and other grass roots marches are what pushed the movement forward. Organizations like the NAACP and individuals had been challenging segregation in the courts for decades with little progress. As blacks fundamentally challenged the system by mass mobilization, greater attention had to be paid to their demands. Similarly, after 1964, the radical and militant elements of black nationalism pushed the movement past the obstacle of potential co-optation of the movement by federal legitimizing of the movement and federal acquiescence to the reformist demands of the NAACP and the SCLC. As the militant element of the movement was slowly repressed, coopted, and misdirected, the movement itself began to die. This is not to say that the nationalist element was necessarily right or even had a well defined purpose or realizable agendas, but they were the militant force which kept the movement on track.
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