Civil Rights vs. Human Rights: How We Narrowed the Black Freedom Struggle
We call it the Civil Rights Movement, and there’s nothing historically wrong with that name. It identifies one of the most consequential periods in American history, when Black Americans and their allies challenged segregation, disenfranchisement, and racial discrimination through litigation, boycotts, direct action, organizing, and federal legislation.
Still, I’ve been thinking about how the names we use can shape what we understand about history. Black Americans weren’t only fighting for civil rights in the United States. Many were also arguing that their treatment was a human-rights issue, and looking at that distinction helps connect parts of the Black freedom struggle that are often taught as separate stories.
Civil rights and human rights aren’t interchangeable
Civil rights generally describe protections people possess within a particular country’s legal and political system. In the United States, those include equal protection under the law, voting rights, due process, and protections against discrimination. Human rights are broader. They belong to people because they’re human.
The modern international human-rights framework that developed after World War II eventually included civil and political rights alongside economic, social, and cultural rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, addressed political participation and equality, but it also recognized rights involving work, education, social security, and an adequate standard of living.
That broader way of thinking gave Black activists in the United States another way to make their case. American racism could be presented not only as a failure of the United States to enforce its own constitutional promises, but also as America failing to meet standards it claimed should apply to human beings everywhere.
Black activists took that argument to the world
In 1947, W.E.B. Du Bois worked with lawyers and scholars through the NAACP to prepare An Appeal to the World. The petition documented the denial of rights to Black Americans and was formally presented to the United Nations Division on Human Rights on October 23, 1947. It addressed inequalities involving political participation, education, housing, health, and segregation.
The choice of audience mattered. Black Americans had spent generations appealing to American courts, presidents, legislators, and constitutional principles. Du Bois and the NAACP were now asking an international institution to consider America’s treatment of its Black citizens. Their argument challenged the idea that racial oppression in the United States was only an American issue.
Four years later, the Civil Rights Congress presented We Charge Genocide, a petition accusing the United States of violating the Genocide Convention through the cumulative effects of lynching, police violence, racial discrimination, and other forms of oppression against Black Americans. The petition was explicitly framed around the United Nations’ Genocide Convention and presented its allegations as a matter for international consideration.
The genocide accusation was controversial and remains historically and legally contested. Still, the broader strategy behind both petitions deserves more attention. Black activists were placing American racial inequality within the developing global language of human rights and asking people outside the United States to examine what was happening inside it.
Malcolm X understood the power of that distinction
This history helps put Malcolm X’s later arguments about human rights into context. Malcolm argued that describing the Black struggle exclusively as a civil-rights issue kept Black Americans politically confined within the United States. A civil-rights dispute was largely an American dispute, which meant Black Americans were asking American institutions to enforce American laws even when many of those institutions had shown little willingness to protect their rights.
A human-rights claim created the possibility of taking the issue beyond the United States. That was especially significant during decolonization, when African and Asian nations were gaining independence from European empires, apartheid South Africa was facing increasing international criticism, and the United States was presenting itself as a leader of the democratic world during the Cold War. American segregation created an obvious contradiction, and Black activists understood the political possibilities created by that contradiction.
Malcolm wasn’t inventing this international strategy from scratch. Du Bois and the NAACP had already attempted to bring American racial discrimination before the United Nations in 1947. That complicates the way this history is often taught, with the NAACP representing respectable legal civil-rights work while Malcolm X is placed in a completely separate, more radical tradition. The history was messier than that, and much more interesting.
King eventually confronted the limits of civil rights too
Martin Luther King Jr.’s later work also becomes easier to understand through this framework. The version of King most Americans learn is centered on desegregation, voting rights, Birmingham, Selma, and the March on Washington. Those were monumental campaigns, but King’s politics continued developing after those victories.
By 1967 and 1968, King was increasingly focused on poverty, economic inequality, labor, and the Vietnam War. The Poor People’s Campaign planned to bring poor Americans from different racial and ethnic backgrounds to Washington to demand greater economic security. After King’s assassination, the campaign continued, bringing together Black Americans, poor white Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, farmworkers, and others around economic demands, including an Economic Bill of Rights.
King himself explicitly described this evolution. In 1967, he told the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that the movement had entered an “era of human rights,” one that required asking broader questions about American society rather than concentrating exclusively on removing discriminatory laws.
That shift makes sense when we consider the limits of legal equality. A restaurant can no longer legally refuse to serve you because you’re Black, but that doesn’t determine whether you can afford to eat there. A neighborhood can no longer legally exclude Black residents through an explicitly racial ordinance, but removing the ordinance doesn’t guarantee access to a mortgage. A school district can no longer legally assign children to schools by race, while residential segregation, differences in property wealth, and public policy can continue producing deeply unequal educational environments.
Civil-rights laws can make discrimination illegal, but laws alone can’t guarantee that people have what they need to actually live freely.
The name changes where we think the story ends
This may be one of the most significant consequences of the language we use. If the Civil Rights Movement is understood primarily as a struggle against Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement, there’s a recognizable ending. The Civil Rights Act passes in 1964, the Voting Rights Act passes in 1965, and explicit forms of racial discrimination become increasingly prohibited under federal law. There is obviously more work to do, but the central objective can appear to have been achieved.
A human-rights framework makes that conclusion much harder because the scope of the problem becomes broader. Housing, healthcare, employment, wages, education, and police violence become part of the conversation. Political participation still matters enormously, but so does whether someone has the economic and material security necessary to live with dignity.
Seen through that framework, King’s Poor People’s Campaign doesn’t look like an unrelated final chapter of his life. Malcolm X’s international strategy doesn’t seem like a historical detour, and Du Bois appealing to the United Nations doesn’t look like an obscure diplomatic experiment. They become different expressions of a much larger debate within the Black freedom struggle about what freedom actually requires.
I think there’s something significant in the fact that both Malcolm X and King were pushing beyond narrower definitions of the Black freedom struggle during the final years of their lives. Both men were assassinated, Malcolm in 1965 and King in 1968, although the historical record doesn’t establish that their movement toward a human-rights framework was the reason they were killed. Still, looking at where their thinking was headed gives us a much fuller picture of their politics than the versions of either man we’re usually taught.
I wouldn’t rename the Civil Rights Movement
Historical terminology serves a purpose, and the Civil Rights Movement describes a recognizable political period whose organizations, campaigns, strategies, and legislative victories deserve to be understood on their own terms. I wouldn’t change the name. I would change how we place the movement within the larger history.
Instead of presenting the Civil Rights Movement as the entirety of the Black struggle for equality, I would place it within the broader Black freedom struggle. That allows us to see the different arguments happening within that struggle without pretending everyone agreed about the path forward.
Some activists emphasized constitutional rights, while others pushed more explicitly for economic rights. Some pursued integration, while others emphasized Black political and economic independence. Some concentrated their efforts on American courts, legislatures, and other domestic institutions, while others deliberately tried to internationalize the struggle.
Those approaches sometimes overlapped, and they sometimes conflicted. They were also responding to the same fundamental problem: Black Americans had been promised freedom without any real agreement about what freedom actually required.
Civil rights were part of the answer. They were never the entire answer.
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-Smart Brown Girl
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